Olga-Patrick - Made with Clipchamp
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[00:00:00] Olga: Hi everyone, it's Olga from SEO Sly. This is SEO podcast by SEO Sly. Today I have a very special guest. This is Patrick. Rice, Patrick, how are you doing today? SEO sly, SEO done right. I'm Olga Zarr, an SEO consultant in SEO since 2012. Don't forget to subscribe to learn SEO for free with me. Now let's get into the show.
[00:00:28] Patrick: Hey, everyone. I'm doing great. Thank you, Olga. I really appreciate you having me on. I'm excited for this podcast. It should be a good one. So thanks. Yeah. Yeah.
[00:00:38] Olga: Thanks for, for being my guest. I'm pretty sure it will be a good one. I heard a lot about you and your experience.
[00:00:44] Olga: Tensive experience in e commerce, SEO in creating topical maps and all of that. So I hope to pick your brains on that topic as well. But before we dive into details, can you briefly introduce yourself in some, in case someone doesn't know you?
[00:01:02] Patrick: Yeah, I would love to. Um, so, uh, essentially I'm an e commerce SEO.
[00:01:07] Patrick: We have a team of actually 10 now, so we're starting to grow. And, um, so we're an e commerce SEO agency. I work with a lot of Shopify and big commerce sites and uh, yeah, our specialty is these large websites. Um, you know, sometimes 40 to 100, 000 URLs, um, where you just have massive topical maps, massive technical problems and sort of technical refinement happen.
[00:01:32] Patrick: Um, and, uh, yeah, that's where sort of my bread and butter lies now. And I love the whole, you know, Full art and science of it all. Um, so I've been an SEO nerd for quite a while here, uh, about seven years and, um, yeah, still going strong, still learning every day. Um, I'm sure there's a ton I'll even learn in this podcast.
[00:01:52] Patrick: So,
[00:01:54] I don't know why I thought, uh, that you are a solo SEO consultant. you now have a team of 10. So how long has it been?
[00:02:02] Patrick: So it's been pretty recent, actually, um, really in the last 12 months. Um, so I've always been more of an SEO consultant, um, throughout my career.
[00:02:11] Patrick: And then, uh, we just sort of slowly built out the team. Um, and it's been really fun. Uh, so it sort of happened naturally grassroots. Like, you know, I met my lead strategist who helps me with the overall strategy. Uh, I met him at SEO spring training, um, Terry Samuels event, and I met him in Arizona and then we met and I was like, so where are you from?
[00:02:38] Patrick: Right. We had a great SEO conversation and he said, Georgia, which is actually where I'm from. And even more so than that, he said the specific county I'm from, we're like practically neighbors. And so now we're like, today we'll go and get coffee. We'll, we'll, uh, do this large SEO audit that we're working on.
[00:02:56] Patrick: Um, so
[00:02:56] Olga: yeah,
[00:02:58] Patrick: it was just kind of a ragtag team of SEOs and developers and people like that, that sort of just suddenly came together. So, um, mostly just in the last 12 months before that, you know, I had a couple employees that sort of helped me with high level or, or low level kind of work, you know, just.
[00:03:15] Patrick: You know, going through and creating some pages. And doing sort of standard SOPs, uh, but now we have a proper team together. Um, so it's, uh, it's fun. I, I,
[00:03:27] Olga: yeah, it's a fast growth. Yeah, perfect. And talking about your very beginning, so we said seven years. So what kind of brought you into SEO?
[00:03:37] Patrick: Yeah. So I'm, I'm quite young and I got picked up in a, in high school.
[00:03:43] Patrick: How old are you? I'm 25.
[00:03:46] Olga: Oh, so you're young.
[00:03:49] Patrick: I am quite young. And so I got picked up in high school. Um, and I was, you know, a friend's dad had an SEO agency here in Atlanta and that was Craig Lawson of ClickReady Marketing. And so, um, you know, I was telling him about what I was doing with YouTube. Like I got 5, 000 subscribers for a Minecraft YouTube channel, which is, uh, just insane, insanely nerdy.
[00:04:14] Patrick: But, um, I got like 5, 000 subscribers. I had a video with a million views and I started going, you know, SEO forms to sort of learn how to, uh, even optimize for YouTube back then. And, um, just kind of figure out keywords and that kind of thing. I was telling him about this and he was like, well, why don't you, you know, like come into the agency and I'll share you a few things.
[00:04:38] Patrick: So, um, you know, the rest is history. I stayed at the agency for, uh, surprisingly only about like a year and some change. Um,
[00:04:46] Olga: and so
[00:04:48] Patrick: we, uh, uh, learned SEO there, um, keyword research, worked on a lot of local sites. Um, worked on one big e commerce site and then from there I kind of went freelance and he was totally supporting on that and, um, he was kind of the reason I'm here because he helped me sort of go out on my own.
[00:05:08] Patrick: He's referred me clients. And so Craig's a great guy and really has contributed to, to my growth as an SEO. Yeah.
[00:05:17] Olga: That's kind of unheard of to go freelance after one year. Yeah. Really?
[00:05:23] Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. It's crazy. So it's 19,
[00:05:24] Olga: right?
[00:05:25] Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. So it might've been like 15 months, something like that. Uh
[00:05:30] Olga: huh.
[00:05:31] Patrick: I'd have to go to the email.
[00:05:33] Patrick: But um, yeah, no, I went freelance, uh, pretty much one year into my career, which is, you Insanity, I mean, it had its ups and downs. Um, you know, I probably should not have done that in retrospect, but, uh, you know, it, it taught me quicker than I think if I stayed, um, stayed in an agency just in terms of, um, uh, in terms of all the sort of fires that I had to learn how to deal with, um,
[00:06:00] Olga: yeah.
[00:06:00] Olga: And during that time until now, can you share like the, the biggest challenges you had, the biggest mistakes you made before you kind of, created your own company and had a team?
[00:06:14] Patrick: Yeah. So the biggest. You know, uh, uh, mistake that I made or failure early in my career was, um, I got off, I became independent, you know, started doing freelance SEO and I got referred by Craig Lawson, a large client, and this was a large e commerce client.
