Matt Edmundson: Welcome to the Ecommerce Podcast with me, your host, Matt Edmundson. Now, this is a show all about helping you deliver Ecommerce. Wow. And to help us do just that, I am chatting with my very special guest today, Josh Piepmeier from Meriwether, about SEO. All things SEO. We're going to get into that always, always, always these conversations, genuinely love them because it's such an important topic. So make sure you grab your pens and make sure you grab your notebooks because you are going to want to take notes from today. And of course, if you're subscribed to the newsletter, we'll send you the notes, we'll send you the transcript, all of that sort of stuff will come straight to your inbox automatically. Awesome. And if you're not subscribed to the newsletter and you think, matt, how do I get such wondrous things? Then you just go to Ecommercepodcast.net and sign up and it will start coming to your inbox without any drama whatsoever. And of course, the cheat code to all of this, because it is a podcast and the podcast players are pretty good, is you just look at the show notes on the podcast player of your choice, which doesn't help my email list, but it's an awful lot easier for you. Not going to lie. So you can do any of those, any of them works. If this is your first time with us on the Ecommerce podcast, very, very warm welcome to you. Why not connect with me on social media, whether on Instagram or LinkedIn, and just let me know a bit about yourself. Love to hear from you. Love to get all the comments from people all over the world letting me know what's going on, which is great. So make sure you find me on LinkedIn. Just go search Matt Edmundson, you'll find me there. Same on Instagram, easy as. Now, let's talk about Josh, who is the founder and CEO of Meriwether, an Ecommerce SEO agency that prioritizes revenue over mere traffic. Now, with a background in direct response copywriting, he brings a unique approach to SEO, delivering multiple seven figure campaigns in competitive markets. When rankings and revenue are a must, Josh is the expert to call. So we called him, we got him on the show. Josh, warm welcome to you, bud. How you doing?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, I'm doing well, thanks, Matt. Appreciate it. Great intro as always. Legendary for the show, so really appreciate it.
Matt Edmundson: It's funny how this is. I need to have a conversation with Sadef actually, because this is. Now you mentioned it to me before we hit the record button. You're like, what the Intro is going to be. So she's made a slight rod for her own back is what's happened. And if you're new to the show, Sadaf is the show's producer and she talks to all the guests before they come on the show and rewrites their bios to be a bit more. Well, a bit more. Less corporate that we sort of tend to write for ourselves.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, better than I can write. Yeah.
Matt Edmundson: Well, I hope it lived up to expectations for you.
Josh Piepmeier: Indeed. Yeah. Loved it. Loved it. Yeah. Okay, good. Happy to jump into it.
Matt Edmundson: Whereabouts in the world are you?
Josh Piepmeier: I'm in New York, so on Long island, which is just east of New York City. So, you know, it's probably 40 minute drive if there's no traffic, which is never the case.
Matt Edmundson: I was going to say it's a 40 minute drive when Armageddon happens.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, yeah, exactly. Exactly. Yeah.
Matt Edmundson: Are you. You don't sound like you're a New Yorker though. Are you an import or have you just lost. Not got the accent as strong.
Josh Piepmeier: So I grew up in Minnesota, middle of the country, Canadian border, you know, so Midwest, I guess the Midwest accent or lack thereof in the US is what people say. But you know, overseas still the American accent and it's.
Matt Edmundson: Did you have. If you're on the Canadian border, do you say a lot?
Josh Piepmeier: No, in fact, we don't actually, you know, there's some of the don't, you know, and like stuff that comes through a little bit but like the A isn't. Doesn't quite. So it's like our own spin on it, I guess.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, yeah, no doubt, no doubt. So I mean, Minnesota, Canadian border, I imagine is not having been there myself, but having been to New York, quite different places. Josh, not gonna lie. How did you end up from one to the other?
Josh Piepmeier: Well, you know, so. So I was actually more in southern Minnesota. A lot of cornfields, just kind of cornfields everywhere. And I wanted to get out of there. I was like, you know, look, I need, I need a little bit of a. I wanted to experience city life, I guess. So I came to school in Washington D.C. met my wife who grew up here on Long island, so moved up here.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic. So your wife's local?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, exactly, exactly.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic. Fantastic. And so you've got a company that specializes in SEO. How did you get involved in that? Was that a happy accident or was that very intentional?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, it was a little bit of a happy accident. I actually. So I wanted to be more of a direct response copywriter when I sort of got into marketing I actually have a mechanical engineering degree, so I've been all over the place. And at one point, you know, I needed to get a job in 9 to 5 so that I could actually move up here to Long island to be with my wife and sort of happened into SEO, content marketing side of things. And I've really enjoyed it. So, yeah, it was a happy accident. But, you know, I think it really works for me. I have the mechanical engineering degree, but I also have that minor. I'm minor in philosophy, so I've always had left brain, right brain, and it works really, really well for SEO.
Matt Edmundson: So that sounds almost ideal, doesn't it? Because I can see it when you said mechanical engineers. Oh, yeah. Actually, that makes a lot of sense for SEO. I'm not sure it makes too much sense for direct copywriting. Not going to lie. But I mean, there's a science to that as well, isn't there? But. But having the philosophy background and the ability to think like that I think is going to help you a lot, isn't it? Because for years it. There's a couple of trends I've seen. Josh, I don't know whether you've seen them, whether it's just me. There are these trends where everybody would key stuff, keyword, stu, content to get the rankings, and it just read awful. And now you go online, it reads better. But man, can you tell the AI copy?
