w/ Jason Berkowitz, Break The Web SEO
Join us with SEO expert Jason Berkowitz as we dissect e-commerce SEO. We're cutting through the noise of AI content and zeroing in on standout strategies. It's all about making your site visible online, illustrated by a case study on an outdoor sports gear brand. We're not just talking SEO basics; we're giving you actionable strategies for Shopify stores to turn browsers into buyers. We go beyond headings, exploring how articles can drive traffic to products. Plus, we're unpacking the real deal with SEO tools and Shopify's role in e-commerce. Tune in for insights that could transform your digital strategy.
Episode Highlights:
Guest Background:
Jason Berkowitz has been a prominent figure in the SEO industry since 2009. As the founder and SEO Director of Break the Web, he has helped numerous DTC brands enhance their online presence. Known for his transparent and results-driven approach, Jason has been a trusted advisor to in-house marketing teams, helping them navigate the complexities of SEO. Outside of his professional achievements, Jason is passionate about demystifying SEO and making it accessible to all.
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What's Kurt up to?
Tune in to learn the secrets of successful SEO from one of the industry's leading experts!
Kurt (00:03.4)
SEO, why is it so annoying? All right, it's not necessarily that it's annoying. It's that it's a necessary evil. You have to have an SEO optimized, that's redundant, that's like saying ATM machine. You have to have a search engine optimized site because everyone else potentially is doing it because you want the organic search traffic. But at this point, Google search results are a hellscape of AI generated garbage content. And that's what we have to outrank.
I don't know, this is an episode not about venting about SEO shenanigans and what they've resulted in. It's about what we can do to fix it. How should we approach SEO for an e-commerce store? And joining me to discuss it is Jason Berkowitz, who has been in the SEO space for 14, 15 years now. Certainly has the experience and is going to...
Talk us through it and maybe commiserate with us a little bit on it Jason welcome
Jason (01:08.43)
Thank you so much for having me Kurt. It's a pleasure to be here
Kurt (01:11.281)
So okay, tell me what do you do? What's your SEO experience?
Jason (01:17.77)
Yeah, I'm a self-proclaimed SEO weirdo because it's hard to find an SEO. I guess that's not in a good way. Of course, been doing SEO since about 2009, 2010 era. I am the founder and SEO director of Break the Web. We're an SEO agency that helps in-house marketing teams of DTC brands. Like you said, just make SEO less annoying. There's a lot of weird ambiguity, annoyances, most of the time bad expectations like it's set when starting SEO. So that's our job is to try to bridge that gap.
with the annoying parts and success.
Kurt (01:50.488)
Okay, so we're on the same page here. You said setting expectations. How has perception of SEO changed over the years? Because you've been doing this a while.
Jason (02:03.902)
Yeah, I think my first few years I still walk around this meme that I brought around with me everywhere I went. And it's kind of like what my mom thinks I do, what the government thinks I do, what my friends think I do. And what I'm really doing is just sitting on a chair, like laying back. It's like, I think it was a South Park character on his computer. The perception of SEO was back in the day, especially when I started kind of like a. Magician type service, because also SEO is very different.
Kurt (02:13.757)
Right.
Jason (02:31.958)
you could get really awesome rankings fairly easy and fairly quickly with automation and tools. What happened with that as, especially Google started getting a bit more advanced, SEOs, some SEOs have failed to evolve with the times, thus causing website penalizations. And that left a weird taste in a lot of brands' mouth and this weird perception that SEO is more black hat. It's not ethical. It's gaming the system.
They'll promise the world and deliver nothing. And everyone has the guaranteed page one rankings and stuff. And I think also as a now it's very interesting time, especially with our target market that the shift, the change, the perception has shifted a lot towards SEO as a necessary, maybe a necessary evil that most brands have to implement, especially if you are trying to diverse your traffic sources, especially revenue sources specifically.
Now I like to think it has a good perception, but then AI, yeah, like you said, it's coming back to throw a wrench in the system.
Kurt (03:32.7)
Yeah, that's starting to change things, make it difficult in a different way again. It's just so easy to generate content.
Jason (03:37.95)
Yeah, because then you got marketers.
Technically, yeah, the quality is a very different conversation of the content itself. But you got higher ups and brands that like, hey, why are we not jumping on this AI content bag wagon? Look how much money we'll save. Then you got marketers who are like, this content is horrible. It's not a real subject matter expert. It's not a real brand voice. And the amount of time that it would take to for most of the time to edit.