[00:06:34] Patrick: So this is when I started really delving deep into e comm SEO and, um, I was having a ton of fun. I was figuring it out and that was great. And then, um, some external company did a migration.
[00:06:52] Patrick: As you know, I was not prepared at the time. Like I've only been an SEO for like two years. And, um, I was traveling at the time and the other company was like, yeah, we, we have it. Um, but I was the real SEO. So big sort of dropped the ball on that. We lost like 20 percent of organic traffic. from the migration.
[00:07:15] Patrick: So, you know, not that
[00:07:17] Olga: bad, like 20 is not that bad for a failed migration.
[00:07:22] Patrick: Not too bad. But the website was like at like, I think like 130, 000 monthly traffic.
[00:07:29] Olga: Okay, yeah. So
[00:07:31] Patrick: it becomes like actual money. So big ecom store. So you know, they lost a decent amount of revenue. Um, and we got it all back eventually.
[00:07:42] Patrick: So, um, you know, we put in the steps to recoup, but of course, at the same time, like I lost the job and they're not very happy and I wanted to do everything I could. And I did that with a mentor of mine, uh, Emery Rowland and so he helped actually. You know, make sure that all the sort of technical stuff is figured out.
[00:08:05] Patrick: Um, so I think that was the biggest learning experience where I was like, okay, technical SEO really matters with these types of sites. Like you can't just do on page and content all the time. Um, if you mess up something on the migration, you're definitely, uh, definitely going to have, have some pain there.
[00:08:23] Olga: So I guess in this case, it wasn't that they like removed something, changed content. It was like a technical thing, right? Something didn't work the way it should, like redirects or what was it?
[00:08:35] Patrick: Yeah, it was mostly, um, just the basics. So URL mapping wasn't done correctly,
[00:08:41] Olga: um,
[00:08:42] Patrick: redirects were going to some wrong pages.
[00:08:45] Patrick: The new URLs had weird characters in the URL, so it went from like optimized URLs to like some URL with like, you know, like a dollar sign in it or
[00:08:53] Olga: something. Oh, okay.
[00:08:56] Patrick: So like those pages totally dropped and um, we essentially just fixed the URL map and um, and that you know, pretty much solved things, um, but yeah, it was mainly just, you know, I think that's the case with migrations on the most part is either not pushing over the content or just getting the URL mapping and redirects wrong.
[00:09:18] Olga: Or I, I also saw a lot of, migrations where redirects weren't even done. I've, I've seen such cases, , okay, so this brings us to e commerce SEO. So, uh, let me like learn a little bit from you about that topic. I like this topic as well. So how does e commerce SEO, differ from, we can say normal SEO?
[00:09:44] Patrick: Yeah, it's a great question. Um, because, you know, from a new perspective, You might not understand how different the two actually are. Um, you know, I don't know for sure on the, you know, technical documentation, but I even know people that claim that Google has, you know, A separate and very different algorithm for e commerce.
[00:10:08] Olga: Yeah. Yeah. I heard it. Yeah.
[00:10:10] Patrick: Yeah. And so you have a lot of different things that you won't have if you're doing local SEO, definitely not, but even with stuff like SAS and, you know, enterprise SEO, um, that aren't e commerce. Um, you'll see a lot of different stuff, you know, the basics are just, if you search a keyword like, you know, like red hat for sale, you will see a lot of product pages and product collection.
[00:10:35] Patrick: And so, um, you're dealing with a lot of transactional intents. Where if I search for a red hat, I just want a list of products, you know, I want, I don't want, you know, an article on what is a red hat, right?
[00:10:49] Olga: The history of red hats.
[00:10:52] Patrick: Yeah. The history of red hats. So like in e commerce, you're really dealing with transactional intent.
[00:10:58] Patrick: And so, um, that changes the game quite a bit. And sometimes you will see all kinds of weird stuff. So you will occasionally see a red hat guide. For a transactional term. And you're like, how did this get in here? Um, and that's sort of the starting place is that you're working with transactional intent. Um, these pages oftentimes don't have a ton of on page content.
[00:11:23] Patrick: Um, we usually add more than what are, you know, normally clients will come to us with pretty much just a list of products on their category. We do see Google liking a sort of hybrid approach where you do have informational content, um, but it is a balance there. Um, so you know, fundamentally you're working with a different search intent and potentially a whole different algorithm on Google's side.
[00:11:48] Patrick: You know, you definitely need user experience there. You have a lot of brands to, with huge backlinks and authority already established. So, you know, it's a different playing field. Um, in terms of the execution of the SEO, I would say the biggest difference. If you've never done, sorry, e com SEO is just the size of the websites for the most part.
[00:12:10] Patrick: Um, and this makes a much bigger focus on technical SEO on, um, you could almost say programming SEO, but essentially if you're working with a site with 50, 000 products and 2000 collection pages, making sure that the heading structure on those products is correct. And making sure that the internal linking is correct.
[00:12:34] Patrick: Is really important and it's the quickest wins. You'll often find just websites with huge websites where you can change one line of code and you'll change it so that the product name is an H one rather than like an H six or whatever they're developing. And that's instant on page boost for 60, 000 pages.
[00:12:55] Patrick: Um, so those two sorts of technical developmental or programming sort of SEO, where you're just applying it to tons of pages. That becomes really important. So, you know, making sure that images have automated alt text. With the product name for each image that interlinks from category pages actually link to the products with anchor text.
[00:13:20] Patrick: You know, there's all kinds of little things where the development side and the tech SEO becomes even more important. Um, same with page indexing. You can, you can get really nerdy with this stuff. Um, but, uh, yeah, I think those are the biggest differences is you're working with large sites. You have a totally sort of different algorithm and search intent is different Um, so you gotta you gotta kind of uh play a different um playing Playing a different game in terms of the serves.