Josh Piepmeier: Yes.
Matt Edmundson: And you just like, oh, please, can someone please edit this before they put it live? And so I feel like that's the problem now. So let's start there. Ran over. I'll get off my soapbox. Should we use AI to write all our SEO copy? Go.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah. So it's funny, like, yes and no. So we actually have worked with some clients that were using AI to write their copy and then sort of got hit by some algorithm updates. When I say hid, they were smacked by these algorithm updates. So, like, they can just do. Just absolutely get crushed. And so we came in and we said, okay, we're just going to stick with their human writers. We've done some tests with AI, but never have quite been happy with the output yet. And so we're still exploring it, right? It's still. AI is still evolving. Our use of it still is evolving. But if you think about sort of the progression of things, it's like if we use AI to create content, well, what is AI feeding into their machines to then create content? It's the content that we're creating and putting on the web, right? So it's like going to if we all just use AI, it's going to turn into this vicious circle where the snake is eating its own tail, where we're creating content with AI that's then fed into AI, which we then use to create more content, and then nothing is new. So I would say that in some cases it can be helpful, especially when writing some very basic content that, hey, sometimes Google likes you to have definitions of things on your sites or just very basic content to establish that you know what you're generally talking about. It's like, use AI for some of that, but anything that's important to your site or important to your product or questions that you get regularly from customers, a lot of that should be mostly humans, maybe with a little bit of AI to help speed up the process, if you know how to do it right.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, that's very, very good. I. I've always had the opinion. I say always had the. I've got the opinion at the moment is probably the correct way to say when we've used AI to help generate copy. So whether it's product copy, whether it's articles for blog posts or whatever it is, I'm like, with our team, I'm like, this is fine, it's a tool, but it cannot be the final thing that hits the web. There has to be somebody in the middle reading through that. And I'm old school a little bit. I tend to read things out loud. Okay, love that. If I can read it out loud and it makes sense and okay. And that's where I tend to find the mistakes. And it's like, I need to read it out loud. I need it to be in our voice. We need to edit this rather than just rely on it, because I think we've come unstuck a little bit with that.
Josh Piepmeier: Well, and just what you were talking about at the end, like, it has to be in our voice, right? And so, like, theoretically, and so we haven't actually done this yet, but we've done it a little bit theoretically. If you can feed a bunch of things that you consider your voice into the model, it should be able to spit out things that are better. And so we've tested this a little bit where we iterate and we iterate and we say, hey, you know, write more like these people, write more like this. Write more of like all of these successful pieces that we've had and it will get better. And I think it will continue to get better over time. But again, it's. Do you have a good starting point? I don't know. That a lot of brands that I talk to are even intentional enough about their brand style guide, their messaging, things like that, to really even feed a cohesive, really distinct voice into the AI model to begin with. So what is your starting point too? That helps.
Matt Edmundson: That's a really interesting point you mentioned there about the brand style guide. How important is it, if I can phrase it this way, Josh, that we have an SEO style guide? Do you know what I mean by this in the sense that brand style guide, most ones I've seen are like, these are the colors, this is a logo. Make sure that this gap exists between the brand mark and the text. Use this font, use this as a heading and there's then one or two lines devoted to, we write in a happy, cheerful, fun loving way or something. You know, it's that kind of thing. I've never actually given it any thought to go, do we need to define SEO brand guide for want of a better expression to go deeper into understanding what our brand voice is and how we put this written content out there?
Josh Piepmeier: Wow. I love the question. This is not a question I think I've gotten before, so very interesting. The answer, I think is yes, and I love it because this is probably one of the most overlooked parts of SEO, but it's also critically important. So when I say critically important, what do I mean? One of the most important things that you can do in SEO that a lot of people do wrong is they don't actually sell their product in their content. So they just sort of will say, you know, for example, let's say you're selling diamonds, a diamond ring, you know, some, we've had some clients in sort of the jewelry space and somebody searches, how much does a diamond ring cost? And you just sort of say it costs, you know, 200 pounds up to 25,000 pounds or more, depending on the ring. That technically correct. Right, but, but what is your opinion in the space? What is your brand doing in the space? Like, do you sell budget? Do you sell high end? And so you should weave that in. So if you sell super high end, it's. You have unique sort of luxury pieces. You say, look, it's 200 to 25,000 pounds, but we actually sell stuff that's $50,000, 50,000 pounds. Because we find that a lot of people don't have the high end, perfect diamonds that are meeting their expectations. Like some of our most high end buyers, they couldn't even find the right thing for them. So we actually, they, our high end buyers, they said no amount of money is too much. This is going to be the most important day of your life. You're buying a wedding ring or engagement ring. What, what makes a ring worth that much? And so then you can give your opinion and sort of weave it in. If you are on the other end and you're buying sort of appealing to budget buyers, it's hey, 200 to 25,000. Most people would do best with something in the 1,000 pound or $1,000 range because it's sort of the 80, 20 you're going to get most of it. Most people aren't going to notice the difference. It's still going to be oppressive. All of your friends are going to think it's amazing, but you don't need to spend the $50,000 that you would be putting down on a house otherwise. So what is your brand's opinion? What is your brand's approach? And so then if you do that, and then you sort of say, hey, if this is you, if you're the budget conscious, check out this collection that we have. All of a sudden you've weaved a sales pitch in that's very nuanced and subtle into the copy and you start to convert people more. And so this idea of what is your brand's opinion? To know that, especially if you're producing content at scale, which is kind of required for SEO, you have to have an opinion and you have to have it written out. So what is your positioning in the market? How do you compare to other people? When you're doing SEO, you have to realize that you're sort of talking to people who are doing research. So the brand Persona is maybe a little bit more research heavy than your standard Persona. How do you appeal to that person? And then you line all of these things up and you say, okay, this is what we're about. This is how you should approach that in content and copy. And here are a couple of examples. It raises the quality of the content a lot and makes it stand out, but it also increases conversions. So we've seen things where we come into clients and they don't have any sort of opinion. They just say, we're going to hire an SEO agency. We're just sort of going to outsource our content to Joe Ryder on Upwork. And it just is very factual and direct. And even if it's not SEO stuffed, it has no flavor. And then we come in and we add the flavor and they're like, ooh, this, this reads great, but it also converts better, you know, so the conversion rates will Rise. So, you know, I, you can tell that this is something that's important to me because it's nuanced and it's. But it's also very important and it can be critical to, like, the success of your campaign.
