eCommerce Townhall Ep7: SEO Optimization on Your E-commerce Store with Geoff Atkinson of Huckabuy

0:00 – hey guys we’ve got an awesome episode for you today uh in this interview i’m talking with Geoff Atkinson from

0:06 – Huckabuy.com Geoff has a ridiculous amount of experience when it comes to seo and organic search he was a key part of

0:13 – driving overstock.com to where they are today is basically just a massive e-commerce powerhouse

0:20 – and a lot of that was built on the back of organic search we go into a ton of different things in this episode but

0:25 – couple things that stand out to me is the importance of page speed and more specifically how to overcome the

0:31 – complexities of it you probably know page speed is important but it’s a super complex thing to get right so we talk about some tactics there we also go into

0:38 – a really tactical way to integrate content into your category pages so content content’s really important for

0:44 – seo but he goes into like a scalable systematic way to really uh drive content into some of these key pages and

0:50 – then the uh other thing that we go into which i really think is is fascinating to touch on is voice search and we

0:56 – basically talk about why you know voice search has the potential to be as big of

1:02 – a shift as desktop to mobile was right so like mobile wasn’t that important

1:08 – until the iphone came out and then it was hugely important uh we go into a little bit of nerd mode about voice

1:14 – search and how that that switch could be flipped here in the next couple years uh and again how to be ready for it so if

1:20 – you’re if you’re not considering organic as a major area to invest in you know you’re making a mistake based on the

1:25 – craziness of advertising industry this past year 2021 you know you’re probably looking at additional channels uh and if

1:31 – you are looking at it Geoff is a great resource to pull from so dig into the episode see what you can implement and

1:37 – definitely reach out to us based on any questions you have enjoy the episode today guys

1:42 – welcome to e-commerce town hall where six seven and eight-figure ecommerce store leaders learn how to scale and

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2:17 – now let’s dive into today’s episode

2:24 – welcome back to the show guys super excited to dig into today’s topic uh what we’re going to be talking about is

2:30 – organic search and seo in particular and you know paid traffic it’s really good once you crack it if you’re in ecom and

2:37 – you you’ve been in the game for any measure of time i’m sure you have paid traffic built up as a channel but you

2:42 – know with all the changes that have gone on in advertising in the last year we’re recording this in early uh 2022

2:48 – you might be focused on investing in other channels and organic search it’s one of those channels that it can be a

2:54 – massive growth opportunity if you know how to attack it and and that’s really the challenge with seo right is

3:01 – you know at a high level google doesn’t want you to be able to you know get ranked right and so

3:06 – with that said there’s a process to follow to get there and today’s uh guest has a ton of experience on how to do

3:12 – that in e-com uh and seo in general and so super excited to have Geoff so

3:17 – Geoff Atkinson he’s the founder and CEO of Huckabuy and Geoff’s gonna go into

3:23 – his background but he knows a ton about seo and e-commerce and really how to apply seo and e-commerce prior to

3:30 – Huckabuy he was SVP of marketing and analytics at overstock.com so gigantic brand and he was just deep in all things

3:37 – seo again for one of like the biggest enterprise web brand so he’s learned a thing or two about how to do it and

3:43 – he started Huckabuy to basically like scale that impact of that seo experience

3:48 – and be able to you know scale that impact of what he’s learned across more brands and so Huckabuy uh he’ll go into

3:54 – it but it improves your search results you know obviously helps you drive more organic traffic and just through

4:00 – a range of offerings makes you kind of future proof for seo is the kind of way that i would word it those are my words not his but today we’re going to dig

4:06 – into his experience when it comes to seo and really make it actionable for you guys to be able to apply this and

4:13 – really either start organic as a channel or really focus on scaling it so Geoff welcome to the show super excited

4:19 – to have you thanks Jon it’s great to be here and great to talk e-commerce i don’t get to

4:25 – do that all the time so it’s always a pleasure when i get to chat econ awesome awesome we were joking uh on the

4:32 – the uh planning call the other day about my background in seo too i i was deep in it uh before before help flow

4:41 – and it’s it’s kind of cool just to kind of reminisce and go back and kind of get back into that the technical parts i’m excited to kind of nerd out a little bit

4:48 – we’ll uh we’ll spare the listener some of that because seo guys can get can get pretty nerdy uh at times but i’m excited

4:54 – to dig back into it but as as far as like you know first things first give us kind of an overview of your journey in

