Get more search engine traffic to your Shopify store.
As we look for more ways to generate quality organic traffic to our stores, SEO will come to mind.
In this episode, you'll will hear how to get more search engine traffic to your store.
We're joined by an SEO Expert who has been called an "SEO genius" by Entrepreneur.com and a "brilliant entrepreneur" by Inc Magazine.
If you've read the Backlinko blog or watched their YouTube channel, you'll recognize today's guest, Brian Dean.
Brian's going to tell us:
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we’re talking about merchants’ three favorite letters, SEO. That’s search engine optimization. And I have largely avoided SEO as a topic, because there’s a lot of misinformation out there. I think it’s easy to get really frustrated with it, and so I finally said, you know what? I found a guy. I found an authority in this topic who I think can demystify it, whose content I have followed and respected in growing my own content marketing efforts, especially our YouTube channel, and so I am happy to welcome as a guest today a gentleman who has been called an SEO genius by entrepreneur.com, and a brilliant entrepreneur by Inc. Magazine.
I’m joined by Brian Dean from Backlinko. His award-winning blog, Backlinko, was listed by Forbes as a top blog to follow in 2017. So, we’ve got the, what I consider one of the top SEO experts. Brian, thank you for joining us.
Brian Dean: Oh, thanks for having me, Kurt.
Kurt Elster: So, all right, we’ll jump right into it here. Well, first, did I get your intro right? That’s all accurate. You are this great entrepreneur according to some impressive sources.
Brian Dean: Well, I’m not gonna argue with them. Let’s just put it that way.
Kurt Elster: Yeah! Take the win.
Brian Dean: I need to change that 2017 reference. That’s getting kind of out of date, so I need to get listed on some other blogs to follow lists in 2020.
Kurt Elster: Here you go. E-commerce podcast host Kurt Elster says he’s the top blogger to follow. There you go. I did it.
Brian Dean: Done. Thank you.
Kurt Elster: Nailed it! In 2020 I said it, no less. All right, so before we dive into the nitty gritty, because your advice is very actionable, which I like a lot, but when we say SEO in the context of e-commerce, that’s a really broad topic. So, what the heck are we talking about? If I’m a merchant, how should I be thinking about this?
Brian Dean: So, as a merchant, you want to think of SEO through Google’s point of view. So, when most people think of SEO, they’re like, “How can I rank? How can I rank? How can I get all this free traffic from Google?” Which makes sense. That’s the appeal of SEO, and that’s why it’s so great for e-commerce sites, because there are people right now searching for the products that you sell on your Shopify store, and all you need to do is get in front of them, and the question is how, and that’s basically where SEO comes in.
And when I first started with SEO many years ago, it was kind of a different time. It was all about gaming the algorithm. It was this perspective of how can I fake all these signals that are important to Google to get them to rank my site? And we’d use black hat SEO, and fake links, and all the keyword stuffing and all this stuff, and it worked temporarily, but my sites would always get penalized.
And over the years, in terms of a high-level perspective, I’m always thinking of SEO in terms of how can I give Google what it wants? Because when you give Google what it wants, they generally reward you with higher rankings and more traffic. So, as an e-commerce site owner, I would think, “How can I create product pages, category pages, and other signals that Google wants to see to show me that I’m the best result for the keyword that someone’s searching for?”
Kurt Elster: So, the way I have thought about it, and recapping that statement a little bit, is Google is viewing the query as a question from the user, who’s their customer, and your page, your search result is… They want to show here’s the best answer, and we’re gonna rank them in descending order of how good an answer we think it is for your question. Is that a fair way to think about it?
Brian Dean: Very much.
Kurt Elster: Okay, good. So, we want to avoid the black hat stuff, right? We don’t want to fake those signals. We want to create these genuine signals for Google. When you talk about those signals, those ranking factors, what are they? What are the top ones that you’re looking for?
Brian Dean: The number one is the relevancy of the page, like if it’s a good fit for that search. Now, relevancy just means you’re… It’s like the ticket to entry, right? So, back in the day, when you searched for something, and remember it used to show… I think it still shows this, but it’s not as prominent, like 10 of a billion results. Remember, it’d be like 11 million. Those are all the results that Google thinks in some fashion are relevant to the keyword.