Kurt (03:45.318)
Right.
Jason (04:08.714)
an AI article to be more on brand and more correct. Maybe you just save yourself time by hiring a great writer.
Kurt (04:16.636)
The fear used to be that like, oh Google's gonna identify this AI content, they'll know. I don't think they can. There is no tool that could consistently identify AI content beyond... If you take any AI content, throw some typos in it, immediately it'll be like, well that's not AI then. Because the AI doesn't make typos. I have not got... Oh no, I unplugged my headphones. Moment.
Kurt (04:50.212)
I have not gone so far as to start adding typos to my own chat GPT content. Though for sure typos are a hallmark of my actual writing. So what are some of the other common frustrations that you see people facing when engaging in SEO?
Jason (05:12.79)
Well, just to tackle on what you just mentioned real quick. First off, AI detection, it should be challenging. And then if you ask a writer if they were using AI because one tool that we may play around with sometimes originality.ai flags your content as being 70% plus AI. That's kind of a diss towards the writer if they didn't use AI content, but also AI content detection just sounds so expensive from Google's side.
There's a lot of costs when it comes to scraping the web and throwing in an AI detection algorithm to detect or give a score to the possibility of content being AI generated. That just sounds really expensive for a free product essentially being the organic listings. So apologies there. If you could remind me again, was that your question?
Kurt (06:02.856)
What are the common, what are some of the other common frustrations that you see people facing, complaining about, being annoyed with in regards to SEO strategy?
Jason (06:14.386)
Yeah, that Google's constantly switching things up. Like we're in this weird pivotal moment right now where these search engine result pages are constantly changing almost every day, especially in the e-comm space. One search query might give a product grid, an organic product grid, not the PLA ads. Another similar search query might not give it. And if that product grid goes above you, that'll push you down, thus decrease your traffic. If it goes below you, it can push you up.
And it can do the same thing with competitors, too. So a lot of shifts going on right now, which makes historical click through rate data from our side really challenging for forecasting and predictions of what can happen or total traffic potential. That makes things really hard on our side. And then just, I mean, I guess this has never really not been an issue. But SEO is technically all hypothetical and theoretical. There's no proven framework like ads, you know, OK, take this box. You're going to get this. You're going to get.
This expected outcome with SEO you're following frameworks that have been created over the course of a few decades now at this point Hoping that it works and if it doesn't then the SEO is usually good put to blame And the SEOs will probably say no your devs didn't do this, you know, and it's a blame game But there's no proof or guarantee that anything's gonna work
Kurt (07:34.584)
So let's try to illustrate this with an example. What's a scenario like a vertical, a client store, a situation in which you go, this is shooting fish in a barrel, SEO wise, and one where you'd be like, let's not even bother, this will be a nightmare.
Jason (07:52.418)
Brands that want to rank the nightmare one first. I'll go for the number one first because brands a lot of times, especially when it comes to expectation setting, is they want to be positioned for certain keywords or queries or specific search intent because some of the big names are ranking for it and stealing traffic when from a competitive playing field, you might not have the right authority to realistically compete. So that tends to be kind of the nightmare cases where if you fail to manage
I mean, we would turn down a client if we feel like we can't manage those expectations. So making sure you have what's realistic and what's not. If you are though, able to rank competitively in a given in your market, in almost all cases, let's say you're an econ brand that's selling outdoor sports gear, hiking gear or whatnot. If you can create top of the funnel content to drive brand awareness.
drive traffic, but also that top of the funnel content happens to tie in directly to your products you're offering, then that's a huge win. Say how to prevent the back of your heel from scraping from hiking boots and you sell really comfortable hiking boots. There you go. There's a nice segue into conversions. Of course, top of the funnel content is not going to have the same conversion value as more product pages, PLPs, PDPs, but it's a nice segue. Or what about?
how to leave no trace in your camping site when you leave and you sell outdoor garbage bags. As just an example.
Kurt (09:26.552)
Okay, so it sounds like content marketing is the thing here. Is SEO a synonym for content marketing?