Matt Edmundson: That's super, super interesting because I, again, going back to our conversation about AI, AI spits out generic copy, doesn't it? In the sense that you could go to ChatGPT or Claude or whatever, you know, you're one of choices at the moment and say, right, write me a blog post on how much diamonds cost. And it's going to give you this very generic between this and this, you're going to, you know, you're going to get this for your money. Between that and that, you're going to get this and so on and so forth. Super generic. And I remember years ago, I don't know how many years ago it was, but I remember reading a book, I think it was called they Ask youk Answer.
Josh Piepmeier: Yep, great book.
Matt Edmundson: Do you know the one that I mean? And he talks about five key questions that people have, one of which is about price. And he was talking in there about how they did SEO for their swimming pool company and they got, you know, millions of dollars worth of orders. Because he wrote a blog post, how much does a swimming pool cost? And it was very much a case of, well, if you spend this, you'll get this. If you spend that, you'll get that. And it all became very. Web copy all became very, I want to use the word inoffensive. Unopinionated is probably a better expression, right? What you're saying is actually, guys, you've got permission to add a bit of, a bit of your opinion, a bit of your voice, a bit of your positioning, dare I say a little bit of controversy, because you're adding an opinion into the whole thing. And that, I have to be honest with you, Josh, is very refreshing because I've heard all the other stuff a thousand times, but what you're saying here is quite wonderful.
Josh Piepmeier: Well, I'm happy to hear it, man. You know, and so I think that with AI, this is just going to become more prevalent. You know, we're just going to keep getting more cookie cutter, more of the same, more of the same. And you can actually see in the most recent algorithm updates that Google has started introducing more diversity into the serp. SERP is Search Engine Results page is just sort of, if you type something into Google, there's a list of things that come up. That's the serp. Okay? Used to be even six months ago or a year ago that if you typed in, you know, what is the best diamond ring, you would just get 10 list posts and they all the best diamond ring of 20, 24, et cetera, et cetera. And now things are switching up because Google is really sort of doubling down on this information gain side of things. Right. Like, are you actually adding something new now? Just adding your opinion isn't always a foolproof way of adding information gain and we can talk about that if you want to, but it does get very technical. But this concept of we're moving in that direction where you have to have an opinion, you have to have something different, something new that no one else has talked about. Otherwise, by the way, you're just not going to rank. You're just not going to rank anymore. Even when you get up there. We're starting to see a lot more tests where Google will say, cool, we're going to rank you for a little bit and then you see the rankings drop. You know, right after a sort of a temporary, okay, we're going to put you in position two or three for a few days and you see it drop right after that and then it sort of settles at a certain point and it can slowly start to climb. And so what's happening is that Google is testing you. So they say, cool, we're going to see if people actually engage with your page and then if they don't, we're just going to sort of tank your rankings and going nowhere. Yeah, people engage with your page will keep you at a sort of a moderate ranking and allow you to prove yourself over time. And so if you just have the same thing as everybody else, why is anybody going to engage with your page? Why would they stick around and read it? Right. So we've seen, you know, like very distinct results where it's, hey, if we have something that's interesting, engaging and different, that initial spike goes down less and you start to see, hey, you rank better to begin with and you have a steadier progress over time. So it balances out. The point that I'm trying to make is that it's not just about, hey, it's in my opinion, on how to write well. It's backed by better rankings, better conversion rates. Right. It all makes sense for the business. But you do have to put in that work up front to decide what is our brand about, what do we want to talk about and what is our opinion.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, I've seen people do this on product pages. There used to be A website years ago called I Want. I think it was called I want one of those, or something like that. I don't even know if they still exist, if I'm honest with you, Josh. But it was a British site. And I came across this site once and I remember read going down the site, looking at the products, and the thing that stood out to me was the way they wrote product copy for that. It wasn't generic, it wasn't bland. It wasn't like they'd copied and pasted it from the manufacturer. It's like somebody sat down there and went, right, the person using this is going to be a bloke, a Fella in his mid-20s. And what appeals to a bloke in a Fella in his mid-20s about this product, let's write about that. And they did it in this sort of fun, interesting way where I actually found myself just enjoying reading the product copy. And I thought whoever did it was genius. To the point where we had this phrase, right? We had a beauty company which I sold called Jersey, and we had the phrase, let's Jersey fight. In other words, we took the product copy from the manufacturers and we're like, let's Jersey fight. Let's write that in our voice. Let's, you know, inject our fun and our, you know, slight irreverence into the whole thing. And our conversion rates were always good because of the product copy. So I guess my brain had never made the link between doing that on your product page and doing it on your blog post. You know, it sort of. It feels like, I suppose for a lot of people, they'll be a bit creative on the product copy page, but not so much on the blog post. It's like, I've just got to churn these out because like you said earlier, right, you've got to get content out there on scale. And so there was less thought in that. But if I'm. What I'm hearing you say, Josh, if I'm right, is actually if you bring that same thought into your blog post, your blog posts are going to start doing a lot better and you're going to start to win a lot more.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, absolutely. You know, and it's always. It's the balance that it's always been with SEO of do you do that? But you also bring in the SEO element, the optimized for the engine, optimized for the Google bot. It's literally called a bot. Google calls it a bot that's crawling your site like it's a. It's A robot and the human.