5:00 – seo and ecom and help us understand like where this expertise comes from

5:06 – absolutely so i took a job in 2005 right after graduating college the ground floor of

5:13 – overstock.com i was you know bottom of the rung but had sort of a mind for internet

5:20 – marketing i started in email marketing worked my way into you know search and website analytics and conversion

5:26 – rate optimization and really we didn’t know anything about seo and we we got wind of a of a

5:34 – seo expert out there a guy named paul bremer who worked at red door interactive which you have overlapped

5:40 – with as well and paul just turned us on to it and i remember going up to patrick the founder

5:45 – and CEO of overstock’s office and being like going to the white board and kind of explaining what i had just learned about

5:52 – seo and that this was kind of a crazy way that you could get all this free traffic if you optimized your website in

5:59 – a way that google can understand what’s going on and as a result you know we went from a

6:04 – channel of zero to a channel of over 300 million in just a few short years so it

6:09 – was a really aggressive push um learned a ton we tried pretty much

6:15 – everything i think at some point we had over 40 people working on seo half of which were developers so sort of

6:21 – unlimited amounts of resources which i know your listeners won’t necessarily have

6:27 – but a lot of these sort of tips that i have and tricks that i’ll tell your listeners are

6:34 – relevant to any size e-commerce business and sort of how you can shortcut and and make results a lot

6:42 – quicker than than normal so we did start at the very ground floor with no real

6:47 – seo traffic whatsoever to obviously a massive brand on the seo

6:52 – front and really changed the business of overstock it was a huge channel and it kind of made overstock into this home

6:59 – and garden company as a result of keyword research and finding the right product for what

7:05 – people were searching for and and i can get into that a little bit as well but yeah then after overstock so i spent

7:11 – seven years there i was the svp over marketing and analytics we did a bunch of cool stuff

7:17 – um founded Huckabuy and Huckabuy takes a lot of the tech stack type

7:23 – things the technical things in terms of how a site communicates with google and makes them a sas solution because

7:29 – having 40 people working on seo is just not realistic for 99.9 percent of businesses

7:35 – it’s a hard project it’s a very technical project seo is very technical and wouldn’t it be nice

7:41 – if there was a sas solution for it something you could buy plug in and literally just grow as a result

7:47 – that didn’t really exist in the seo space so that’s the purpose of buy staying ahead of the curve let us stay

7:54 – ahead of the curve so that you know you kind of have that box checked as google changes which they’re going to and

8:00 – constantly do you’re going to have this perfect relationship with google so that’s kind

8:05 – of my journey now Huckabuy you know about five years in uh we’re growing really quickly we’ve got tons of prominent

8:12 – customers we have enterprise down to startups to you know much smaller businesses and

8:18 – yeah we’re just focused on growing having our customers grow their organic channel through our software

8:24 – we’re not a services company as quickly as possible so that’s that’s my background and i never thought i’d be

8:30 – like an seo guy you know i started my career but i just seem i can’t get away from it so uh here i am

8:38 – nice yeah it’s it’s interesting like um my journey into seo was i i feel like

8:44 – most people don’t start in seo they started something surrounding seo or they started something around uh in web

8:50 – marketing and then they end up encountering seo everybody encounters seo but some people get enamored by it

8:55 – of like look at this you know i can picture you drawing on the whiteboard like i remember those days um or they go

9:00 – oh my gosh this is so complicated i don’t understand it and you’re you’re on one side or the other um and so i totally resonate with what you’re saying

9:07 – um i call it like the circulatory system of the internet right it’s like it’s like the oxygen it’s the blood flow like

9:15 – it’s it’s you know you can’t be denied and either you you know you either participate or you die it’s just a

9:20 – necessary thing and it’s also part of everything too like um you know i i stay pretty close to our

9:27 – clients as far trying to understand like what strategies and stuff they’re doing even though like we’re fairly focused just on live chat and conversions um i

9:34 – like learning about everything that they’re doing and when we talk about seo like one of the things i always tell clients is like

9:41 – seo is is a part of everything you do like it’s not really just something like you do seo and then you get ranked it’s

9:46 – more of like it needs to be a part of the technical structure the content yep marketing initiatives when you do that

9:52 – partnership with that big brand like there’s a lot of seo aspects to that and so um yeah it’s just part of everything

9:58 – but i’m curious from your perspective i want to start us off a little bit broad um we’re gonna go into like some

10:04 – of the you know future proofing um seo strategies in a couple minutes but what are the main gains that you would see