Jason (09:37.574)
Oh man, the SEO's answer, it depends. Sometimes yes, sometimes no. We call it SEO driven content marketing because content marketing can come in many forms in different verticals too, not just SEO, paid, email, social. The way we do it is again, SEO is driven by demand. So if there is search demand for a given topic, that gives us one point. If that demand is also very intent driven for what the...
brand offers as great tie in or can help with thought. Leadership can help maybe bring in some links from around the web, can help get some email newsletter signups, then absolutely there is some good value there. So SEO, so content marketing is typically one form of good SEO, especially with top of the funnel. But then you have bottom of the funnel where it'd be awesome for your PLPs and PDPs to rank, but maybe you won't necessarily be.
content marketing to get those more organic visibility.
Kurt (10:40.104)
So what are the within, if we're thinking about an SEO content strategy for a Shopify store, what are the, in your head, what are the key elements that go into that?
Jason (10:54.43)
Yeah, definitely starting first with the transactional pages, the ones that will bring in money and trying to optimize those from these specific PLPs, making sure from a categorical standpoint, they make sense, tying that into specific search demand. So some market demand research, market research, keyword research would be involved. Say again, comfortable hiking shoes, making sure that you and if you have a assortment of products under that specific collection.
Make sure that page is optimized as best as possible. If you could realistically compete, making sure that everything is clear, concise, if there's relevant questions that are frequently asked, maybe throw them in towards the bottom under the grid. And then of course, optimizing some of the product pages for more intent or more long tail versions of search queries where conversion value can be significantly higher. So if I typed in comfortable blue hiking shoes with orange soles as an example.
be a lot easier to rank because you're more specific. And if that search query also has demand, then it's a shoe in. So that's always a good starting point to hit the transactional optimizations first, because that's gonna directly lead to more money. And then work your way up to the top of the funnel and bring in some more winners there.
Kurt (12:06.488)
So it sounds like top of the funnel is article creation. You know, if I have like the ultimate guide to X and then within that, I link to either, I've got remarketing, I've got an email opt-in and I've got links to my products. That's gonna be a reasonable strategy.
Jason (12:27.174)
Yeah, that might be top middle of the funnel. I mean, super top of the funnel is someone really just asking a question and just wanting a very simple answer. And they may not even be in buyer's mode. So that's where good keyword research comes in and helps somebody navigate. For example, someone's typing in how to stop my heel from scraping. There's a good chance they have a solution. They have a problem and they need a solution, whether it's buying a little pad, buying better shoes, buying better socks, whatever it might be, if you can be there to help solve the problem.
then that might be a bit more middle of the funnel, so to speak, but that's a great way of capturing new audiences as well, that you can hit with retargeting ads, you can hit with different places to help build that, continue that brand awareness. Top of the funnel is a great place just for bringing in new audiences from a wider, but relevant audience.
Kurt (13:20.893)
So.
We've got our content strategy top of funnel. We've got on-site technical strategy. My experience with working with SEO consultants on Shopify stores is they'll, you get the initial audit, the resolved bunch of issues, check for a bunch of issues. Really, you know, a lot of just making sure you've got things configured correctly. Like are we in Google Search Console? Let's start there.
And then it turns into a retainer. And then the retainer becomes, once a month, they're like, change this heading tag. Change this heading tag the next month. This is, I've had this happen to me multiple times. Where after like months of just changing heading tag types on various pages, I just tell the client, I go, look, they're just taking your money and putting it in their pocket and then they're like, make that an H2. No, no, okay, now this month that one's an H3.
Okay, now that one's an h1 again. Well, it is a complete waste of everybody's time and then others are like hey, here's Here's recommendations. Here's our strategy. Here's keywords to target. Here's you know, it's very content focused and keyword driven or Once you get into those later phases
Our head- how important are heading tags? This seems to be like 80% of the SEO requests that we get. So it's like change the- just drives me nuts.
Jason (14:51.134)
Yeah, I mean, first off, that's lazy SEO to begin with. There's a lot more than just updating a heading tag. You know, if we have heading to recommendations, we'll just give it in bulk so you don't have to go in each in and out each and every month. But that's just like a one off on page SEO optimization and heading tags. It's very controversial in our space. First off, this is where also devs and SEOs tend to butthead. Sometimes with heading tags is where devs traditionally also like to use headers for styling purposes.
Kurt (15:14.771)
Yes.
Jason (15:20.182)
where technically headers are best used for accessibility first and foremost.