Matt Edmundson: Right.
Josh Piepmeier: You got to marry them. So. But, but absolutely. I think that adding that opinion is going to be even more important as we move forward.
Matt Edmundson: Love it. Love it. So let's start with some basics then. Other than, you know, we've talked about how to literally write the copy. Where do I, where do I go to find the right keywords? Because let's say I'm selling diamonds and I start my diamond selling business. If I write a blog post, you know, how much does a diamond cost on a brand new site? The chances of me ranking for that? Well, let's just say they're not large. Right, Right. So how do I, how do I find terms? Where's the best place to go these days to understand what the best terms are to rank for for my business?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, it's a great question. So I'm actually going to shift focus a little bit to collections pages. Okay. Instead of blog posts. Because if you're starting out with SEO, let's say you're doing, you know, a million dollars a year or something and you say, hey, you know, this Facebook is, this meta ad costs are rising. These influencers aren't performing. Let's, let's try and do some SEO. Right. The first thing you should do is focus on your collections pages. And what do I mean by that? I mean create more of them for more specific terms. So let's say you're selling leather bags. Totes. I had a client like this at about this size. Actually, what most people do is they just create one collection with all of their leather totes and they call it today. But when people search online, they don't just search for leather tote, they search for brown leather tote and black leather tote and best work bag, which is a completely different word. Right. They say a work bag. Or how do people actually use your thing? Diaper bag. I talked to this guy, he said a lot of our customers actually use it as sort of a high class diaper bag. So they can bring it with them and not feel like they're carrying a backpack all the time. And so it's like leather diaper bag is really what it is. Do you have any collections shopping experiences on your site focused towards the people that are searching for, for these other terms that describe your same products? And if you do not, the first thing you should do is start to create those. Okay. And so then, okay, how do you find the keywords? Well, so you're going to take the inspiration probably from your customers and say, okay, what, what are the things that people use our stuff for. Read some of your reviews. If you haven't read all of your reviews, read, read a bunch of them and say, how are the people actually using it? And then you can take it to a keyword research tool or into search console and you can start to look for ideas. The keyword research tool of choice for me right now is still hrefs a H r e f s.com okay. It is a paid tool. I think the lowest plan is like $80 a month. I'm not sure I use one of the higher paid plans. But there's a free trial for or seven day trial or something. And so you can just, you can get a lot of work done in seven days. If you sit down and you say, I'm do some keyword research and you literally just start typing into what they have a keyword explorer. You just type in there sort of the top level terms that people are using. Diaper bag, leather, diaper bag, leather tote, black leather tote. And just see what all the suggestions and variations are. And then you can sort of just pick out. Yeah, that one's right, that one's right. That one makes sense. That one doesn't. And you just add them to a list and then all of a sudden you have a list of 150 keywords that you can target. Right. This is a very quick process. I do this between, if you reach out to me, we have a call before we have a second call. I will literally do this process with you. Sometimes even on the call, we'll get in, we'll say, okay, what are some of the keywords? And I'll do it in an hour. Now I've been doing this for a long time. I've looked at millions of keywords probably.
Matt Edmundson: So you've got an inside track.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, yeah, yeah. But you know, I think the average person could do it in a couple of hours, you know what I mean? And get a very good list of ideas of keywords. But it all comes from again, your customer. Right. Like what are they actually using it for? What are the variations that people are looking for? Things like that.
Matt Edmundson: That's really good. That's really good. So your SEO tool of choice is Ahrefs, obviously there's Google search console as well. Yeah. So you're talking about collection pages. So can I just clarify, Collection page in my head on an Ecommerce site is a group of products, except where you're shown a collection. And so you're on about creating collections around different lengths of Keywords do I add to get into the weeds A little bit. I'm going to do my posh leather bags for diapers, you know, Collection.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah.
Matt Edmundson: Am I adding copy to that collection page? Maybe some imagery or is it just literally the title that I need?