10:10 – for an e-commerce store and and i mentioned on our call before um the typical uh audience member for us is

10:18 – you know an e-com store only really i’m sure we have other listeners but it’s a pretty hardcore e-com uh and i would say

10:25 – like the revenue size is around like that one to two million to ten million dollar range um we’ll definitely have

10:31 – some listeners uh below and above that but i think that’s kind of the sweet spot um at least as far as our client base and so i’m curious um for those

10:38 – types of stores like what are the biggest gains that they should focus on you know maybe over like a 12-month

10:44 – period right like what are the big things that a store should be focused on if they haven’t really focused on seo

10:50 – before yeah that’s a really fun and exciting time for an e-commerce company because

10:56 – usually it’s kind of hyper growth phase or it could be hyper growth days and almost every e-commerce company that

11:03 – does experience hyper growth gets it in a lot of ways through their

11:08 – through their seo for new customer acquisition and then once those new customers are signed up they have a

11:14 – fabulous crm email marketing system so it’s definitely a critical component for

11:19 – growth in that sort of one to ten million dollar range which can be a really exciting time because it can be really hyper growth so the first thing

11:26 – is is keywords right knowing what keywords you want to rank for and even sometimes having keywords drive what

11:33 – products you sell it’s much easier to find a large amount of demand meaning like searches online and fulfill the

11:40 – product for those searches then saying i’m going to take this idea or this product i’m going to stuff it

11:45 – down your throat that’s how overstock transitioned into a home and garden company from a jewelry

11:51 – watches electronics company there wasn’t a lot of competition but in

11:56 – the in the space of of furniture and bedding and all those things all those big box retailers really weren’t savvy

12:04 – to seo in 2007 2010 so we just swept in there built a supply chain out that had

12:09 – all those products and we just took off um so keywords are really important and

12:14 – it’s not just keywords and what products you know you have to support those keywords but also

12:20 – making sure those keywords are in your navigation so your top navigation call

12:26 – things what people search for probably the navigation and the optimization of the navigation is the easiest and most

12:32 – most important quick win you can get as an e-commerce company in that range so

12:37 – do your keywords does the demand match how you’re displaying your navigation on the site

12:44 – after that i’d say structured data which is this language that allows a search engine to to easily understand an

12:51 – e-commerce site there’s product structured data which is sort of the most it’s the most used structured data on the internet that

12:57 – says you know this is a product here’s the name here’s the price here are the reviews and it chews all that up so when

13:04 – you people search for your product you actually see like the star ratings that are in the search results that’s all

13:10 – powered by that language the next thing would be page speed has become very important so page speed doesn’t just

13:16 – correlate to seo results it’s a huge factor now as of 2021 google did a

13:21 – massive update that’s all about page speed but it also will help your time on site your conversion rate your page

13:27 – views and ultimately just correlates with revenue so that’s one of those kpis that a one to ten million dollar

13:35 – ecom site probably isn’t thinking about but is a very important kpi is how fast

13:40 – are your pages loading and then just a quick sort of

13:45 – trick is your categories your categories are going to be the keywords that that are more what they call like head terms

13:52 – so i’ll use the example like memory foam mattress that’s like a very important term for

13:57 – overstock but each business has those terms and a lot of companies they’ll take

14:02 – those categories and they’ll just list products but those category pages because they aren’t so important to rank

14:08 – they need to actually have a content strategy behind them as well so you’ll naturally have content on product pages

14:14 – with descriptions and reviews but how do you feed content that search engines really are craving onto your category

14:21 – pages um so that’s that’s a really kind of and you can do neat things like one ever every five

14:28 – reviews in a category goes into the category page instead of the product page but those are some quick

14:34 – wins navigation structure data page speed a content strategy for your

14:40 – category pages that’s a really great one-year road map to just get

14:46 – you know flying along nice yeah there’s a lot here i want to dig into a couple of these um

14:51 – i’m going to come back to page speed in a second um but i want to stay on the content strategy for category pages um

14:57 – can you rattle off a couple more ways that you’ve seen you know big brands be able to do that you mentioned like one of every fried product reviews pump

15:03 – those into the category page can you kind of give us some more ideas because i think for definitely from like my consulting days

15:10 – i remember this where it’s like okay let’s put a content block on the page right and it’s like okay now we have content but that’s not like a strategy

15:15 – right so what are the things that you see happen that um are valuable content for the the viewers of the page it does