Kurt (15:26.808)
I see you're one of the good ones. Is what I'm hearing. That's, yeah, you're right. We'll see crazy crap in Shopify themes sometimes that it's like, all right, you gotta fix that where it'll be stuff, it's a little bit like H3, class H1. We're like, who did this? Why would you do that?
Jason (15:31.518)
I'm of the... yeah.
Jason (15:42.606)
Yeah, I mean, some things will also wrap the logo only on the homepage in an H1. Also, we've seen that come up a few times on Shopify sites, too. And it makes no sense. It's an image just wrapped in an H1, but accessibility.
Kurt (15:51.412)
quite the choice.
Kurt (15:56.072)
But I guarantee that was done under the misguided idea that this is good for SEO.
Jason (16:03.238)
I guess maybe or just some bad coding. Let's just say misguided SEO. I think that's probably the best one to throw it under.
Kurt (16:11.648)
Also, yeah, certainly an incorrect use of semantic HTML.
Jason (16:16.774)
Yeah, yeah. But we like to consider that heading tests set a good standard for what the page is about. Most importantly, we're a fan of H1s. Some SEOs are like, H1s don't matter. And in the grand scheme, H1s may not matter from an SEO perspective. But if you're a smaller brand that's trying to get their foot in the door and you see a correlation among all of your competitors that are performing really well, have a keyword optimized H1,
might as well fall within the pack and try to again, if there is a correlation, do the same. If your brand is significantly more authoritative and adding in an H1 or changing an H1 is a huge dev load, maybe if it's a custom stack or whatnot, then you may be able to get away with not optimizing the H1 to perfection and try to supplement in other areas. We're a fan of H1s for setting the
Jason (17:17.262)
Accessibility and screen readers, that's how they form H1s. Then H2s are just supplementary, H3 is below that.
Kurt (17:26.544)
And those, you know, we never defined it for the laypeople. Heading tag, H1 is like, this is the first heading tag, H2 is a subheading below that, and on and on. So I've heard you mention keyword research several times. I don't even know where to begin. I don't know what the tools are, I don't know what the approach is. And I, chat GPT, just give me 10 keyword phrases, please. Like, what do I do here? Give me the crash course in keyword research.
Jason (17:31.01)
Hahaha.
Jason (17:55.558)
Yeah, I mean, there's going to be tools that I can recommend. And if you're starting out and you don't have much of a budget or you need to be budget conscious, you can simply just use Google search and just start typing some ideas on what you think your ideal customer might be typing in to Google. And seeing if you notice other brands using similar verbiage in their page titles on their page content, maybe Google suggesting other related search queries or people also ask type questions.
that shows there's a little bit of demand. You can't see the size, but it can be a good starting point to validate some ideas, especially if a lot of competitors and even big names are using very similar words. Again, in the H1, the page title on the page content, it's usually a good sign. Now, beyond that, there are a lot of tools like hrefs.com and summars.com that can help with keyword research. And they have their own tutorials for how to go about it. But essentially what we're trying to do is
locate demand, identify what people are typing in, how many people are typing in on a monthly basis, how many people are clicking from search onto the website. Because sometimes there are searches that don't. If I type in how old is Tom Cruise? It's probably a zero click search query because the answer is going to pop up right there and then in the feature snippet. So understanding as much as possible related to demand search intent, trying to put yourself in the minds of your ideal customer. What might be what?
might they be looking for is probably the greatest starting point in our eyes. I think it's starting point for SEO in general. Can't really do much. I mean, you can, but not going to be optimizing much without at least understanding what the market is asking for.
Kurt (19:39.996)
which is the tool you use.
Jason (19:44.174)
I use both. So my team is split. So we have paid accounts with both hrefs.com and SEMrush. I'm a fan of hrefs, but for certain things I also like semrush.com. I know some people on my team, and especially on the SEO side of things, they're the opposite. They prefer SEMrush and will supplement data maybe with hrefs. It's kind of, and there's a few other tools out there as well. Those are probably the two biggest names in our industry. I think everyone has their own unique value proposition of the tool set.
than others.
Kurt (20:15.676)
Yeah, well, if your team is telling you, like, this is the one we prefer, just go with what they like. Don't force them to use tools that they don't love. And so you're like, alright, flip a coin is the answer, but it's going to be SEMrush or Ahrefs for this. And then for technical SEO, and that's more what we do, because like with Shopify store migrations, it's important. Especially for like older stores. Screaming Frog. Oh my gosh, what?