[00:13:50] Olga: totally. So talking about search intent. I have a bunch of e commerce Clients, even though this isn't like my specialty But one thing I have been coming uh coming across over and over again is that there is like this Keywords, which is It's either plural or singular, doesn't matter. And in search results, we see, uh, some, some product pages, some collection pages.
[00:14:15] Olga: And when the client kind of wants to enter that keyword, uh, what do we do? Do we create a collection page, a product page, or both like, or very often recently Google has been like, changing what it ranks. It used to rank, for example, a product, now it ranks a collection page of that client or. Or a different kind of a mix.
[00:14:37] Olga: How do you approach that? Have you seen those, uh, you, you probably have seen those situations. Like what's your take on that?
[00:14:46] Patrick: Yeah, that's a great question. Um, and it's something that, you know, we're still experimenting with. Um, our basic process is just looking at, you know, what is the most common result.
[00:14:56] Patrick: So like if the top three results are all collections, we'll, we'll do a collection. Um, if you know, five out of the 10, um, Pages on the first page are collections or products, we'll kind of go that direction. Um, we'll typically keep to one page. Um, I know that it's possible to rank both a product and a collection page.
[00:15:19] Patrick: Um, but that complicates our process to a pretty big degree. So we usually keep to one page and, um, the hardest ones with that sort of search intent problem is the ones where it's really ambiguous, you know, like maybe the, uh, first result is a product. Second result is a collection. And it just, it's like five, it's like completely mixed and, um, At that point, you mostly, you know, kind of have to use your best judgment, uh, in terms of what you think would work for both the client and the search results.
[00:15:55] Olga: And what about Google merchants feed? Like, do you have any like, insights, any tips? Like one thing I have been, I have, I have had problems with is I have one client, they are eCommerce. But they do not sell products. So as an experiment, I submitted feed and the client got a nice boost. But of course, after a few weeks, a few months, they got kind of removed from merchants feed because they do not sell products.
[00:16:25] Olga: And what are your kind of, uh, experiences with that?
[00:16:30] Patrick: Yeah. So that's a great point because, um, the merchant feed and the product feed. is so important in e commerce. Um, you know, we've uploaded someone with 50, 000 products. We just upload it to Google merchant center. Didn't do anything else because they've never done that and instantly went to 150 clicks per day from listings.
[00:16:52] Patrick: So if you're on Google Merchant Center, you're, you're really missing out, um, as a retailer. And, uh, the way we've dealt with that, you know, normally there's kind of, there's a lot of specific instances with the product feed. Um, so like you mentioned, we've seen people that We've tried uploading product feeds to a client that only does rentals.
[00:17:18] Patrick: Um, and like the pricing that they have on their website is, is kind of strange. And so Google will constantly get mad at them about like pricing. Like they like to do it a certain way for CRO, but then Google gets mad at it because it's like rental products. So. Yeah, there's a lot of, uh, specifics to the, uh, you gotta be kind of careful with it and you will get products disapproved and all that kind of thing.
[00:17:48] Patrick: Um, yeah, there's another client that's in the medical niche and that's always very tough too, um, where you're selling supplements and then you have all kinds of product disapprovals, even if they don't actually make sense, um, Google will disapprove it and it's kind of hard to get them to. Uh, but like general Google emergency center and product feed optimization.
[00:18:14] Patrick: Um, very important. Um, you know, as a retailer, you definitely want your products on there. You want to minimize how many disapprovals you have. Um, so if you go into the account and you have 50 percent disapproved products, you definitely want to clean that up. Just make it as nice of a feed as you can. Um, but yeah, I mean, there's so many specific cases depending on your industry and, and how to do that.
[00:18:40] Patrick: And in terms of optimizing the product feed, we find that really the most important thing is just the name of the product. So the title of the product, and then, you know, having the keyword in the title, the description. Um, making sure that the categories are correctly aligned and that the uh, the overall health of the feed, you know As much information as you can in that feed is always going to be helpful
[00:19:04] Olga: And talking about the recent AI overviews, which I think have been live for two or something two weeks or so Have you seen any impact of that on your e commerce clients?
[00:19:17] Olga: Any observations?
[00:19:19] Patrick: Not too much. Um, if the only instances where we've seen it really affect is on very, um, informational based terms. Um, and usually our bread and butter, uh, for the agency is Something we call collection expansion and like really focusing on the product optimization and collection pages.
[00:19:41] Patrick: Um, and so that's really where we get the biggest wins for revenue and for getting people on the site. Um, the informational terms can take a hit though. So we've only had really one client where we've seen that, but they had more of that sort of, uh, factual sort of blog post. Where it's pretty easy for AI to answer it.
[00:20:04] Patrick: And so we did see those, um, go further down on this.
[00:20:09] Olga: Um,
[00:20:10] Patrick: but yeah, I'm super, like, I'm super excited just to see the whole AI, um, you know, overviews. And I'm just interested in how, um, I recorded a video on that this morning. So I'm very interested in, like, just trying to kind of checking out what, how that all plays out.
[00:20:30] Olga: Yeah, because like
[00:20:31] Patrick: we haven't seen it, we haven't seen it for Ecom too much because it's informational at this point.
[00:20:37] Olga: okay. So another question about the SERPs, what they look like for e commerce. So usually they are very different. You have like a ton of ads, a ton of products from, from merchant feed, product feed. , and then you know, It's all the filters, prices, sizes, so it, it becomes very messy, very huge. And even if you rank number one, two, three, usually you do not get like 40 percent of clicks if you just ranked for number one in like normal kind of order. More normal search results. So how do you approach this?
[00:21:12] Olga: How do you get the click?
[00:21:16] Patrick: Yeah. Yeah. So, um, I mean, really, we just want to be everywhere. So we do ads as well. And so we really just focus on, um, making sure that Google ads is good, making sure that the product feed is optimized so that we're showing up in the product grid, the Google ads, if depending on budget, right.
[00:21:35] Patrick: Yeah.
[00:21:35] Olga: And
[00:21:37] Patrick: sort of the top three organic results, um, as well as with all those filters, the way they filter down is, which is such an interesting point to bring up too, is those filters have gotten, like, they're on all, pretty much all like search results. Now, the most important thing there is. You know, when you click on those filters, they update the query.