15:22 – the job for seo and also that it it scales you know it’s something that can just be part of the business’s strategy

15:29 – not just something the seo guy puts on there yeah well you know

15:34 – the one that i left off the list that’s really coming to mind right now is links right inbound links from external

15:40 – sources is going to be critical for any e-commerce company to be successful especially you know you

15:46 – might be known to humans but if you’re not known to search engines the way you get known from search engines is inbound

15:51 – links but it needs to be something interesting um which can be tricky uh getting inbounds links is probably the

15:57 – most complicated and awkward thing about seo um we actually have a product specifically

16:04 – for generating content on category pages it’s called our content curator and what it does is it grabs say you have like an

16:10 – instagram feed you can copy and paste an instagram post it’ll go at the bottom of your page and then you just it basically

16:17 – inserts it and then you write a comment about that post or same thing for you know find an article or a picture or a

16:24 – tweet or something that’s relevant it’s just giving you an excuse to write a little bit of content and

16:29 – it’s that that unique content that you’re going to write it’s like a paragraph long and having that refresh you know ideally

16:36 – daily or weekly or whatever your content schedule is really impacts the page so the big wins

16:43 – are definitely on things that are scalable so you can actually do it at least once a week and

16:50 – the page changes in a meaningful way once a week for e-commerce by far the most efficient

16:57 – content strategy is user-generated content through reviews so if you aren’t incentivizing your

17:04 – customers to leave reviews in some way or another giving them a coupon on their next purchase

17:10 – that’s just a no-brainer you just need to be doing that and if you can take some of that content and move it

17:16 – onto the category page instead of the product page he’ll be in really good shape um

17:22 – those are sort of my suggestions it you if you can get really creative you know have video content that displays and

17:29 – anytime you have a video or any kind of other piece of content writing a little blurb about describing it um anyway you

17:36 – can just make that page you know have some substance to it that’s

17:42 – that’s you know interesting to a search bot and gets updated on a regular basis you can be very successful i love that

17:49 – one that uh reminds me of one of the interviews we did with a company called video wise um that essentially they

17:55 – enable you to showcase um you know videos and youtube reviews and those types of things um and i imagine that’s

18:01 – something that would be interesting to integrate too um but it was kind of what i’m really hearing from you is

18:08 – take what’s already out there showcase that regularly on the category pages make it relevant to that page make it

18:14 – real or make it uh unique content also like summarize it or something um and then have a system to do that and i

18:19 – think that’s for the listeners like that’s the key thing to understand from this is like just like facebook ads right like you

18:25 – don’t just put an ad up and then like oh my gosh i hope it works it’s like there’s a system to optimize you’re monitoring metrics you’re doing a number

18:30 – of things and then you do it forever essentially um and step one is is really just finding

18:36 – the location as simple as that can sound it’s like above the footer below the products or after 10 rows of products

18:44 – you insert a content and then you can get creative on what you want to put there that’s relevant to your customers

18:50 – don’t worry about it distracting them from buying if they’re going to buy they’re going to buy it never hurts conversion rate to have more content on

18:55 – a category page um but find the location and then figure out what you want to use to fill it that’s as you said it’s it’s

19:02 – repeatable you can keep doing it so i want to go to page speed um so a lot of our clients are on shopify super

19:10 – common with ecom um i would say the majority of them are on shopify plus um but one of the things

19:15 – that i know has become um you know a big thing in the last i don’t know i’ll probably get the time frame wrong definitely last year

19:21 – probably more like two years um is this whole journey to going headless um on shopify and i’m curious if you have any

19:27 – um experience with the pros and cons of doing that because we’ve seen clients do it and it’s it’s a big undertaking it’s

19:33 – not like just a different shopify account it’s a whole different animal um and

19:38 – i see some good stories of people doing well with it i see other ones where it’s like we tried to do it it’s super expensive it just didn’t work so they

19:43 – never get to kind of the end result i guess i’m curious from you if you have any experience in that is um like is

19:48 – that a direction that a shopify plus store should be looking to solve the speed problem or other other low hanging

19:54 – fruits that are a lot easier you know i’m not specifically knowledgeable on the headless piece and

20:00 – maybe you could explain it just a little bit more clearly so i could give you a piece of advice on whether to do it or

20:05 – not but we have a ton of shopify customers that all struggle with page speed and i i don’t know how many of

20:11 – them are headless they’re not we have a partnership with shopify that we do do page speed for them but i don’t have a