Then, from there, it’s a matter of ordering them and putting them in order from one to however many pages it goes. So, that’s the number one, because if your page isn’t relevant, then you have no chance of ranking, and that’s sort of how the foundation of the algorithm works. So, for example, if someone’s searching for a posture corrector in Google, what they’re gonna do is look through all of the pages in their index that are related to posture corrector, and then bring those up, and then order them based on what they think is the best result for that particular search.
So, to get in the game to begin with, you need to have a page on your site that is relevant for that keyword.
Kurt Elster: Okay. The cost of entry is a relevant page. It sounds like our strategy here is gonna start with content marketing, content creation, right?
Brian Dean: Yes. I mean, for e-commerce, it’s a combination. It’s content creation, but you also have product and category pages that you want to rank, as well.
Kurt Elster: Right.
Brian Dean: So, it’s sort of a two-pronged approach with e-commerce. It’s a little bit different than a blog. And you tend to have, also e-commerce sites tend to have a lot more pages than most others, so you gotta be more, a little bit more strategic about the keywords that you use and how your site is set up, and we can talk about that. But yeah, exactly, at a high level you’re creating content, whether that’s text on a product page, or a blog post, that’s relevant to that search.
Kurt Elster: All right, so it sounds like there’s two directions we can go in. One is like how do we think about keywords and those searches, and how do we create awesome content. Before we jump into that, what’s the biggest mistake you see people making when they’re in e-commerce and thinking about SEO?
Brian Dean: The number one mistake by far is putting up a bunch of product and category pages and being like, “Okay, I’m done.”
Kurt Elster: Nailed it! All right.
Brian Dean: Nailed it. Keywords set.
Kurt Elster: The shotgun approach.
Brian Dean: Yeah, exactly. It’s a shotgun approach in terms of creating way too many product and category pages, but also just thinking like, “Oh, as long as they’re optimized,” which is the most straightforward part, right? Product and category pages, add your keywords, optimize them in the right places, but there’s this missing element that I see a lot of e-commerce sites miss, which are backlinks and content marketing, and all those other things that help support your product and category pages and help those rank higher.
If you look at any non-Amazon, non-Best Buy, non-Walmart e-commerce site, mom and pops, most of them end up ranking because they have these product and category pages that are well optimized, but they also create this content that’s so good that people are linking to it and sharing. Google is sensing those signals and thinking, “Oh wow, this is a good resource. This is a good website in general.” And then you get higher rankings on your product and category pages.
So, once you have your product and category pages, I look at that as more of a step zero, of like, “Okay, now I have a e-commerce site.” Versus like, “Okay, now I’m good to go.”
Kurt Elster: So, that’s like the literal first step, bottom of the barrel in this process, is just creating those things. Launching the product pages. Okay.
Brian Dean: Exactly. It’s like putting your shoes on and being like, “Okay, I just ran a marathon.”
Kurt Elster: For people who-
Brian Dean: You got-
Kurt Elster: Go ahead.
Brian Dean: Yeah. Just saying that’s, it’s like you said, it’s an important first step, and it’s important to do it right and to have your keywords for all your product and category pages. Like I said, that relevancy part is super important. That’s really the foundation. So, once you have that, you’re in a good position, but in order to rank, Google needs to see your site as an authority, and the only way to do that is to get backlinks.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so the number one or only relevant ranking factor for establishing authority is backlinks. That’s a really tough thing to get. So, what I’m hearing is Google views each backlink as a vote of confidence for this site, right?
Brian Dean: Exactly.
Kurt Elster: Okay, and what are… It’s tough to get backlinks, especially for a product page where you’re like, “Yeah, just link to some stuff I’m selling.” That’s just not a compelling proposition. So, what are some typical, common strategies I could use to get those backlinks?
Brian Dean: Yeah, so one that works really well is to create some sort of data on your site. So, like you said, most e-commerce sites are like, “Okay, here are product and category pages.” If you can get links directly to those, that’s great, because those links will count a lot more towards ranking those specific pages, but like you said, Kurt, why would anyone link to a product page? You know, especially if your product isn’t amazing in some way.
There’s some smaller, I wouldn’t even call them e-commerce sites, but they have products like the Roost Stand, which is this very popular laptop stand. They have tons of links, just because they have a really interesting product, but if you’re selling toothbrushes, unless your toothbrush is really something amazing, you’re gonna be hard pressed to get links to it.