Josh Piepmeier: I would add some copyright. So like our go to standard format is a sentence or two above the fold. So at the very top of the page you have the title and then just a couple of sentences and then some more extensive copy below the fold. A lot of this depends on the industry sort of industries will evolve over time as people sort of one up each other. So like if you're in an industry like cbd, these people will have collections pages. You know, if you're in big commerce category page, some people call them PLPs, right. They'll have these collections pages and they have 2,000 words of copy on them, 3,000 words of copy on them. I think the record I've seen is 6,000 words of copy on a collections page. It's like a book. Yeah, yeah. And so obviously that's over the top. I would not recommend that. But 500, 750 words is not crazy. You can talk about sort of what makes your product unique. Okay. Talk about frequently asked questions. Right. Things that people actually ask you about. Try and do it in a way that is written for Google a little bit. And so the best way I can use to describe this is talk about the technical aspects of your product a little bit. So Google loves things like ingredients or like the actual materials. If it's a, it's a, it's not a leather bag, it's a leather bag crafted with rawhide, leather tanned and whatever, you know, with, with premium materials and this stitching and that. Google likes sort of the technical details. So if you can weave those in in a way that still benefit first, that's a really good way to talk about it. So you know the title and then a couple of sentences. Just sort of introducing the page and then right below that you can just have some copy with some images or not, you know, kind of whatever it works best for your brand. Talking about where your product is sourced, what kind of materials it's used, are used to make it, how it's made, things like that and why that should matter to the person reading. That's, you know, like that's the 80, 20. Yeah. You might want to look at the keywords, look at the titles or something. But you hand me that, it's going to take me five minutes to completely SEO optimize That page, it's going to be very, very easy versus if you're just sort of trying to copy everybody else. It's going to be a lot harder.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, that's very good. 500, 750 words. Love that. Now what happens then? I can see that working on a tote bag site that's got, I don't know, 300 different tote bags. Yeah, I've got a supplement website, one of the, one of my ecom sites. It's got 15 products. Right. So how does that work for smaller product sites in terms of SKUs?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, I love it. So actually this is like one of the core distinctions in terms of your SEO strategy or content marketing strategy. What kind of site are you? Do you have, you know, say 100 or more SKUs? Do you have less than 100 SKUs? Also very important is how many SKUs do you have compared to your competitors? So look, if you're in a supplement space and all of your competitors only have two products, you're practically swimming in products. That's actually going to be something that is competitive advantage for you. I've worked with clients in industries like this and so how many products do you have and how much do you have compared to your, to your competition? If you have a very small product catalog and let's say that it's also less than your competition, so you're selling supplements, you're in the same spaces like bodybuilding.com or my protein or something like that. Vitamin shop. Right. You're going to be in a tough spot. So actually what you're going to do is you're going to lean on the content marketing angle a little bit more. So you're going to create some of those collections, still spin them off. I think one thing that you can do to make that better is in Shopify, you can list all of your variants as different products in the collections pages. Are you familiar with that functionality at all? Okay, so then you can do that to sort of beef up what the collection looks like in Google's eyes. But you're going to lean a little bit more on your content. So doing things like writing more blog posts, becoming an authority in your, in your space. If you write things like Pricing, They Ask youk Answers a really great book on this. I forget the exact five questions that he asks. But if you write things like Best, you know, best product for, you know, best diaper bag for professionals or whatever it is. How much should I spend on a leather tote? If you write about those sort of concepts and those topics you will still sell if you have the product conversion copy in the blog post itself. So you're going to have to focus more on your. On your content. By the way, if you do that right, you can actually then outrank your. With your collections page. Bigger, more powerful brands with more SKUs. We had a customer who was competing against Macy's, Nordstrom, Amazon, and I forget what the last one was, but another big brand were sort of the top four for their target term. Right? This is a term that got tens of thousands of searches a month. It was actually a term that these brands care about. You know, you get on these SEO podcasts and people are like, I outranked healthline. And it's like, yeah, for what? Like, what is the definition of a tonsil? It's like, okay.
Matt Edmundson: And for 20 seconds as well. Well done, dude.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, yeah. So. So this was an action book.
Matt Edmundson: Two.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah. Yes. Yes. So anyway, it's SEO industry is crazy, but so it's an actually competitive commercial term. And so their collections page had been stuck at sort of position seven or eight for a very long time. They'd been doing SEO for a very long time. We sort of came in and we just assumed that they had met their ceiling. They were like, please, you know, we don't expect you to get this number one. Do some other stuff on our site. Don't crush our rankings for this term. We're as high as we're going to get. We said, cool, actually, we're okay with that. So we started to write some content. What was interesting is after we wrote a bunch of this content, the collections page started creeping up in the rankings, and eventually it was at number one. And we saw a really interesting pattern when we wrote two pieces of content is when this inflection point happened. So we wrote, how much should this thing cost? And where should you buy this thing? And as soon as we wrote those two things, we published them on the same day. You saw the collections page that was sort of stagnant, actually, in a little bit of a decline, immediate sort of inflection. Boom. And it started climbing up the rankings and was eventually number one. And we said, this is crazy. What's going on? It was because we bumped our rankings for how much does this thing cost? And where does. Where should you buy this thing? And those are all questions that are highly related to the purchase journey, right? So if you're, like, trying to buy a necklace or a piece of jewelry or a supplement, it's like, how much should I expect to spend on this thing, how much protein should I have in my protein powder? What is whey isolate versus whey concentrate? How does that, how does that break down? What are the things that people are actually asking right before they buy? And so we've started to use the same pattern with other clients and we've sort of developed a list of keywords that are sort of bottom of the funnel like that. But if you write those very bottom of the funnel posts, your collections pages will actually rank higher and outrank bigger, more powerful sites with bigger, bigger categories.