[00:22:01] Olga: Um,
[00:22:02] Patrick: and so you can still rank like when they update it, it's a different query now. And so you can have a different collection page or different product page ranking. Um, so you can still sort of use that to your advantage to find different tributes, entities to sort of expand out what your product catalog is.
[00:22:19] Patrick: Um, and still rank there.
[00:22:21] Olga: Totally. So, what tools do you use for e commerce? What SEO tools are your, are like your top tools for , e commerce SEO? Any difference to normal SEO tools?
[00:22:34] Patrick: So, I don't use anything that's like, uh, crazy, really. Um, cause like we're very much into the, uh, idea that it's, you know, an SEO's brain is the most important thing.
[00:22:45] Patrick: Um, so I know you're a fan of screaming frog. We love screaming frog. Yeah. Um, so, uh, Olga did a great presentation at, uh, event SEO mastery summit. Um, and she shared some stuff I had no clue about in screaming frogs. So, um, and so screaming frog, you know, we absolutely love it. I posted about it tons of times on my.
[00:23:08] Olga: So
[00:23:09] Patrick: screaming frogs, a big one, and you're dealing with these large websites. It really is a savior. Let's do crawl everything. There's alternatives like Sightbulb and others do similar things, and some people prefer them, but, um, yeah, I'm a big screaming frog fan. And then, um, I use SEMRush and Ahrefs, um, pretty basic.
[00:23:31] Patrick: Um, you know, I have a majestic account that I like to check out just in certain situations. And then e commerce specific would be mostly related to the platforms. So I would say some of the most interesting e com tools are for Shopify is Matrixify. And that lets you just essentially do optimizations at scale.
[00:23:55] Patrick: So that would just be like, you can export all collection pages or all product pages, and you can optimize any piece of the data. So you can update alt text, you can update. Um, product descriptions, you can pretty much do anything. Um, and so that's very nice. Uh, another tool for Shopify SEO is a Jason LD for SEO.
[00:24:19] Patrick: That's a Shopify, uh, uh, Alana, I think is her name. Um, but she's a great, you know, SEO in her own right. And, um, that's a really cool Shopify app that lets you do schema, um, on Shopify. So I think in terms of my favorite SEO tools, it usually depends on the CMS because you do have so much restriction on a lot of these platforms.
[00:24:42] Patrick: Um, like JSON LD is the only way that I can easily get custom schema on pages and that I can get, you know, good overarching schema on Shopify without like the other ways would be like Google tag manager and You know, kind of annoying things to do. So, um, that's been a lifesaver, um, on Shopify.
[00:25:03] Olga: Yeah. So my next question was supposed to be about Shopify SEO.
[00:25:07] Olga: Exactly. Like what are your best practices? Your, the challenges you have with Shopify websites. I haven't, I haven't worked with many Shopify websites, but I find them a little bit. Problematic so if you can even maybe share more about like shopify seo the challenges and your experiences
[00:25:31] Patrick: Yeah, so a lot of people don't like shopify for seo.
[00:25:34] Patrick: Um, because like if you're um, There's certain limitations that are annoying Um, we've been able to get past most of them and i've actually grown to love shopify. It's a very intuitive back end and You know You know, a lot of clients use it. It's very good for a lot of things in e commerce, you know, outside of SEO.
[00:25:55] Patrick: Um, and most SEO, we can kind of work around with it. Um, there's a few things that you can't. Um, so you can't. What?
[00:26:06] Olga: What are these?
[00:26:07] Patrick: So the biggest thing is that you can't get around the URL structure. So, um, l4 slash collections slash whatever. Um, and slash products slash whatever. Um, but a lot of stuff we can get around with, um, like I'm a development team.
[00:26:24] Patrick: So a lot of the developers can get around a lot of stuff. Um, and then some apps help. So like the JSON LD helps with the schema. And so there's, there's a lot of ways you can get around stuff. Um, I find Shopify SEO to actually be pretty intuitive. Once you, um, I think pretty intuitive on the on page level.
[00:26:46] Patrick: Um, the URL structure is very annoying. Um, but other than that, um, and the scheme was really annoying. Those are the two factors that can get, you know, just, just kind of, you got to do work arounds to make them work. Um, what about
[00:27:03] Olga: speed? Sorry, what about speed optimization? Because I, I once had to do that for Shopify and it's, I wasn't really very successful.
[00:27:14] Patrick: Yeah. Speed optimization is tough on Shopify too. Um, so my development team's really good and they can usually get the speed to, um, a pretty good place.
[00:27:23] Olga: Um,
[00:27:24] Patrick: but on that, it really depends on the theme. Um, because the code is completely dependent on the theme. Um, so some themes are just horrible and that's where like, we might even recommend the client to get a new theme.
[00:27:38] Patrick: If not, my development team can usually just kind of patch all the holes and fix things up. Uh, but that's where it gets the hardest to sort of deal with. Um, is like, if it's a badly coded theme, like you're pretty much recreating the website, like you're recreating the theme for them. Um, so, uh, Shopify speed optimization is tough.
[00:28:00] Patrick: Um, you usually can get it up to a, uh, an acceptable area where we feel good with it. Um, but yeah, that's, that's definitely a problem.
[00:28:11] Olga: Yeah. So, another question regarding JavaScript, SEO and e commerce, like have you seen any, have you had any like problems with that? Do you always recommend like having products displayed and links visible in the source code or not only in the rendered version, like what are your experiences in that area?
[00:28:37] Patrick: Yeah, that's a, that's an interesting question. I haven't had to deal with Too many problems regarding that. Um, I find that Google will still, uh, crawl the product pages. Um, say like if I have, uh, clients or I have a client where the product listings are generated via JavaScript, um, we're scoping out whether we could change that, um, but Google does, they still rank well, right?