So, what you need to do is create something on your e-commerce site that I call a link magnet. And this is basically a piece of content that you create that’s specifically designed to get backlinks, and one format that’s working really well right now is data. And basically what I’m saying with that is like you come up with an industry study that looks at something in your niche and in your industry, and then you report on the results. And we’ve been doing this a lot at Backlinko, and it’s just been absolutely crazy for getting backlinks. Works a lot better than most content formats, like list posts, and case studies. Those things are great, they have their place, but they don’t get linked to that often, and I learned to get linked to, you need to have something very specific on your site that people want to link to, and data does a great job with that.
Kurt Elster: Off the top of your head, can you think of one or two examples?
Brian Dean: Yeah, sure. I mean, we’ve done a bunch, and I’ve seen other people do them, and that’s why I sort of like… This is what made me want to delve into it, so over the last year we published five or six of these industry studies. So, to give you an idea, we did one a few months ago which just looked at page speed statistics, like how fast a page loads, and to do this we used totally public data. We didn’t have to scrape anything, that was just out there. But no one had really collected it, moved it all around, and reported on it in an accessible way. And that did really well for us. People link all the time when they’re looking for what is the average page loading speed, how long does it take for a page to load in terms of fully loaded, time to first byte, all these kinds of little statistics. It’s done really well in terms of links.
It’s not directly related to my business, which we sell SEO courses, but it’s related enough, and that’s one of the things I would recommend for e-commerce sites, is think a little bit outside of your specific niche, if you can. So, if you sell posture correctors, your study or whatever data you’re gonna do doesn’t have to be about posture correctors. Or if you sell pots for plants, it doesn’t have to be about the pots people use. It can be about what things are growing, or organic food, or anything, really, that’s at least tangentially related to what you’re selling on your e-commerce site.
Kurt Elster: Okay. That makes a lot of sense. And I think merchants have a lot on their plate, especially as solopreneurs, and so then creating authority content just ends up feeling like homework. It’s an easy thing to just procrastinate on, put it to the bottom of the list. Do I have to just be able… Do I have to force myself to do it? Do I have to love to write? Do I have to delegate it? Is there any advice here you have for someone who’s just struggling to get going and get that momentum?
Brian Dean: Yeah, sure. I can absolutely relate to that. I understand that whole fatigue factor of like hey, I’m running an entire business here, I’m selling physical products, I have an e-commerce site, I’m trying to get the word out, we have Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, all this stuff, and now we also have to do these crazy pieces of content. It makes total sense. But what I would say is this approach to content marketing SEO is a lot easier and a lot better than most, which if you ask most people, like, “Oh, I have an e-commerce site. I want to use content marketing SEO to grow.” They’re gonna be like, “Okay, here’s what you need to do. You need to publish one blog post every day, or one blog post every week.” And they really focus on this quantity over quality approach, and not only does it not work very well, but it’s also something that stresses a lot of people out, because they feel like all of a sudden they’re running on this treadmill and they have to keep up and keep up, or else somehow their content marketing’s gonna stop working, or the SEO’s gonna stop working.
And what I’m saying is literally to get started, all you need is one piece of content. Now, it needs to be great, but you only need one. And for most people, that’s like a relief. They go, “Wow, all I need to do is do one thing. Maybe it’s hard work, but at least I could just focus on that and make it great.” And in my experience, especially in e-commerce, those amazing pieces of content that stand out tend to do a lot better than 50 mediocre blog posts.
Kurt Elster: Right. Yeah. Oh, absolutely. The quality is evident to the audience. The quality is evident to the search engine. And I think it’s evident to the author. If you make something you’re really proud of, truly proud of, you are going… That’s gonna show through in how you talk about it, and you’re just gonna end up naturally promoting it more. And once you start to see success, and even just like that initial dopamine rush of, “I made a thing and I’m proud of it and I put it out in the world and it’s for my business.” That’s going to empower you to then create more content like that.