20:16 – spec you’d have to give me a little bit more context what that even means that they’re headless or not yeah i don’t know

20:23 – uh i don’t know if i’ll explain it exactly correctly but my understanding of it is it’s essentially you’re getting

20:28 – uh the benefits of the shopify back end without um shopify run in the front yeah it’s

20:35 – essentially reskinned think and people are gonna probably say i’m wrong but no i think that makes sense yeah so

20:42 – um that is a great way to go in terms of page speed but it is a lot of work because it’s custom development work

20:48 – that you’re going to have to now provide your own tech stack for the delivery of the site um

20:54 – this is what we do right is we we handle the delivery of the site in the fastest possible way

21:00 – so i do have a lot of experience in that i have seen customers do it themselves um

21:06 – it’s it’s hard to do takes a lot of engineering um but customers that do end

21:11 – up doing it seem to be very happy with the results if they did it correctly um we’re definitely a workaround you know

21:18 – like uh you could really so that’s that’s instead of investing in in that particular piece uh you could

21:26 – find a sas solution that probably could do it for you nice help me understand that part then um because i know like

21:33 – normally i don’t go into like directly like tell me exactly what the product does and like let’s sell it event yeah but i know headless is it’s it’s on

21:39 – everyone’s mind it’s a big thing um help me understand how Huckabuy uh is

21:45 – able to speed up shopify plus sites and like you know how that process works at a high level let’s spend spend a couple

21:50 – minutes on that um so that you’re listening to saying okay we got to go headless in 2022 like maybe they look at

21:56 – it as like or maybe we just need to like heavily optimize shopify plus and figure out how to make it lightning fast like

22:01 – what what would make that work for you guys so page speed is sort of depth by a thousand paper cuts it’s not one big

22:08 – thing that like all of a sudden will speed everything up so you have lots of little projects that go into a really

22:14 – fast page um they start with just how it’s being delivered you know what’s the tech stack of how it’s being delivered there’s like

22:21 – images image size image caching are you minifying your javascript are you minifying your css it’s like a hundred

22:28 – little thing little projects that go into a page seamlessly being delivered

22:33 – um and that’s what we’ve done essentially is all we’ve done all of those projects for you so you flip the

22:38 – switch we’re now taking we’re now the ones that are responsible for delivering the site and we’ve done

22:45 – all those projects your images are going to be resized reformatted into the latest formats that google wants um all

22:52 – your css is gonna be minified your jss is gonna be minified we’re trying to get you you know the

22:57 – fastest possible google lighthouse score you can get um so that’s it even if you

23:03 – go the headless direction you’re still gonna have to do all those hundred projects for the page to really get

23:09 – noticeably faster um and basically we’ve built that into a sas solution so you

23:14 – just turn it on and we can like even with images and video formats that

23:20 – aren’t supported anymore like 50 of our customers when they go in to use this product they have antiquated formats

23:27 – that google that they support them but they don’t really like them all that’s going to get updated so

23:33 – you’ll be in the latest and greatest formats that google’s adopted and your page is just going to be faster so it’s stuff like that we call them boosters

23:40 – and some boosters work a ton for some customers sometimes they break the sites we have to turn them off

23:47 – but it’s all those little projects that go into a really fast page speed got it got it

23:52 – that makes sense um let’s shift to the future proofing thing now like we we’ve talked about um you

23:58 – know a number of things that stores should be looking at um what what things that she they should be

24:03:00 – looking at now i guess now where i want to get to is like okay for people that are implementing these things and getting these best practices in place

24:10:00 – um what should they be looking at for the future of seo because i know um

24:15:00 – i remember from my consulting and agency days like i think that’s part of what was really hard for business owners to

24:21:00 – understand about seo is like it’s always changing it seems like it’s just it’s always something different and how do

24:26:00 – you manage in that type of environment so um i guess i’m curious from you like what are the things that you see coming

24:33:00 – as far as um you know search technology and how to basically optimize for that and be ahead of that um

24:39:00 – what are some of the trends yeah so that’s a tough one because they’re always changing and you don’t

24:45:00 – know what they’re going to come out with yet although now they’re much more open about it so just paying attention to

24:52:00 – google webmasters on where they’re going is just a great start um the last few big changes have been

24:59:00 – structured data the implementation of that then something called dynamic rendering which basically allows you to create a copy like a seo version of your

25:07:00 – site just for google no javascript flat html gives them all the content that they need

25:13:00 – their adoption of apis specifically around e-commerce companies so feeding them