Jason (20:25.376)
Yeah.
Kurt (20:44.676)
If you're a big dork, what a delightful tool. I love it. Like, give me the real technical spreadsheets, it's scraping, I love that thing.
Jason (20:48.962)
There are updates.
Jason (20:52.914)
And the updates they've been releasing over the last, I would say, year and a half, two years have been awesome. A more recent one being segmentation by page types is a new one, so you can really segment by collections, by product types, by a blog, by other pages that exist on the Shopify site. It's been really, really awesome. There are other tools that we like also. We do very much when we pay for Screaming Frog as well. Another one we like that also has a much cooler UX and gives a lot deeper explanations as to
Possible issues is site bulb. It's a local tool I think they also have one that can run on the server itself But it's a site scraper that gives you some really good insights and some things might be true issues that they label some things might not be but it's a good starting point because Good technical SEO like when we're giving advice must put dev We're not gonna give you a spreadsheet of pass fail pass fail. That doesn't help you We just like to get to nitty-gritty. We personally house everything on notion
Notion.so in databases. So here's an issue. Here's a potential SEO impact. Here's possibly the resources required, which may not always be a dev. Sometimes an editor to fill in a blank meta description could be all, that's enough. And how we would prioritize it from an SEO perspective, just from an SEO perspective. And that's how we like to present it without all the extra fluff. What's the issue, why it's important, and if we have an answer, how to fix it.
Kurt (22:21.072)
I love these tools. And many, like there's Screaming Frog has, did we mention Screaming Frog? Yeah. That has a, there's a free version you could download. Ahrefs has a free plan and they have a free keyword generator tool you can use. SEMrush has a free version you could play with as well. And then SiteBalb on the side, it has a free trial. And so I'll put...
Jason (22:28.432)
Yeah.
Kurt (22:49.88)
I will stick all of those links in the show notes if you've got some free time you want to play with it can't hurt They're kind of fun tools now I I'm driven nuts by stuff that tools that give things their own arbitrary scoring system where it like it feels very subjective and black boxy You know like Google Lighthouse Google PageSpeed gives you like zero to a hundred. You're a bad boy. You fail. I hate that stuff SEM rush and you know other tools will
do similar things like SEMrush will sign an authority score to a site, you know, 0 to 100. Do you pay attention to? Are those scoring systems useful?
Jason (23:32.778)
It's useful if you need to filter out large data sets. It can be a quick measure. We wouldn't use it as a source of truth. Because again, it's just a proprietary biased system for how they go about ranking things. Which again, oftentimes might be inaccurate. SEO has a lot of critical thinking and kind of manually double checking things sometimes. And when it comes to authority scores, domain rating, domain authority from Moz, kind of the OG.
Kurt (23:38.566)
Okay
Kurt (24:02.829)
Oh yeah, we forgot about Moz.
Jason (24:02.888)
in the space.
just like some other people in the industry. Now I respect them, they still produce tons of, no, that was me, I love Moz. They produce tons of really great content. I am a big fan of still nowadays of the content that they produce. Domain authority has kind of been a weird one for them. But in any scenario, if we need to filter out large datasets or get some quick initial guidance of maybe how a site can realistically compete in a given market, it could be a nice, good, quick gauge, but should always be followed up by.
Kurt (24:09.392)
Ouch! Oh my gosh.
Jason (24:36.29)
more critical research as well. If we have a keyword list of like 2000 keywords in a sheet and we wanna see, okay, what's the best opportunities we might be able to filter out by a certain keyword difficulty. So we wanna see just the keywords that are below keyword difficulty of 20. So that just helps a quick filter of large data in a way.
Kurt (24:59.652)
I like, and I've been poking around with these tools. They look very cool. You open it, it's like there's charts, graphs, and all kinds of info. I mean, I just, I feel like I am doing something important here when I've got this kind of very chart-centric dashboard up on my screen. But if I don't know what I'm doing,
How useful is it? Can I get myself into trouble or is it cool just to poke around? I guess these keyword research tools, all right. I would try and figure out, I would use this to try and figure out what's a keyword that is accessible that I can rank for potentially and then I could start trying to work that into product titles.
Jason (25:32.11)
Okay.