And like the first thing’s the hardest, because you make it, and then it’s crickets, and then you start to get some hits on it, and then you start to get some feedback, and once you have… that feedback loop starts happening. Now you go, “All right.” You’re encouraged and you now kind of, you start getting ideas for other things. And I remember very clearly going through that process, even with this podcast, where it’s like the first month, there’s a few hundred people. But then you get that first person who emails you and it’s like, “Wow, this is really helpful. I’d love to hear more about X.” You’re like, “I should do more!” And then it becomes… I’ve likened content marketing in this sense to a water wheel, in that it builds momentum, and it feeds itself, and it picks up speed.
Brian Dean: Yeah. That’s a great analogy, and Kurt, you’re a good example of how to do this whole content marketing thing right. Now, in your case, content is a podcast, but it’s still content marketing. You don’t just stay, “Okay, I’m gonna do a podcast. I’m gonna use my iPhone and call random people unprepared and start asking questions.” No. You built this ridiculously cool at-home studio, you do tons of preparation, you sent me things to help me prepare. You had your questions. Not totally ready in advance, because you want to make it spontaneous, but you have a lot of the topics you want to cover in advance. That’s the level of effort that you want to put into your blog content, because if your blog post is just like five tips for whatever, it’s just gonna get lost in the noise.
But if you create something like, “Wow, we did a survey where we asked people about how many office workers use standing desks and we have this data about how often they stand, how often they sit, what standing desk to use, and all this information.” If you’re in that space, it’s gonna be super interesting and people are gonna share it and link to it.
Kurt Elster: So, all right, so I’m hearing the solution here is quality over quantity, awesome content. I don’t even need to be blogging daily or weekly as long as I have these amazing authority pieces. And it can even be based on publicly available information, but I happen to be the only guy who packaged it and put it together in a nice, cohesive way. That’s the awesome content strategy. Is there any more to it? Anything else we missed that we should touch on?
I know we didn’t quite touch on keyword planning, or like coming up with the topic ideas.
Brian Dean: Yeah, so the topic ideas, I wouldn’t worry that much about ranking with these studies or data points. Of course if you can, that’s great, but the main goal is really to get links. Your goal with this is to get backlinks, so if you start trying to do that and keyword research, a lot of times it’s too confusing. Even for myself, who’s done a lot of these studies and I have more planned, I don’t really worry that much about them ranking. My goal is really just to create something that people want to link to. And with that mindset, it’s a lot easier.
So, one thing that’s helped me a lot with these studies and helped them do really well, like some of them have literally 5,000 links, is to look at what the bloggers and journalists in your space are already linking to, and what they’re already talking about. So, unlike traditional content marketing, which is where you create content for your target customer or your target audience, with these you’re really creating content for bloggers and journalists. You’re creating content that’s not for your target audience. They may not even get it or like it. But you’re creating content for the people that have the ability to link to you, which are people that run blogs in your niche.
To give you an idea, last year we ran a voice search study, where we did, we bought a Google Home and just asked it a bunch of questions, looked at all the results and tried to figure out why Google was giving one result over another, why the Google Home was giving us one result. It did really well, but in terms of my target audience, no one was really asking me about voice search. You weren’t like, “Hey, I want to rank in voice search.” It wasn’t really that hot of a topic compared to Shopify people, which make up some of my audience being like, “Hey, I want to rank my product pages, my category pages. How do I do it?” But we decided to go with it because we knew that the bloggers in the SEO space were going crazy in voice search, talking about voice search this, voice search that.
And we created something that was for them, and because we created it for them, we know that they’re gonna like it and they not only link to it, or amplified it and shared it on Twitter and places like that.
Kurt Elster: That’s really clever. I had not… I feel like I’ve got a reasonable grasp on content marketing, of SEO, semi-competent with technical SEO, and I feel pretty good with content marketing, having done a lot of it, and been involved with it, but that piece of advise, that was like… That was a mind blower for me right then, is some percent of your content needs to exist to gather backlinks, and the non-sleazy way to do it is look at what the publishing professionals in your niche or industry are already talking about, and create content for them. Is there anything you do to get that stuff in front of them?
Brian Dean: Yep, I use email outreach for the most part. There’s a lot of nuances with that, of course, like we’ve all got those horrible outreach emails, so I’m not saying it’s a magical thing that’ll work.
Kurt Elster: Greetings of the day!