25:19:00 – your product information versus them having to crawl it that’s become very important page speed is the biggest update that

25:26:00 – they did in 2021 it was one of their biggest updates i’ve ever done um looking forward you know a few things

25:31:00 – just to be on the heads up of um voice search and being able to actually transact

25:37:00 – using voice is probably going to become something that’s important over the next five years we can get into a little bit how

25:44:00 – to future proof for that one um there’s some others that you know that aren’t really the future but they’re still

25:50:00 – going that direction which is mobile optimization and being able to check out directly from a mobile

25:56:00 – experience that’s very fast and that’s where page speed is so important is i don’t know a very high percentage of

26:02:00 – e-commerce purchases now happen on a mobile phone and if the page speeds slow then you’re you’re just not going to get

26:08:00 – those conversions um but you never really know and yeah you mentioned something i want to stop on um

26:15:00 – on our on our initial call you said you know that transition transition to voice search is happening and it’s you said

26:23:00 – you know it’s it’s probably going to happen very similar to mobile about gradually then suddenly like everyone knew mobile was important okay it’s

26:29:00 – still 10 it’s still 15 and then poof it just essentially changed really quickly how do you see that

26:35:00 – playing out with voice search like where’s it at now as far as um you know penetration in the market and then also

26:41:00 – like what what is it that kind of shifts us to um you know heavily being driven by voice search

26:48:00 – so the analogy to mobile is a very great example um i certainly remember

26:54:00 – having a mobile phone that was a trio or a palm pilot or a blackberry and you’d go to sites right with the stylus and

27:00:00 – you’d be clicking and it just it was so slow that you just it was so much easier just to

27:06:00 – get your laptop or go to your desktop and buy like there was no reason for a user to even bother with it and then the iphone came

27:14:00 – along and then connection speeds started to pick up and then sites started to get built for mobile

27:20:00 – because people are using their iphone so much more and the user experience got as good as using

27:27:00 – your desktop or your laptop and that’s when it’s so much more convenient to have a thing in your pocket

27:33:00 – that it flipped from that sort of like little 10 thing to like 75 and it happened really

27:39:00 – fast um i think the same is true for voice search so right now using voice search to buy a product is

27:46:00 – very difficult it is not as ideal as being on your phone or being on

27:51:00 – your laptop or desktop you don’t get all you know the best price you’re not hunting around you’re

27:58:00 – not necessarily getting the most reviews but all these big companies

28:04:00 – amazon with alexa apple with siri google with their voice search

28:11:00 – they all see this as the future and they’re putting tons and tons of research and engineers into

28:16:00 – getting that user interaction to be so easy that it’s as easy to buy

28:22:00 – something using your voice as it is going on your mobile phone typing it in

28:27:00 – or going on your laptop it just hasn’t gotten there yet so it’s really just a user um

28:33:00 – problem it’s not there the technology is not there yet but it will and

28:38:00 – when that happens if you already see a very yeah amazon

28:45:00 – they were good uh if you had mobile dialed in before um the iphone then you’re in a good spot like how do you

28:51:00 – get ready for um you know that that switch to 50 of your purchases being voice that seems crazy to say at that

28:58:00 – high but you know how do you get ready for that yeah i mean it’s a little bit different than mobile was with seo

29:04:00 – because there’s actually three big players amazon is right now the biggest player when it becomes voice search and

29:11:00 – buying so if you’re on amazon how you’re optimized on amazon if someone wants to buy x y

29:19:00 – and z are you are you the one that’s selling it to them are you the first one that shows up that’s the one that’s

29:24:00 – going to place that order so that optimization is really important your amazon optimization which i’d

29:30:00 – imagine a lot of your customers if not all of them have some sort of amazon integration so that’s a really important

29:35:00 – point that’s that’s i don’t even know probably like 75 the 90 of of voice transactions in

29:43:00 – e-commerce are happening on amazon using alexa today um the other piece is structured data is

29:50:00 – what powers voice search so structured data is you know basically

29:55:00 – when you search for something on your desktop and it comes back and it shows you like what they call a rich result so

30:01:00 – it’s not just 10 blue links anymore it shows you something that’s featured you ask it a question it gives you the

30:06:00 – answer that’s all powered by this language so having your site just optimized for structured data which

30:13:00 – isn’t the hardest thing in the world there’s lots of solutions we’re one of them but that’s a really important piece but it’s

30:20:00 – more competitive because it’s so important that last point of transaction whether