Jason (25:49.01)
Yeah, I mean, there's not really much. No, I got it. I got you. You can't really get them to much trouble because they're third party tools. Nothing really going to take place on your website. It's just to guide kind of like you might use statistics for audience or industry research. You might use exploring topics or Google trends, whatever it might be for market audience research. This is just another research tool to help you and guide your SEO strategy.
Kurt (25:49.204)
I don't know where the question went. That was just like, I just went.
Jason (26:16.502)
won't make you break an SEO strategy. It's really kind of how you use the information and how you use the data. That's different.
Kurt (26:24.172)
I, oh man, I got even more tools I got to include in here now. We're going to get Google Trends in there, forgot about that one.
Jason (26:30.523)
They're gonna be real happy you're dropping all their names.
Kurt (26:34.66)
Statista that was for Statista man the if you're like, I wonder X Whatever crazy thing you want to know Statista will be like you could sign up for it. I've got a free trial You can go through the thing and you can answer with real Quantified data from them just about anything you'd want to know like one time. I was like, alright, what's you know? What's what's the state of?
e-commerce alcohol delivery and I'd your questions around that Statista was like alright here you go I mean you could even send them the request and when you have the paid account they're like oh This is what you're looking for it could be quite incredible Yeah
Jason (27:16.01)
Yeah, they're a really great database of, like you said, data from all around. We'll use them to reference in our clients' articles as well as sources of truth and information and we can utilize that as well even just for link building and stuff. It's like, hey, you have an outdated statistic on your site. Our site has an updated statistic.
Jason (27:38.702)
still linked to it.
Kurt (27:39.176)
Oh, and then you're like, hey, heads up, update this, and if you need a site of source, you could just link back to us.
Jason (27:46.626)
Pretty much, yeah. In a way, yeah.
Kurt (27:47.86)
Clever.
So with, we're talking about tools here, and like you've dropped a whole bunch on me, I could spend the rest of the day playing with these SEO tools. With Shopify itself, are there apps, like Shopify specific apps or tools that you would use?
Jason (28:10.814)
Yeah, the biggest for SEO purposes, there's two I can drop. One being SEO manager or similar apps. There's a whole bunch of similar apps to SEO manager. The biggest one for us and what we're looking for in an SEO app is one that allows us to customize the page title, customize the meta description, if needed, customize the canonical tag in a URL, as well as have the capabilities to
No index, a specific page, so it would add a no index tag to the page, which tells Google, hey, you can crawl this page, but don't add it to your inbox index. Don't serve it up to people with the addition of remove from sitemap so that Google really has no way of really adding it to their index. That could be useful for landing pages or short-term promotional pages that may not serve true value for organic users. Those are the big things we're
There's a whole bunch of tools that can do that. We've historically kind of recommended SEO Manager, but I'm sure there might even be better ones.
Kurt (29:17.712)
You know, I'm thrilled with that. SEO Manager was one of our oldest and longest running sponsors years ago, not currently. And it was one of the earliest Shopify apps. That's Josh Hyland and Rhianne Boitler were created SEO Manager. Yeah, that's a good one. That's an OG app.
Jason (29:33.778)
Yeah. And the support was really good. Yeah, I remember having an email chain with their founders about some technical aspect and they were very communicative. They didn't need to speak with somebody like me. And this is years ago, but we're just nerding out on SEO Q&A back and forth about can this happen? Can this happen? Can this happen? And they were very good with it.
Kurt (29:55.716)
Oh yeah, no, they're good. All right, so include that in the show notes as well. With Shopify, I don't hear it anymore, but like five, 10 years ago, when Shopify was still up and coming, and well, not five years ago, but further out, and oftentimes people would compare it to WordPress. It's a very different tool, but it would be like.
Got this reputation which I think was from like disgruntled WordPress devs just going shop files bad for SEO And you go why and then no one could tell you why is it bad? What is what's your opinion here like good bad agnostic it's just a tool
Jason (30:41.086)
I guess more agnostic. It depends on the resources you have available. You're gonna get more flexibility in WordPress because you can literally customize every single little thing. It's completely open source. At the same time, that also makes it more susceptible to errors. Maybe by required WordPress updates, things can break. Now Shopify is great and Shopify does rank. You know, there's some things we love about Shopify and there's some things we don't, may not love as much.