Matt Edmundson: Interesting.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah. And so if you're a smaller brand with a smaller catalog, you have to do this more. You have to focus on the content more. Doesn't mean you don't do collections pages or you don't look for opportunities. You still have to have those optimized to an extent. But it's this idea of creating a content ecosystem around those collections pages, around those products pages that can give you an edge over some of these bigger brands. Right. That's the stuff that gets me excited because I love the David versus Goliath stories.
Matt Edmundson: You and me both, dude. You and me do. It's interesting because what I'm hearing you talk about, I would say the default for a lot of people is to take those questions and put them on an FAQ down at the bottom of the product page. And what you're talking about is actually pulling those out and writing blog posts, writing more detail content around them. Is that right?
Josh Piepmeier: Exactly. You know, like, what are the, what are the nuances? So like, where to buy something? Sometimes it doesn't make sense to write that. Right? It's like, where do you buy, you know, paper clips? It's like, who cares, you know, but where do you buy, where do you buy a diamond? Where do you buy a pearl? Where do you buy a red light therapy panel? Right? It's like that actually can make a difference because if you're buying a red light therapy panel on Amazon, it's going to be a knockoff from somebody who just paints a bowl of bread and calls it red light therapy. Whereas there's actually some very advanced sort of LED technology that goes into that. So if you write in there, you can say, hey, you can buy it on at your local health food store, but you're going to pay an arm and a leg because they have to mark it up. You can buy it on Amazon, but you got to be careful because all of these third party sellers, or you can buy it from an independent shop like us. Hooray. Sales pitch. Right, but. And you're going to get the best product, right? Yeah, stuff like that. Sometimes it makes sense.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, that's brilliant. Like it's again, it's all very sensible stuff, isn't it? And the thing we found like with the supplement site, one of the things that made a difference was when we going back to your collections idea, even though you only have a handful of supplements, they solve a shed load of problems. And so best supplements for a cold, best supplements for pregnancy, breast supplements for teenage boy going to school. Jeremy has got way too much testosterone going around his system. Best supplement. And you could, you can use the same supplements to solve 25,000 problems. And so we found, actually we found that by doing what you call these collection pages, which we, we have more collection pages than we have products on our website.
Josh Piepmeier: Love it. That's what you gotta do. Honestly, that's what you gotta do.
Matt Edmundson: So it's really fascinating, really fast. You mentioned earlier, Josh, that to win the game of SEO, you've got to do content at scale. What do you mean by that? Because if I'm, you know, already stretched to the hilt trying to run my store, paid media, you know, pick and pack and you know, and still smile at the wife when I walk through the door, it's kind of like what does that mean? Because I don't want it to create overwhelm for people.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So there's a couple of things. So look, if you are in that situation, I would say that let's say you're sort of bootstrapped, you're also sort of strapped for cash, right? Like you can't just go out and hire an agency for everything. Creating the collections pages is going to be a good first move, right? And so maybe you just identify the top 10 or 15 or whatever the collections pages are and you create those and you write some copy for them and it's just sort of a one time project. And then maybe you create some content around the top one or two, create a little cluster. Hey, our top collections page that we think we can rank for is something like best supplement brands for, you know, expecting mothers. Okay. Then you create a little content around each of those and you call it a day and then you sort of just let it sit and it might not rank every single page and you might not rank number one. But I think that I've seen in enough cases where that is enough to bump you up to position three, position four, to get a trickle of that revenue coming in and at least it gives you that breath of relief. And so in those cases, maybe content at scale isn't the right play. It's sort of a one time project that you do over a couple of months and then you let it sit. That power of compounding, you know, interest or the compounding effect of that content over time does matter. Google likes sites that have been around for a while that are sort of showing that they have some expertise in the space. If you're going to take SEO to the next level and you're going to be very serious about it, you do have to create content regularly. And so we create as part of our sort of standard packages at least one piece of content a week for our clients. Sometimes that is a new collections page, sometimes that is a new blog post. Because what you'll see is as you start to create new content, Google does this thing where they start to show your site for more and more keywords, queries, and so you start to show up for more and more of these different queries and they start sort of throw things at you until they find keywords that don't fit anymore. So you write a post on best supplements for expecting mothers. Maybe they'll also sort of show you for prenatal pills and they'll sort of show you for, you know, best greens for expectant mothers and things like that. And then they're going to keep doing that until they get to something that no longer works. Best supplements for moms and people, they start to show you for that keyword and people aren't engaging anymore. And so they say we're going to sort of pull back and we're not going to give you as much traffic anymore. If you can, on an ongoing basis, create new content for the things that Google is feeding to you, they're going to start to show you more overall. And so Google is constantly feeding you this new stream of ideas in search console. And if you can take advantage of those, you'll start to rank better for your most competitive terms. You'll start to rank for more terms and you'll start to increase your traffic and your revenue overall. So if you really want this to be a core pillar of your business, you do have to be building on and playing the back and forth with Google. You gotta play the game with them. They're sort of, you know, if it's, if it's tennis or something, they're serving the ball over to you and if you never serve it back, they're just gonna be cool, we quit, you know, bye. They're gonna leave.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah, yeah. Now I'd say it's not a case, is it anymore, of you build it and just leave it, I think is what I'm hearing you say you've got to build it and tweak it constantly. Tinker, I think, is the Tinkerer, isn't it? It'd be a great name for an SEO company. The Tinkerer.