30:26:00 – it’s on amazon or it’s on google is really important and it’s going to

30:31:00 – get easy enough to make a voice query to get that product um right now

30:36:00 – to be honest the winner’s amazon it’s not google amazon’s the easier platform they’ve got a head start

30:42:00 – so getting optimized there is probably right now the most important thing and

30:48:00 – then structured data on top of that which is what google uses for voice search will be really important in the future

30:54:00 – got it got it that makes sense um do you see do you see google making strides forward

31:00:00 – or or i guess maybe anybody else that would be in this position to to basically

31:06:00 – you know essentially hey siri you know buy me uh find a new moleskine journal to buy or

31:11:00 – something right i’m looking at it on my desk like on amazon that that process is pretty dialed in we’ve got the alexa in

31:17:00 – the kitchen yeah you reorder this put the pin code in and you don’t even have to have the pin but we do because the kids buy crazy stuff uh

31:23:00 – like is how far off is google on being able to do that with um rather than all

31:29:00 – of the products that amazon has like all of the data and the product data that google has out in the market like

31:36:00 – how are they progressing with that do you see anybody making big moves um

31:41:00 – well they’re all making really yeah they’re all making really big moves um it’s where who stores your payment

31:47:00 – method so apple pay has become you see how hard they’re pushing apple pay same thing with google wallet right you have

31:53:00 – your payment information there if a site is integrated with those two solutions then you can check out anywhere so

32:01:00 – making sure your checkout stuff is seamless as these solutions start to drive more volume using voice search

32:07:00 – that’s really important um they all see this as the future that and and by all i

32:13:00 – mean like those three plus ebay see this is like where people are going and making it you know user friendly

32:21:00 – um so that’s that’s kind of where you watch is like how does that how does the transaction

32:27:00 – happen and at some point it will happen on google.com it already is happening in like books and videos and movies and

32:34:00 – stuff on apple it’s obviously happening across the board on amazon so making

32:39:00 – sure that you have that sort of checkout capability when the volume starts coming so that

32:45:00 – you’re one of the players that get the transactions will be really important but i think yeah you

32:50:00 – start it with what’s in you know where are they paying from if they’re you know they’re paying

32:56:00 – a ton from their amazon.com prime account and they’re starting to feel comfortable doing it with like apple in

33:02:00 – the apple wallet and all that so um that’s where i’d start is being like am

33:08:00 – i integrated at a checkout level with all these different providers good good i’m going to hold myself back

33:14:00 – from going too deep because i i kind of like the holes there but um yeah what i’m really hearing from that part is is have

33:21:00 – structured data set up and running like that you’re like don’t do it after the fact kind of like

33:26:00 – sites scrambled to get or uh brands scrambled to get a mobile-friendly site put up like once the iphone came out

33:31:00 – it’s like that’s something yeah better than nothing um but it’s a little late right and the checkout parts actually counter-intuitive where you know should

33:38:00 – you have apple pay on your site should you have google pay on your site like maybe i don’t know if it’s not that much of a

33:44:00 – share of checkout like why bother but when you put it in that perspective of like when google cracks you know hey

33:51:00 – google buy me my water bottle or something like they’re they’re going to send it to those stores right so like

33:56:00 – having structured data the reviews the authority built up and the checkout part makes makes perfect sense

34:03:00 – um how do you guys help with that we we’re we’re kind of coming up on time give us a little more context um on like how

34:09:00 – Huckabuy can help with this as uh as we wrap up and how like listeners should be kind of thinking of Huckabuy as a piece of their stack

34:15:00 – yeah so we are sort of the technical seo piece of the stack for our customers so

34:21:00 – there’s four products um the first is automation of world class structure data which is our very first product the

34:28:00 – second is dynamic rendering an auto you know full dynamically rendered version of the site that’s much easier for

34:34:00 – google google to crawl you get you know all these you know a lot more pages indexed and all this good stuff

34:41:00 – um we didn’t get into that one much the third is then page speed which is taking your site from wherever it is up to a

34:48:00 – really fast page speed which is great for seo and it’s also great for conversion rate and you know user

34:53:00 – interaction um and then the fourth is our content curator which is this ability to sort of

34:59:00 – easily in 10 minutes post something write a quick comment and get a new unique piece

35:04:00 – of content on a page that’s important to you in the e-commerce world that 99 of the time is a category page

35:11:00 – that’s how we that’s how we help if you do all four you’re probably growing pretty