But Shopify sites are pretty SEO friendly and they're only getting better. It's not as fast as other initiatives that they're running, but it's way better than it used to be in terms of what you can and can't do. But they very much rank very well. You can even go to Google, we've done this, what are the top 100 Shopify sites? And you'll see some pretty big brands on there that are ranking some data collection site. So I'm pretty agnostic. Again, if you have the resources.
You can go with WordPress and WooCommerce, which is the biggest e-comm partner in WordPress as a plugin.
Kurt (31:46.576)
Yeah, WooCommerce, it's like a e-com plug-in suite for WordPress. I'm doing a, we're doing a migration from WooCommerce to Shopify right now. And very convenient to be able to just export everything and then drop it into Shopify with Matrixify. No, we were, 2008, we were WordPress developers before Shopify. So I'm familiar with it. The, and it's like, yeah, it's so open-ended.
Jason (31:50.314)
Yeah.
Jason (32:10.347)
What made you switch?
Kurt (32:16.144)
That's how you can get yourself into trouble with it. So what, like what's the, oh, well, we do the Shopify projects and we get done and go, well that was easy. And then we'd like go back to banging our head against the walls with WordPress, and PHP and Lampstacks and all that stuff. And then we do a Shopify project, go, that was easy. And then like by the third time, one of us finally went, wait, why are we doing anything else?
Jason (32:19.979)
What made you want to switch?
Kurt (32:44.656)
You know, maybe it's not that it's easy, it's that we're good at it, it's well documented, like, this is the good fit, so let's stop fighting it, and just only do this. And of course that, anyway, combined with the timing, was the best decision I ever made.
Jason (33:00.926)
Yeah, and you're betting, I guess, Nicole and Shopify on their growth, which has been going up and up.
Kurt (33:06.32)
Yeah. So within... Like, certainly there's... There'll be some SEO limitation or some annoyance that you have. Like, what's the one that consistently you're like, ugh, I just wish this worked differently.
Jason (33:21.918)
Yeah, I think just being bound by a CMS and their server can sometimes cause issues, especially when it comes to maybe like we talk about page speed, loading priorities, what's being loaded and when is something that may not be as easy to optimize on Shopify or even time to first bite. For example, those are things that you can't work directly with a host to help optimize, but you are kind of limited there.
So many other things are their blog and their blog structure requirements, especially from a permalink standpoint where everything has to be slash blog slash by default, it's news. Um, most brands hopefully switch that up a little bit for branding, but those are some of the big ones is you are limited by CMS. I think sometimes I don't remember if you can actually answer this for the longest time you weren't able to
modify the robots.txt file for a crawling priority. Now, it happened within, had to have been last year at least, right?
Kurt (34:21.136)
Oh, you can modify that now. Yeah.
Probably the last two years. I think is when that happened
Jason (34:28.267)
God damn it. Okay. Yeah.
Kurt (34:31.504)
But yeah, they'll be, I have made modifications to robots.txt where it's like, all right, these are pages. And of course you have to be careful with it because if you're not, you could very easily just get Google to ignore your entire site wholesale. So don't just play with robots.txt willy nilly. But yeah, it'll be like, all right, well here's, you have, our thinking was you have a crawl budget where Google's only, it costs money to.
Jason (34:45.726)
disallow Googlebot, yeah.
Kurt (35:00.564)
to run a computer, right? And so you can only take, Google can only visit so many pages at a time before when you look at this, you know, across the entire internet, this becomes very, very costly energy intensive operation. And so your site has a crawl budget. And so we would, you know, we could use robots.txt and go like, these are pages that we absolutely do not care. We don't think there is no value to Google ever seeing these. So we're just gonna say robots.txt, you're gonna ignore these, disallow.
would be, yeah, that would be our robot's use case. And I'm trying to think of like specific examples, but. Well, we saw some like ref-
Jason (35:37.294)
I mean, they're default blocks, search queries, and search filters that are being used. So the default one's also pretty solid.
Kurt (35:41.712)
Yes, yeah, yeah. Yeah, it's like a lot of the dynamically generated stuff.