Josh Piepmeier: I love that actually.
Matt Edmundson: But yeah, I think I'm hearing what you're saying. And as your business grows and as your resource grows, you need to actually put into play some serious. I say some serious. You've got to think about, actually, how am I going to do SEO and do it well.
Josh Piepmeier: Right.
Matt Edmundson: One route to go down is agency like yourself. So let's say I'm going down that road. I'm thinking, love what you're saying. I need to think about what are some of the things that I need to look for in a decent SEO agency. Obviously you could count yourself in said category, but I'm just kind of curious if somebody maybe has not approached an SEO agency before and can get baffled by the we outranked Macy's, you know, in Timbuktu for 10 seconds. Yeah. Thing. What sort of things should I look for?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah. So I think the number one thing you want to look for is sort of this laser focus on revenue. And a lot of SEO agencies still to this day will say, we give you X amount of traffic value. And so if you go to like, even like in Google Ads, they have this cost per click. And so they're just sort of associating the equivalent cost per click to the clicks that are going to your site, etc. Doesn't work like that. Okay, if they just say, hey, we're going to grow your traffic and then it's eventually going to convert. Sort of this, this circus trick that a lot of these agencies try and do is they say, okay, what's your site conversion rate right now? 3%. Okay, well, we're going to bring you 50,000 visitors a month, no problem. And at 3%, it's going to be X revenue. That only works if it's super high quality, highly qualified traffic. And if they. So then you can say, okay, well, how do we know that the traffic is going to be qualified? Give me some examples of what qualified traffic looks like. And if none of those, their answers actually make sense to you. Hey, we're going to bring you traffic. For people asking, what is a leather tote bag? It's like, that doesn't make any sense. People who ask that aren't going to buy anything. Okay, how much does it cost? You know, what are the best brands? What are the things that people actually ask you about? Yeah, if it makes sense that the traffic would be qualified, then they probably know what they're doing. Also, how are they reporting on revenue? We will go into Google Analytics and we'll report on revenue on a page by page basis. We like the landing page report in Google Analytics. We also will then layer that with reports from Search Console where we say, how much of the traffic to these converting pages is actually brand traffic versus non brand? Meaning like people who are just searching for your brand versus non brand. Because there's a lot of agencies. This is probably the number one pain point I hear from people who have worked with agencies in the past is they say, look, our organic revenue overall in GA was up. Uh, but. And our SEO team was sort of celebrating popping bottles, right? And we were like, something just doesn't feel right. And I say, okay, how much did you spend on ads that quarter? They said, well, our, our ad spend went up 30%. Oh, and how much did your SEO revenue go up? I don't know, 20, 30%. And it's like, well, of course, of course there's a direction. There's a direct correlation. People who see your ads are going to search for your brand. So you have to dig into a little bit of what are you going to use to report on revenue? Are you going to split this out on brand versus non brand traffic? And how are you going to ensure that the traffic is qualified? Like, how do you define qualified traffic? And you have to get a little bit nerdy about those things, otherwise it's going to be really easy for people to sort of wave smoke and mirrors. So I don't think that the exact methodology, if we use this backlinks or this content or this blah, blah, blah is the most important thing. There's a lot of strategies that work. I think the most important area is what are the incentives? What are the KPIs, what are you actually measuring your performance on? And if they can, if you can align on some performance incentives or the KPIs that actually make sense for your business, that are actually going to drive new revenue, then you're probably in a pretty good spot.
Matt Edmundson: Well, I can't begin to tell you, Josh, how refreshing it is to hear you say that, because I remember six months ago, maybe we're talking to a marketing agency in a company that I'm involved with and they were like, well, we're going to increase revenue by 900 grand a year through. No, it's 450 grand a year through SEO. So they were, they wanted to increase revenue overall by 1.8 million. 450 grand was going to come from SEO.
Josh Piepmeier: Okay.