Brian Dean: Greetings of the day. That’s-
Kurt Elster: You see that one and you’re like, “Oh no!”
Brian Dean: Oh yeah. Yep. Yep. Or, “Hi there!” Once they don’t use your name, it’s almost a guaranteed spam.
Kurt Elster: I liked recent blog post in which you said… Like, “Oh boy.”
Brian Dean: Exactly. I’m partly responsible for that, because I created a script like six years ago that people started using and it just got a little out of hand. But that’s another story for another podcast. Yeah, but if you reach out to people that are genuinely interested, this is what I find. A couple things for making your email outreach really effective for this thing, this type of content, but also just in general for promoting content. The first is if you find people that are genuinely interested in the topic, then you’re gonna go a long way with it. So, what a lot of people do is they’re like, “Hey, you once randomly mentioned this word, so therefore you’re gonna like this post about that thing.” I get that a lot. It’s like one time I randomly… I’ve gotten a couple about gardening, because I’ve used that as an example before.
Kurt Elster: Oh, geez.
Brian Dean: And people are like, “Hey, you write about gardening. We wrote this ultimate guide to growing tomatoes in your backyard.” It’s like, “Dude, that has nothing to do with my site.” So, what you want to do is find people that are genuinely interested in the topic, so in your case, Kurt, it would be Shopify, obviously. So, if I created a study that was like, “Here we analyzed 10,000 Shopify stores, and we found that these are the major technical problems, like broken links, or shopping cart problems, or SEO issues.” You’d be like, “Dude, this is awesome.” Right? Even if I was a random person. Especially if I don’t ask you to share it.
So, that’s the other tip, is once you find someone interested, send them your data, but don’t even ask them to share it. Just be like, “Hey, I think you’d be interested in this.” And it’s kind of a Jedi mind trick. By not asking, they’re actually more likely to share, because they’ll think of it. It’s their idea. And if it’s something that will benefit their audience, they’re gonna share it anyway.
Kurt Elster: You’re going full Inception on them.
Brian Dean: Yeah. I like to think so.
Kurt Elster: I like that. Yeah. As soon as you’re asking for it, it’s like it loses some of the value. When you are just presenting it as like, “Here’s this thing that you may or may not find valuable.” Ah, now suddenly they’re more willing to evaluate it on its own merit, and if it’s great, which if you’re willing to share it, hopefully it is, then they will be willing to share it, as well.
Well, all right, we talked about content marketing quite a bit. What about back to step zero, those product and category pages? Is there anything I can do to boost the rankings on those?
Brian Dean: So, one of the things that can really help product and category pages is something called authority sculpting, because when you take a step back, and you look at product and category pages, the only things you can really do to optimize them is A, put your keywords in strategic places, so as long as your pages have unique content that’s not duplicate from somewhere else, and it contains your target keyword like in the title, a few times on the page, maybe in an image alt text, that’s basically what you can do there in terms of traditional, on-page SEO.
You can also do things to make sure that your product and category pages is a good… they’re a good fit for what the person’s searching for, because Google can measure if someone lands on your product page and then goes back to Google right away. To them, that’s like, “Oh man, that page really isn’t good. That’s not a good fit.” So, as long as you keep people stuck to your e-commerce site, and ideally convert, then you’re good. But I don’t really have to say that, because you want them to convert anyways, so most people spend a lot of time and energy on their conversion rate optimization.
Other than that, the best thing you could do is build up backlinks on your domain using content, and then funneling that authority to the product and category pages that are the most high priority for you. And that’s one of the reasons that I was saying before about a mistake is only having product and category pages, because when you only have that, you don’t really have any leverage. Your site doesn’t have any authority in the eyes of Google. So, even if your page is really relevant, they’re not gonna rank it because all the sites above you have more authority, and they judge that authority based on links. And that’s why I recommend creating these content pieces that are specifically designed to get links.
Once you have those, you’re in a good spot. You can start doing stuff in terms of SEO. Without that, you don’t have a lot of leverage. You can just optimize your pages and kind of pray that one of them will rank. So, authority sculpting is really… It sounds kind of fancy, but it’s actually really simple. All you do is identify five to 10 product and category pages that are most important to you, and then take those pieces of content that have links, or any page on your site that has links, and internally link from those high authority pages to those product and category pages. That will send authority to those, and they’ll get a rankings boost.