[00:29:07] Patrick: So Google does crawl the product internal links and. They do, uh, they can, um, parse that data. But yeah, we're, you know, I haven't tested it too much, um, for that client, we're considering a test where we, we recreate the product categories to, to list the products without JavaScript. Um, but, um, I'm not really sure the results of that.
[00:29:31] Patrick: Um, I know that JavaScript is best. Uh, you know, to not have, so if you can have it, original source code is much better. Um, but yeah, you're doing a lot of development sort of, you know, uh, hoops. You got to jump through a lot of hoops in e com depending on what their platform is. No, this client is a big commerce and they're using search spring, um, to load the product category.
[00:29:57] Patrick: So, and they're, they're signed into a contract with search spring that they won't allow.
[00:30:03] Olga: Okay.
[00:30:04] Patrick: So there's all kinds of sort of like hoops you got to jump through. But what's your experience on JavaScript SEO?
[00:30:12] Olga: So I I have always been recommending, like having the important stuff, having links, descriptions, products in the source and rendered.
[00:30:21] Olga: It is, of course, not always possible. I have one big e commerce client and , he listens to what I'm saying and they actually implemented that. They didn't like, they were doing okay, they implemented that because before, before that, the products, nothing was visible without JavaScript.
[00:30:40] Olga: Now everything is visible and they have been, they have been experiencing a nice growth ever since, but I cannot really say if this is because of that or because, because a ton of other things have been, have been done as well. So, so I cannot, this is just anecdotal, but. I, I, I think if it is doable for the team and it doesn't take months, or like the entire site doesn't have to be rebuilt, it may be worth doing because we can hear now, some people say that maybe this SGE or AI overviews that the staff that is shown there is taken from the source, not from the render.
[00:31:22] Olga: It's HTML. Maybe it'll change, who knows? But I am a proponent of having everything in the source. If possible.
[00:31:31] Patrick: Yeah, that's a great point. Um, and I think we will do that experiment, um, for that client. And then I can, uh, get a better idea of the results we see.
[00:31:43] Olga: Yeah, yeah.
[00:31:45] Patrick: Yeah, that'll be fun. Shopify is usually not too bad with that.
[00:31:48] Patrick: Um, most Shopify teams will not have JavaScript rendering it, um, for the product listings. Um, but then, uh, uh, yeah, uh, BigCommerce. And if you're using, there's a lot of these sort of external that will do the filtering in the category pages, that's where you get a lot of JavaScript. And it, and there's a lot of, um, a lot of, it's a messy area, right?
[00:32:13] Patrick: For this client, we're probably going to have to recreate that whole, um, page type, and then sort of A, B test it without, without search spring.
[00:32:23] Olga: Totally. So, can you share some experiences with, indexation problems, in e commerce SEO. What were the causes in that case? What were the remedies?
[00:32:35] Patrick: Yeah. So indexing is very important, um, for these large sites. What we found is here's an, a, a specific case study. Um, we're working with this supplement brand, you know, 50, 000 products and they had, you know, very messy technical SEO. So, uh, they had where every Well, and on the website was actually internal links and not button tags.
[00:33:04] Patrick: So all the add to carts were actually internal links that would, whenever you click it, it would crawl a cart page with different products. Yeah. So you essentially have situations in e commerce where like the bot, like if you step into the bots shoes, Google bot, and you walk through it, it's like, essentially what they're doing is that they're, they're just like clicking on stuff constantly.
[00:33:26] Patrick: So like they, they click onto the product, they click the add to cart, they go to the cart URL, then they, yeah, just
[00:33:31] Olga: playing with the card. They
[00:33:33] Patrick: just like go through the cart for like 20 minutes, whatever it is. Um, and so like when you crawled that website on screaming frog, originally it would be like so large, you couldn't, you couldn't even do anything with it.
[00:33:46] Patrick: Um, you know, it'd be like 200, 000, um, HTML pages. Um, and they really only had 50, 000 products. So there was no reason for it to have, uh, so much, so much, um, just unnecessary bloat there. So we essentially just did a tech audit, uh, fixed up all of that, all of those types of errors, um, and, uh, that helped the indexation quite a bit.
[00:34:14] Patrick: And so in Google search console, you can go to the pages index. And you can look at essentially what you'd normally want to look at is a crawled but not indexed and discovered but not indexed. Those are going to be the two places you want to look, check out what kind of pages are not getting indexed. In this case, it was a lot of product pages.
[00:34:33] Patrick: And so that's, that's a big problem. You know, you need your, all your product and category and bottom of funnel pages indexed, or you're just missing out on a ton. And so, uh, what we did is that, you know, by doing all the technical audit and then taking those pages. Um, we use this tool, gsctool. com and it's, uh, you know, there's tons that I'm sure do this.
[00:34:58] Patrick: Uh, but it allows for bulk, um, indexation requests, um, and bulk removal requests. So then we bulk, um, ask Google to index all the product pages that were being indexed. Um, and, uh, from there we got it from, I think. If I remember correctly, it was a thousand six hundred fifty or so new product pages that were indexed that weren't
[00:35:23] Olga: so,
[00:35:25] Patrick: you know, all of those, especially in supplements where most of the ranking pages are products.
[00:35:31] Patrick: It was like, if you need ID profan or something, you just want ID, headache. Yeah,
[00:35:36] Olga: exactly.
[00:35:37] Patrick: So like the product pages are the money. Those are the bread and butter. So, um, mostly just by fixing up the technical issues and then, uh, submitting for reanalyzation. Um, we got those, uh, 1, 600 products indexed. Um, and, uh, that, that's the type of situations we see, you know, looking at the page indexing report in Google Search Console, checking out what pages aren't being indexed, and then making sure that we clean that up the website.
[00:36:05] Patrick: See kind of why Google is deciding to not call the website better Definitely can take a lot of time sometimes So depending on the history of your website, you know, they may just not even care about it They may know Indexing pages because they're like, oh, well you've been doing You know, whatever you've been doing for a long time, uh, and so it's definitely, uh, definitely case by case and kind of, it depends as they always say, but, uh, It
[00:36:36] Olga: does.