Matt Edmundson: And I thought, okay, this is slightly ambitious, but, you know, let's not throw the baby out with the bathwater. And I sat down and I said, explain to me how you're going to do that. And they're like, well, this is our strategy. And my next question was, explain to me how you're going to measure that. I want to know how you're going to tell me that you've got 450 grand extra. Like, because anyone can write a figure down on a piece of paper, but how are you measuring that? And they're like, wow, it's quite difficult to explain, really. And I thought, okay, now I'm out, I'm out. Because it's all of a sudden everything's shrouded in mystery, isn't it? And it's like, yeah, whatever. It's really complicated to measure things from. No, I get that, I get, I get that. Measuring something organically, there's going to be a level of complication here. There's a level of complication with any kind of attribution. We had had a great conversation about this recently with the chap from Google and, you know, he was talking about a lady who bought a pair of shoes and how just buying one single pair of shoes. He said, we. And this is Google monitoring this. He said she had 263 different interactions with the company. It's like, at which point do you attribute the sale? Because it's like she sees the ads, she sees the Google Ads, Facebook ads, she reads a blog post, she's on the website three or four times that she's got the email. What actually sells, we don't know. So I get attributions. Difficult. But when you can't answer the question other than, oh, it's, you know, it's a bit of voodoo science. I'm kind of like, I'm, I'm out. So I'm with you. I think you've got to push back, I think, on a lot of these things. And I know that they're complicated, I know it's not easy, but you have to at least understand the methodology and it has to make sense to you. And what they're doing, not that I'm trying to steal their ip, I could, I don't want to do the work. I just wanted to understand you know how they were going to reason it every month? Josh, listen, I'm aware of time, right? And I, we could keep going and going and going. So let me ask you the question that I've started asking all, I guess and that's your question for me. What's your question for Matt? This is where I ask you for a question. If you're new to the show, dear. Listen, this is where I don't actually answer the question now. I answer it on social media. My slight ploy and trickery to get you to come and connect with me on social media. But yes, what's the question?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, so my question for you is, if you had to start another, another brand right now in 2024, going into 2025, what kind of brand would you start and why?
Matt Edmundson: Oh, that's a really great question. So if you want to know my answer to that, and I have a very definite one, let me tell you, come find me on social media and I'll be answering that. Just find me on the gram at Matt Edmondson or on LinkedIn. Matt Edmundson. You'll see me on either of those two. Josh, listen, enough about me and questions for me. If people want to connect with you, if they want to find out you do maybe understand what it would take for you to get involved with their business, what's the best way for them to do that?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, so I'm finding, you know, I will often give like a bunch of different links but people love LinkedIn, they like chatting on LinkedIn. So if you look at me on LinkedIn, Josh Piepmeier. My last name's a little bit of a nightmare to spell. There's like 3,000 eyes and A's, so.
Matt Edmundson: It'S a nightmare to say as well, I'm not gonna lie.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, so if we can put that in the show notes or something, that'd be great. Yeah, just look me up on LinkedIn. If you looked up on LinkedIn, Meriwether SEO. Meriwether is also a nightmare to spell. So I don't know what I was thinking there.
Matt Edmundson: What is it about you? An unusual spelling?
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah, I guess it's just, it's in my blood, I can't help it. But if you look up Meriwether SEO, I'll show up in any of that. What I would encourage people to, to look at actually though is trafficlighttracking.com So I have a landing page set up there. We have a whole methodology for how we measure revenue from SEO, especially non brand revenue. And so we have a whole report you'll get the report. It gives you step by step directions on how to set it up. You do have to use a couple of tools. It gets a little bit nerdy, but anybody with a little bit of time, you know, an hour, if you stick an hour into it, you can figure out how much real, brand new revenue your SEO campaign is giving you. So. Trafficlighttracking.com Enter your email there. You'll get a bunch of resources. It'll send it to you. And I actually don't really send out a whole bunch of emails to my list right now, so you'll just get the one email. So it's the only time that's ever going to happen.
Matt Edmundson: Trafficlighttracking.com and of course on LinkedIn and all that sort of stuff as well, which we will of course link to in the show notes, which, as I mentioned. Yeah. Will be in your inbox if you subscribe to the newsletter. If you go to the website ecommercepodcast.net, they'll also be on there. And of course, just scroll down on the app you're listening to because they're in the notes there as well. But Josh, genuinely loved the conversation, man. Learned a lot and really, really appreciate you coming on. And I'm going to be going and talking to Jen, who heads of power marketing and Michelle, who do the SEO stuff. Right. What opinions can we now add? And I want some more collection pages, so. Yeah, no, it's been great. I've definitely got some takeaways and I'm sure all our listeners have as well, so thanks, man. Genuinely appreciate it. Love talking to you and great to meet you.
Josh Piepmeier: Yeah. Thanks so much for having me on the show. It was a pleasure.
Matt Edmundson: Fantastic. What a great conversation. Huge round of applause to G. In fact, let me do this. Where's it? Oh, no, that's not working. Why is that not working? That failed. Anyway, huge round of applause to Josh for joining me. I've got this thing. Oh, I know why it failed. Here, let's try again. There we go.
Josh Piepmeier: Wow.
Matt Edmundson: Yeah. Skills, skills. It's Matt not being able to use his sound desk. That's what that is, ladies and gentlemen. Anyway, be sure to follow the Ecommerce podcast wherever you get your podcasts from, because we've got yet more great conversations lined up and I don't want you to miss any of them. And I will endeavor to learn how to use the sound desk between now and the next podcast. And in case no one's told you yet today, let me be the first. You are awesome. Yes. You are created. Awesome. It's just a burden you have to bear. Josh has got to bear it. I've got to bear it. You've got to bear it as well. Now, the Ecommerce podcast is produced by Podjunction. You can find our entire archive of episodes on your favorite podcast app. The amazing team that makes this show possible includes the wonderful Sadaf Beynon on who we talked about earlier and all kinds of amazing people, including Josh, another Josh, Josh Edmundson who wrote the thing music. Now, if you would like to read the transcript or show notes like I say, you can head to the podcast website which is ecommercepodcast.net all kinds of good stuff there which you can find out. But that's it from me. That's it from Josh. Thank you so much for joining us. Have a fantastic week wherever you are in the world. I will see you next time. Bye for now. Sa.