35:17:00 – fast and up to the right um which is what we want to see you know if you’re if you’re using all four products your

35:23:00 – seo is growing even if you’re using a couple but all four you’re definitely growing pretty quickly

35:29:00 – i want to ask you as we kind of wrap up i’m going to summarize in a second but is there is there any like big insights

35:34:00 – or things we didn’t dig into today that you think are important um for for brands to be paying attention to when it

35:39:00 – comes to seo i know i know they could go into a lot but are there any big pieces that you feel like oh we didn’t hit that

35:45:00 – part it’s important for these brands i think knowing that seo is more important than we give it

35:52:00 – credit for if you look at the true analytics and not any sort of last click or

35:58:00 – typical google analytics seo is way more valuable than it gets any sort of credit

36:04:00 – because their incentive is to have that last click attribution whether it’s ppc or it’s display or facebook or instagram

36:11:00 – they’re capturing that last click and they want to give it credit because they you’re paying for it um seo if you take kind of

36:19:00 – where it what it’s doing today in in real reality it’s really kind of double what it’s

36:25:00 – doing for you today so if it’s 30 today it’s really kind of 60 if it’s

36:31:00 – you know so it’s it’s just a much bigger channel the analytics all the analytics

36:36:00 – providers are incentivized to to have your paid channels getting credit for these purchases

36:42:00 – but in reality it’s actually seos that starts it and then the other piece is that when you talk about building a

36:48:00 – brand nothing builds a brand better than the number one organic search ranking there’s so much trust

36:54:00 – and just seeing it and the impressions and all of that um it’s so undervalued

36:59:00 – as a branding thing um it’s it’s one of the most important branding channels by a long shot of any

37:07:00 – any sort of ecommerce channel you can imagine awesome awesome well we really appreciate you digging in on everything

37:14:00 – here um there’s uh there’s a lot of angles to seo guys but um i hope that this has given you kind of an overview

37:21:00 – of what you should be focused on um and definitely speaking from my own experience with seo it’s it’s possible

37:27:00 – to get overwhelmed with the technical aspect of it and just feel like you know like it’s daunting essentially but if

37:32:00 – you really boil down um you know some of the things um that Geoff has shared here like some of the things that stand out

37:38:00 – to me uh is making content and a good content strategy a part of what you’re

37:43:00 – doing so a part of your product strategy a part of your category page strategies um you do need some tech to do that but

37:49:00 – it’s not um super super complex to get in place especially if you have a tool like Huckabuy um page speed um you know

37:56:00 – that is something that that can be super complicated unless uh you know depending on what tools you’re using but

38:01:00 – definitely really important um i don’t think that stuff’s going to be really new for everybody listening but i hope that this has given you guys kind of

38:08:00 – a look at what you should be focused on over the next 12 months or so and then this future proofing stuff like i wanted

38:14:00 – to be on record uh here you know voice search and you know that may not be a big priority

38:20:00 – for you at this point but when the iphone of voice search comes out and when whoever solves it solves it it’s

38:25:00 – going to be super important and um what i’m hearing is it’s not that complex of how to like

38:31:00 – be ready for that have structured data dialed in and you know get get google pay on your site um you know

38:37:00 – and apple pay so um this has been really really helpful um what’s the best way for listeners to continue the

38:43:00 – conversation with you as we wrap up here Geoff yeah on linkedin is definitely my most

38:48:00 – active spot it’s Geoff geoff Atkinson and uh the company is called Huckabuy so it’s

38:53:00 – easy to find me there you’re always welcome we give podcast listeners 30 day free trials as well as

39:00:00 – like 10 to 20 discounting on products so if they come through fill out a form mention the podcast they’ll be in really

39:07:00 – good hands and usually um i’ll be on those calls because they’re podcast listeners and they’ve heard me talk for

39:13:00 – whatever it’s been 20 minutes already so um yeah love to meet your audience and

39:18:00 – we’ll make sure they’re taken care of if they if they come through the Huckabuy pipeline awesome awesome and we’ll get that in

39:24:00 – the show notes guys um so you have the link but it’s Huckabuy.com you can check it out there and just mention the podcast and Geoff i appreciate it man

39:30:00 – this has been super helpful thanks for your time thanks Jon that was great thanks for tuning in to e-commerce town

39:37:00 – hall for more resources related to today’s episode visit ecommercetownhall.com

39:43:00 – and don’t forget to check out HelpFlow, HelpFlow provides 24 7 live chat teams

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