[00:36:37] Olga: I recently had a similar case where I, I had, it was also an e commerce, a big, big e commerce. And they had, I think, 10K, maybe 30K products. So not, not that many, but in Google search console in crawls currently not indexed and discovered currently not indexed. There were like, I think, 10 million URLs.
[00:37:00] Olga: I tried to, and it wasn't like hacking. I tried to, crawl the site with screaming frog. It also showed me a couple of million pages and it was very simple. Just, uh, filtering. In the URL, no canonicals, tons of duplication, and Google simply ran out of crawl budgets for that site. But it was a quick fix for that site, and it helped it tremendously.
[00:37:29] Olga: And talking about CMS for e commerce, which one is your favorite? Is it Shopify or WooCommerce, Magento, or whatever else is there?
[00:37:41] Patrick: Yeah, so, um, there's, there's two answers, which is, uh, Shopify and WooCommerce. So, um, if I want to be very SEO focused, um, WooCommerce is nice. And if I want all the, you know, control, then, um, that's very nice.
[00:37:58] Patrick: But I have, um, like I have Shopify stores of my own and I do really enjoy how simple it is. And I've gotten really used to the platform. Um, and so I'm, I'm very comfortable in Shopify. Uh, but yeah, I mean, fundamentally on a technical level, um, they're a better option, like WooCommerce can do
[00:38:18] Olga: a lot better.
[00:38:20] Olga: And do you do a log file analysis for e commerce? I'm not sure if that changed, but at least some time ago, I think you couldn't do that for Shopify. How is it now?
[00:38:31] Patrick: Yeah. So you, that's, that's the, the other limitation. You can't do a log file analysis. Um, I'm not actually too deep into log file analysis. Um, you know, I've taken a look and I've kind of, you know, have a, a basic understanding, but, uh, that's probably an area where I could, I could improve, um, Shopify focus where, uh, we don't really have the control to do that.
[00:38:59] Patrick: And so I haven't, I haven't done that too much. The main area where I've really wanted to is for, there is an instance where, uh, Bing was. Just completely dropped off traffic. Um, we don't think about Bing that often,
[00:39:14] Olga: but
[00:39:14] Patrick: with the new development, Bing is becoming more and, um, Bing just like totally dropped off traffic, like from like 250 clicks per day to, uh, 60 clicks per day.
[00:39:25] Patrick: Um, and. Like they didn't de index anything. They just like re evaluated the website. Um, and that was an instance where, um, I really needed to see, you know, what was the Bing bot doing on the website?
[00:39:41] Olga: 404
[00:39:43] Patrick: errors. Like, obviously on our end, it didn't look like that. Um, so we sort of had to investigate. And, uh, then we had to get in contact with Bing and do all kinds of fun.
[00:39:54] Olga: Uh huh.
[00:39:55] Patrick: And what was it?
[00:39:56] Olga: And what was it? What was the cause?
[00:39:59] Patrick: Um, it was mainly Bing bot, uh, getting, um, different sort of, uh, uh, weird, uh, error codes when they were coming to the website.
[00:40:08] Olga: Uh huh.
[00:40:10] Patrick: And, um, They, uh, they were able to solve it. Um, I'm not really sure exactly why. Um, so that's, that was kind of a weird case.
[00:40:21] Patrick: Um, but yeah, we were able to bring it to them. Um, and they could, uh, they could fix it on their end.
[00:40:28] Olga: yeah. One thing with Bing is that you can actually like write to them and they will reply. There is like a possibility to have contact with a human. While I think with Google. I don't think it is possible other than, like, tagging them on Twitter or something or using Google help forums, right?
[00:40:50] Patrick: Exactly, yeah. Google is very, very hard to get in contact with. Um, and then of course, they'll, they'll never stop bugging you from Google ads too, with just some random, random person that's like, Hey, you have all of these opportunities. And you're like, no, you won't respond to my SEO issues, but you'll, you'll try to upsell me.
[00:41:11] Patrick: Yeah,
[00:41:14] Olga: Exactly. Okay. So, what about, planning the website structure for e commerce SEO? Like how do you do that? What's your approach here?
[00:41:24] Patrick: Yeah. So, um, that, that's, um, that's a really important piece of the puzzle. Um, it's an area I find a lot of people don't do correctly, um, which is, And even we're still learning the best ways, right?
[00:41:40] Patrick: Um, but topical mapping for e commerce is really important and, um, making sure that you have all the correct categories and that they're organized and internally linked in sort of a rational way. Um, is a big piece of the puzzle. Uh, and so like a lot of times what we do is that somebody already has a, um, sort of basic structure in place.
[00:42:04] Patrick: Um, for client, for customers, um, you know, the customer journey going through the website. Uh, there are cases where they don't at all, and that's, that's frustrating. That's a lot of work. Um, but usually they have some sort of structure already in place that we can work with. And then it mainly comes out to, um, you can make topical mapping really, uh, in depth and you can go really deep with it.
[00:42:29] Patrick: And, um, my lead strategist, you know, watched Corey's course and deeper into it than, than I am. But you know, the basic way for, um, for a podcast is essentially just keyword research, figuring out all the category pages. That competitors have that you don't, um, looking through GSC keywords, Google ads, keywords, and, and really looking at, okay, we need all of this list of new category pages created.
[00:42:57] Patrick: Um, that might be a hundred pages that might be a thousand, right? Like it can really sort of vary. Um, and then getting all of those different, um, category pages. You know, maybe it's, uh, you know, stylish clothes and then cute clothes and then retro and then you're like, oh, well, there could be a, um, there's obviously a section that needs to be created for style or for a theme, something like that.
[00:43:23] Olga: Um,
[00:43:24] Patrick: and then you can add that into the navigation where, you know, if it's clothes you can have by, uh, by style and then that could be cute, funny, retro, et cetera, vintage. Um, then you could have sort of by age. So when you're doing this keyword research you find these patterns um, and That's the that's the main thing is making sure that you know, uh, there's also all kinds of ways you can go with it So there might be by style by theme by color by age And you can kind of go from there Depends on the niche, but that's that's the basic sort of path we take Um, you can always go deeper into it.