Kurt Elster: Oh, no way. I had… I knew internal linking was important, but I thought it really was largely more about page visibility, making sure that stuff gets indexed and updated regularly. I did not realize that there was an authority flow through that could happen via internal linking.
Brian Dean: Yep, there is. It’s similar to a backlink, right? When another site links to you, authority flows through that link to your site. It’s the same thing happening, but on your own domain. It’s not as powerful as a link directly from another site, but the same principle applies. You’re just one degree removed from the other site linking to you.
Kurt Elster: Interesting. Okay. Wow. That is good to know.
Brian Dean: So, it’s important for all that stuff you mentioned, but this is another benefit, and that’s why I recommend being strategic with it, because what a lot of people do is just add random internal links across their e-commerce site, but if you’re like most people, you have a couple that are really important to you, whether they have a good ROI, they’re a new product that you want to get the word out about, maybe you already rank like number seven, so you kind of can get a boost up to the top three, where all the action is. For whatever reason, it’s a priority for you. You want to send as much juice as you can from these pages that have authority to that page.
Kurt Elster: This is a good and easy to implement tip. I like this. The elephant in the room is Amazon. It feels almost impossible to outrank Amazon. Is it impossible to outrank Amazon if we’re competing for similar things?
Brian Dean: No. If you’re competing for the same things, maybe. So, this is one of the reasons that I don’t recommend competing with Amazon. I know it sounds kind of like a riddle, but it’s kind of like to compete against Amazon, you don’t want to compete against Amazon, because yes, you have a chance for a product page to rank above them, but like I mentioned before, the authority of your site is super important, and Amazon has domain authority of like infinite. Infinity, right? It’s insane.
And in fact, a while ago I looked at a bunch of Amazon’s product pages to see how many had links directly pointing to them from other sites, so backlinks, and very, very few had any backlinks pointing to them. So, what that means is let’s say Amazon has two million pages. I would estimate 99% of those don’t have any backlinks pointing directly to them. They’re ranking because of the domain authority as a whole, like I was telling you before. The problem is if you’re competing against Amazon, you’re not gonna be able to match their domain authority no matter what you do.
So, you have a couple options. One is to really focus on getting that link authority to those specific product pages using that authority sculpting strategy that I mentioned earlier, because that’s the advantage you can have over Amazon. They have huge domain authority, but their individual pages, no one’s linking to them. So, if you’re able to get links to your page, to your product pages, or one link removed using internal linking, that can help you rank above them. The other thing you could do is look at keywords that are a little bit different than Amazon’s optimizing for. So, the same product can be described a lot of different ways, and especially as you get more niche.
So, for example, let’s say you’re an e-commerce site that sells organic dog food. Well, the keyword dog food is gonna be tough. Organic dog food’s gonna be tough. But you can always create product pages around organic dog food for specific breeds. This is something that a lot of big e-commerce sites don’t bother with, because it’s not worth it. They don’t get a lot of traffic. But if you create like organic dog food for chihuahuas product page, that has a good chance of ranking above Amazon, because Amazon’s probably not even ranking for it, because they don’t have a page about it. So, those are two different ways that you can compete against Amazon and win, but I recommend focusing on the second strategy, of finding these keywords that are a little more longtail, a little bit more niche, because Amazon isn’t even bothering to try to rank for them.
Kurt Elster: So, on the topic of longtail keyword phrases, how do I do that keyword planning? How do I know what is a keyword I should go after? Or should I not think so hard about it?
Brian Dean: No, definitely, I definitely recommend thinking hard about it. Because your keywords, when you have an e-commerce site, let’s just say you have all your keywords set. You’ve determined a lot already. You basically have determined who your market is, who your customers are. It’s a big deal. Not to say you should stress over it or anything, but it is an important thing that dictates sort of the rest of your SEO moving forward, and even just how people perceive your products. It’s how you describe them. And you’re gonna use those keywords on your page.
So, one thing I would recommend is searching for potential product ideas and then seeing what Google suggests in the Google suggests search bar. So, with the organic dog food, you can put organic dog food for and see what Google suggests. Those are a lot of times longtail keywords that Amazon and other big e-commerce sites aren’t targeting, and you can create product pages around them.
Kurt Elster: See, I like this idea, and I’ve promoted this idea, and I’ve had other supposed SEO experts slap my wrist and say, “Well, no. That’s not true. That doesn’t work, because it’s tailoring it to you, so that’s irrelevant.”
Brian Dean: I mean, it is to a certain extent, but if you’ve never searched for the thing, they don’t tailor it to you. They only tailor it to you if you just searched for that thing.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
Brian Dean: And then you’re searching for related right away, or if you searched for it in the past, they’ll show it in purple as a history. But then you could just use incognito mode or whatever, so then it’s not tailored to you.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, I was gonna say, if I just do this in incognito mode, doesn’t that solve the problem?
Brian Dean: It does.
Kurt Elster: Good. Okay. What are some of your favorite tools? People love tools. What are some of yours?
Brian Dean: Yeah. They do love tools. That’s probably the top question I get is like what tools do I use. For an e-commerce site, I would say if you want just one tool, which is I think what everyone ultimately wants at the end of the day, to me the best suite of tools for keyword research, and links, and technical SEO and all that stuff is Ahrefs. It has… There’s other tools that have a similar suite of features, like SEMrush and Moz Pro. On the surface they have the same features, but to me, Ahrefs has the best features, and it’s just the easiest to use, which is important. With some of the other tools, I have trouble finding things, or knowing when things work, and I just find Ahrefs is a little bit easier to use. It’s not cheap, but again, you get what you pay for, and I think that it’s the number one tool that I would recommend for people if they’re serious about SEO.
Kurt Elster: And it does have an inexpensive seven-day trial. It’s like seven bucks for seven days. So, if you want to play with it and decide if it’s worth it, you totally can. Another one that you had mentioned earlier off air was Exploding Topics. What is this thing?
Brian Dean: So, this is something that I actually co-founded.
Kurt Elster: Oh, okay.
Brian Dean: Yeah, so full transparency, I co-founded this thing, but it’s a lot of e-commerce people are liking it, which is why I wanted to bring it up, so I created this because… It’s not a pitch. It’s free, so I don’t even get anything if you use it, but the idea behind it is with Google Trends, it’s great for seeing trends. Like if you’re considering a product that you want to add, or a category that you want to add to your e-commerce site, you can put it into Google Trends and see how it’s trending. If it’s trending up, that’s probably good. If it’s trending down, that’s probably bad.
The problem is Google Trends isn’t great at bubbling up ideas that you hadn’t thought of before. So, if you’re like, “I have no idea what I want to add. I just want to find trending stuff.” This is what this is designed for, because you can go in there, find your different… in different categories. You have like tech, and whatever, products, and you can just see what products are blowing up, and what types of topics are blowing up in terms of search volume, and it’s cool because it’s a discovery engine instead of having to search for something. So, that’s why we developed it, and e-commerce people and Amazon FBA people seem to be liking it.
Kurt Elster: So, are they looking at it to discover the next big niche idea and ride that wave?
Brian Dean: Yeah, exactly, so it could be if you don’t even know what site you want to create yet. I mean, you could… That’s what it was originally developed for. I actually bought it from this person that started it, and he created it because he was like, “I want to start a business, but I don’t know what to start a business on, and it probably should be something that’s trending up, so let me create something that just scrapes terms and finds those that are trending up.” And over time, he sort of refined it and it has thousands of different trending topics. But yeah, if you’re like, “I want to start an e-commerce site, but I don’t know what niche.” Or like, “Hey, I want to add a new category. We want to add new product.” It’s more just to check it out and be like, “Oh, hey. This is an idea.”
It could be a specific brand sometimes are blowing up, and that means like, “Oh, so that means this whole category is probably blowing up, too.” Like if one particular brand is exploding, it’s a good sign that that category is also doing well.
Kurt Elster: So, we’re coming to the end of our time together, but I want to talk to you about a different search engine. I want to talk to you about YouTube. You wrote this phenomenal guide that I followed on like, “Hey, here’s what YouTube’s looking at. Here’s how it works.” And I used that to optimize my channel, and that’s helped picking up 50 to 100 subscribers a month now, which is… It’s nice. It’s good to see that steady, steady growth.
Brian Dean: Nice.