[00:44:03] Patrick: You can approach it from different ways. You know, you could try to take out and extract the entities and attributes for the niche. Um, and you can try to organize it that way. Um, and then connect that to keywords. Um, and, and to be honest, we've done it several different ways and, um, what I find is that, you know, as long as you're, as long as you have keywords that, um, people search and that you're organizing it in a logical way, you know, by these sort of, um, I mean, whatever you want to call them, buckets, categories, silos, whatever you want to call them.
[00:44:40] Patrick: Um, then you'll, you're, you're usually pretty well off.
[00:44:45] Olga: I have the same experiences. So if you were to name three top mistakes you see in e commerce websites regarding SEO, what would they be?
[00:44:57] Patrick: So first one is a header structure on, um, uh, the website you'll see so often just product pages.
[00:45:06] Patrick: Um, with incorrect header structure or, or heading structure is probably the correct Or
[00:45:09] Olga: no headings at all.
[00:45:12] Patrick: Yes. Yes. Exactly. And it's like that, that takes my developers like sometimes 30 minutes to implement, and then it's like 60, 000 products have now heading, headings, um, and the on page is so much
[00:45:24] Olga: better.
[00:45:25] Patrick: So that's by far the number one issue we see. Um, I would say the second issue would be not taking Google Merchant Center seriously. Um, and not caring about it while in, you know, 2024, uh, e commerce results so often show so many product listings from the product feed. So it's like, it's so important and people will just, I'll ask them about merchant feed and they'll be like, wait, what is that?
[00:45:51] Patrick: Or, or,
[00:45:51] Olga: you
[00:45:51] Patrick: know,
[00:45:52] Olga: they'll
[00:45:52] Patrick: be like, Oh yeah, I think like our ads, people do something with that. Um, and then it's always unoptimized. It's always has a lot of disapprovals. And all kinds of things like that. Um, and so that's, that would be the second issue. Um, The third issue would just be, um, and maybe this would go higher in the list, but just not thinking about SEO.
[00:46:12] Patrick: Uh, so you, I remember Ted Kovaitis, if you know, oh yeah, you do, cause you're a fan of him. Yeah,
[00:46:17] Olga: yeah, yeah.
[00:46:17] Patrick: Like Ted Kovaitis always says like, name of things SEO. Where it's just, you know, like an e commerce site would be his example. Is
[00:46:25] Olga: delight and something. Yeah, yeah.
[00:46:27] Patrick: Yeah, it's like, it's like, um, something and delight.
[00:46:31] Patrick: Yeah,
[00:46:31] Olga: it's like
[00:46:32] Patrick: just change that to a gifts and now you have a optimized page. So like, maybe it's like writing delights and it's like change that a gifts for writers. And then I think he has
[00:46:42] Olga: gifts on the light or anyway. Yeah.
[00:46:47] Patrick: Yeah. And he goes into a lot of great content. If you don't know SEO fight club, you probably do if you're watching this, but they have some great stuff.
[00:46:55] Patrick: Um, so Ted also goes into, um, joint categories. So, you know, we mentioned those ands, so it might be like, you'll see people with, this is an absurd example, but like shorts and pants. It's like you need, you need a short page and you need a pants page. You can't combine them, um, unless a very specific search result that you're trying to rank.
[00:47:17] Olga: Yeah. And, and Ted also talks a lot about supplemental, supplemental content for e commerce that you can now easily create it with ChatGPT, Claude, whatever. So it isn't that, um, such a long process as it used to be in the past. So that's, I think, a good, good piece of advice from him, him as well.
[00:47:41] Patrick: Definitely.
[00:47:42] Patrick: Um, we always add to the categories. We always add, um, some kind of content section at the bottom. Um, and that might be, you know, a simple one would be like an FAQ. So those would be accordions, frequently asked questions. Um, uh, you, but you can pretty much do it anyway, right? So like, you can also try to hide the content and make it like, just like an arrow or expands out into this huge sort of on page SEO fast.
[00:48:08] Patrick: Um, but yeah, Ted does it so well, like, you know, something else I learned from him is adding the different attributes and adjectives to a collection. So, you know, if you have, like, I think his example he's given is like Xbox. Yeah. Xbox. Um, so if it's like a, an Xbox controller or something you could do in the supplementary content or the FAQs or any content below the products on the collection page, you could just create a big list of sort of Xbox controllers for kids, Xbox controllers for adults, Xbox controllers for Minecraft players, right?
[00:48:45] Patrick: Like you can go so deep and then you cast a wider net on the category page to rank for all kinds of long tail keywords. Okay. Thanks.
[00:48:54] Olga: Yeah, totally, totally. And you can also like add LSIs, the ones that kind of statistically correlate from Quora report and entities. And it's usually does miracles from my experience as well.
[00:49:08] Patrick: Yeah, exactly. Um, yeah. So on the SEO tool section too, is like, they're not really eCommerce specific, but screaming frog, uh, SEO rush or HRS and, um, Cora are probably my favorite. Um, and alternative to the Cora that I have been using, which is good is on page dot
[00:49:27] Olga: AI,
[00:49:28] Patrick: I'll give you some nice entities and LSIs too, but like the core thought on here is just, A lot of category and product pages are missing essential, uh, uh, terms that, that add a lot of this relevance that Google is looking for, how do you determine a relevant document?
[00:49:48] Patrick: And figuring that out is pretty much just adding these LSI and entity terms. From a core report or from any of these sort of, um, on page tools, uh, and adding that into your categories is always a, it's always worked for us.
[00:50:03] Olga: Yeah.
[00:50:04] Patrick: It's, it's a very good move in, in, in my experience.
[00:50:08] Olga: Yeah, totally. And in my experience, the top three mistakes would be internal linking, that, for example, like the product is linked through the entire box in div, there is not, there is no text link or image link with all text, so internal linking.
[00:50:25] Olga: Lack, lack of content on, on category pages and on product pages as well, and headings as well. Headings. Yeah. I
[00:50:34] Patrick: think that's a, I think that's an even better list. Yeah. Cause um, that's typically what we do, you know, right at the start is fix all the heading structures for homepage category and product pages.
[00:50:45] Patrick: Um, and then add content to the bottom of category pages. Which, um, like from a, if you're not an SEO, um, it's totally understandable why you would not do that, but almost no clients have when they come to us. Um, sometimes they do, but very rarely, usually it's just a list of products with product names and an H1 and maybe like a sentence or two of text at the top.
[00:51:10] Patrick: Um. Yeah. Yeah, so that's definitely a big win. Um, I was, I would agree with your list wholeheartedly.
[00:51:17] Olga: Yeah, I, I think Ted calls it a goose egg SEO, which is when you like improve there, there is like 1000, uh, let's say 1000 products, which do not have any traffic. You improve headings and all of them now get Two clicks per day and you get, and you have a big win.
[00:51:38] Olga: So
[00:51:38] Patrick: exactly. And I think that's, um, something for like newcomers when they're trying to get into e com SEO, they haven't done it before, or if you're doing it for your own brand, um, it can be so intimidating cause you do have such a large website. Um, you know, if you're not doing C or anything, um, it's like, where do I even begin with this?
[00:51:58] Patrick: Um, and so like, I feel like people get anxiety, they get overwhelmed. Um, and so the, the names of things in, in goose egg SEO is, are great concepts by Ted, because, you know, really you just have to start somewhere. And, um, that might be as simple as just, you know, starting with a single page and being like, well, what keyword could this rank for that is not, even if we get one more click a month, do that to a thousand pages, that's a thousand new, uh, potential customers per month.
[00:52:27] Olga: Yeah,
[00:52:28] Patrick: so it so it's really important and on these sort of transactional intents you can get quite good. Um, you know relevant converting traffic on product pages and categories, so
[00:52:39] Olga: Yeah,
[00:52:39] Patrick: I think I think that's definitely definitely a powerful way to go about you.
[00:52:43] Olga: so any final thoughts insights for people wanting to do or doing?
[00:52:49] Olga: enterprise, e commerce, SEO, e commerce, SEO is often enterprise as well. So any final tips?
[00:52:57] Patrick: Um, uh, let's see final tips. I think we went through all of the best sort of, um, initial tips. I think your, your three mistakes are actually really good in terms of a. Uh, base, base, uh, task list, you know, like through all the category pages, uh, well first make sure all the headings are on the website correctly.
[00:53:18] Patrick: You can use something like SEO meta and one click or there's the detail Chrome extension. Um, there's tons of these Chrome extensions. Just pop it on and see, you know, for a product page, what is the heading structure or a category? What is it? And for the homepage. Um, you'll often find for homepage, you'll have no H one, and you can quickly rank that for something.
[00:53:38] Patrick: Um, and for product pages and categories, you'll often find a similar thing. Um, and so just making sure that those are structured correctly. Um, and then after that, uh, check all your category pages, um, see what they're ranking for, um, you can look for pages that are sort of on, on page two of Google, or maybe like low page one.
[00:53:58] Patrick: And you can add in that, uh, into the optimized content to the category pages. Um, you will need a developer for a lot of this stuff. So you will need that sort of have access to that. Um, And have them add a little FAQ section. Like, that's the basic one. FAQ section, just like, What are these things? What, you know, what do they do?
[00:54:19] Patrick: You can even, um, look on Google and just look at what the people also ask. So search your primary keywords, see what people are asking about that, add that in an FAQ. And now you have some content on the page. You'll probably even naturally get in some entities and allies, but, um, up your game with a tool like Quora and it will give you exact list of words to use in your page.
[00:54:42] Patrick: Um, once you kind of go through those opportunities, Um, then just start going one by one and, and see what, uh, the keywords you can get onto those pages. Uh, just in the H one in the title tag,
[00:54:55] Olga: uh,
[00:54:57] Patrick: final sort of, uh, advice. If you're working with clients specifically, you will get a lot of pushback, um, from income clients because that's their brand and you have to understand, right.
[00:55:09] Patrick: As an SEO, that, um, These companies are making most of their money from, uh, and from, uh, you know, uh, word of mouth and all kinds of things. And so SEO is a portion of the pie, but like making sure that CRO is, um, correct is really important. And, um, also you also just have people that are, um, a little particular about their brand.
[00:55:39] Patrick: And so you'll find that like people will push back on content to the category. They'll push back on on changing a name from delights to gifts like they're like, oh well It's my brand better, right? So, um, we'll have sort of this push back and um, Uh, ted has said before, you know have a heart to heart with them and um,
[00:55:58] Olga: yeah
[00:55:59] Patrick: You know, just let them know that this is how you rank and and you can usually get some stuff Approved you just might have to edit it And be a little bit careful with all that.
[00:56:09] Olga: totally, yeah. So, it was like, , so many tips. so much advice. So, Patrick, where can people find you? What's the best place to follow you, learn from you more?
[00:56:21] Patrick: So, YouTube is by far the best place to follow me. Um, so, uh, we're releasing a new video, um, today or tomorrow on the AI Overview.
[00:56:31] Olga: I will add a link somewhere. It will be somewhere here. The
[00:56:36] Patrick: link is somewhere. Yeah. Yeah, so I'm, I'm mostly just focusing on YouTube these days. Uh huh. And you can find all my content there. Also on LinkedIn and Facebook and all the other. All the other places you can chat with me.
[00:56:49] Olga: Okay. Perfect. Perfect. So Patrick, thanks.
[00:56:52] Olga: Thanks a lot for being my guest, sharing your knowledge. It was a very, very fun episode.
[00:56:58] Patrick: Thank you, Olga. And, um, thank you for sharing your knowledge at SEO mastery. And, um, I just love the content you've been pushing out. So yeah, So
[00:57:06] Olga: thanks everyone. And bye bye.
[00:57:11] Patrick: Bye bye.