Kurt Elster: Tell me, give me the high-level overview there on YouTube and your approach to YouTube marketing.
Brian Dean: Yeah, so my approach to YouTube marketing is just super top of the funnel awareness. This is something I had to learn kind of the hard way. When I first got started on YouTube I was like, “Oh, YouTube’s huge! What I’m gonna do is just like with SEO, you rank for these keywords that people are searching for, people watch your video, and then they buy something.” And it doesn’t really work like that. So, one of the things that I learned is that the goal of YouTube should really be to get people to see you, to follow you, to be aware that you exist. That’s the main benefit of YouTube, and then down the road, when they’re searching for what you sell and the see your domain in Google, they’re gonna click on it. Or when they’re on your site, they’re gonna be like, “Oh, I know this. This is whatever brand I’ve seen. I watch their YouTube channel. It’s great.”
And it may sound like a kind of like, “Oh, who cares if it’s just top of the funnel stuff?” But it’s actually super powerful, because you can do it at scale on YouTube. To give you an idea, Backlinko’s channel is relatively small, like we have 280,000 subscribers, which is big-
Kurt Elster: Plenty of people would kill for that.
Brian Dean: Yeah, I would have killed for that not so long ago. Trust me. But if you take a step back and look at YouTube, like according to SocialBlade, I looked this up the other day for a course I’m working on, like I think there are 25,000 channels with more subscribers than that.
Kurt Elster: Wow!
Brian Dean: Yeah, so it’s not, when I say there’s a lot of channels that are, that’s what I mean. I’m not even in the top 25,000. So, it sounds like a lot in some ways, but in many ways it’s a tiny channel. It’s insignificant. But anyway, let’s put it somewhere in the middle.
Right now, the channel gets about 190,000 unique people watching the videos every month. That’s not views. It’s really like 250,000 views and 180 to 190,000 unique people that are seeing my videos every single month. That’s massive. If you think about that in terms of like TV commercials, or radio ads, or display, all those sorts of advertising that’s just like awareness-based, it’s really hard to top that. That’s a lot of people. And it’s pretty targeted, too. It’s people that are in my space, professional marketers.
So, if you can identify your target audience, that they hang on YouTube, which they probably do, because YouTube has over a billion users, and you can get your brand in front of them, they’re gonna watch it, and a lot of times they’re gonna be like, “Oh, let me search for this brand in Google,” read about you, maybe check out some of your products. Maybe they won’t buy right then, but you at least got them to your site. You got in their head. They’ll visit again maybe, they’ll watch another of your videos, visit again, maybe sign up for your 5% discount popup this time, and then check out in a week.
So, it’s definitely not like a money machine in terms of you start getting views and people start buying your stuff. There’s a delay there, but there’s definitely… I can draw a straight line between YouTube views and revenue.
Kurt Elster: Oh yeah. Those numbers are tremendous. I mean, if you had a billboard, you would not see those kinds of numbers next to the highway in a month. That’s absolutely tremendous.
Brian Dean: And think about a billboard, how many people actually see it, or a display ad, or a TV ad. They’re on their phone, or just driving. Hopefully not on their phone driving, but they probably are. And they’re not really engaging with it. Video’s such a powerful medium that they’re more likely to remember you.
Kurt Elster: It’s a very personal medium.
Brian Dean: Yeah, it is like even the numbers are amazing, but if you think about the medium itself, it’s even more powerful, because people are seeing you and your brand, and maybe even your products if you do some sort of low-level product placement. And they’re gonna… It sticks in their mind a lot more than like a display ad, or a TV ad, or something like that.
So, not only is it a quality of view, it’s a quantity of view, and that’s where YouTube really shines, and that’s why it’s such a powerful medium.
Kurt Elster: And so, yeah, I need to be investing even more time in my YouTube channel, it sounds like. So, we’re coming to the end of our time together. Where could people go to learn more about you?
Brian Dean: The best place is to go to backlinko.com, and you can sign up for the newsletter there, and I send a lot of exclusive SEO tips and strategies that I only share with email subscribers.
Kurt Elster: I am on your newsletter, and I can confirm.
Brian Dean: Great.
Kurt Elster: All right. Brian, this has been enlightening. I am thrilled to have had you on. Thank you so much.
Brian Dean: No, thanks for having me.