Kurt (35:50.305)
There is an interesting issue, debate, discussion point with Shopify URL structures. So the default for many, many years was I have a product. If I visit the product, my site is example.com slash product slash t-shirt. If I navigate to a collection first, I go...
the t-shirts collection. So now I'm in example.com slash collections slash t-shirt. And I cannot change the URL structure. I could change handles, but the URL structure is set in stone. And then I click the t-shirt. I'm on the same t-shirt, same page, but now my URL is example.com slash collections slash t-shirts slash t-shirt. And so I can get to the same page two different ways with two different URLs. And
Oh my, oh no, that's duplicate content. I mean, you say like duplicate content and merchants clutch their pearls. That's a very terrifying phrase for some people. But then later, and that was like, this was just how it defaulted in Shopify, official themes and templates, and so that became how it was done. Then, in the last one or two years, that disappeared. It was called like the in collection URL.
And so on Shopify Supply, I think of that as like, this is their cutting edge demo store. That's their swag store. I am wearing a hoodie from Shopify Supply right now that they gifted me. And on that store, I noticed it does not do that collections thing anymore. It just goes straight to the product. So what's the right answer there? Because some themes will do it one way now and some will do it the other. What's the right answer?
advantage, disadvantage thoughts. Maybe it doesn't matter. Who cares?
Jason (37:45.802)
Here's my opinion, which also I don't think my opinion is that unique, is that will it absolutely make or break your SEO by having the. Collections plus products in the permanent link. No. Can it be a way of optimizing performance of your site? Yes. So both URLs, the longer version with collections and products and the shorter one, just products, typically the longer version would have the canonical set to just the product version, which is telling Google, Hey,
This URL exists, but the true URL is the shorter version without collections appended to it. So all ranking SEO value, throw to the products page directly. Now what, correct, with the, a good, and that's default actually with Shopify. So no matter which theme you use.
Kurt (38:27.824)
with a canonical tag.
Kurt (38:32.648)
I was gonna say, yeah, that it does, these themes will have, the themes that exhibited this behavior would have the canonical tag, and they would also have it because, um, you would have like, I'm on page two of a collection, well that's still the same collection, and so it's like, oh, that's, that page two is actually canonical to the first one. I think. Yeah.
Jason (38:52.446)
Yeah, the longer version just canonicals over to the shorter version in terms of character length. But say for example, you're using a tool like Screaming Frog, and maybe you can think of Screaming Frog like Googlebot, it's crawling your website. You're throwing your domain into Screaming Frog and then it starts showing up all of the same products, especially if the same product appears in multiple collections, so many variations of the same product that it's eating up crawl time.
Kurt (38:57.168)
Yes, yes, yes.
Jason (39:21.682)
Speaking of crawl budget, it's eating up your data set. You're getting a lot of duplicate information. It just helps have a nice, clean information architecture. From a SEO equity standpoint, when things are linking to a given page, whether internally or externally, going direct to the source and not through a canonical is always the best. Making sure, again, Google sometimes miss canonicals too. And...
In Search Console, there's the user declared canonical and Google selected. So they can actually ignore your set canonical sometimes.
Kurt (39:57.78)
That's what's so tough about Google. They're like, here's the best practices. We may or may not care.
Jason (40:02.731)
Yeah, I mean, like they even say like user declared. So you're declaring the proper canonical. Well, we choose something different. Sometimes it actually works in benefit. Yeah, sometimes people are wrong, but it just helps preserve crawl budget, having the shorter URL, making sure that Google is visiting the most important pages when they do, let's say they're only going to spend so much time on a site, making sure that they see each unique page as often as much as possible.
Kurt (40:09.813)
Like, look, we think you're wrong.
Jason (40:30.218)
is the best route just leads to a very clean information architecture. Again, the canonicals ensure that it's not a make it or break it. And if you don't fix it up, it's going to break your SEO, but it just helps keep the information architecture super clean. So if someone happens to go to your page or a product through a canonical or through the longer version, through a collection, they want to link to it. That main product is getting the true value.
And then if you don't do it and people start linking or you have internal links going, then you've got to add redirects and try to bulk replace internal links. Like that's one of the first things also we try to classify when we fix this issue with our clients is, hey, here's a lot of articles that are internally linking to collections plus product URLs on your site. Probably want to swap them out. The redirect we want to do also by default, but yeah, we got to swap these out.
Kurt (41:24.804)
The catch with the redirects is you can't redirect an active URL. So if that URL would have worked, then the URL redirect just gets ignored. And Shafai does it to be like, hey, we're going to save you from yourself, stupid. And it's like, no, that's actually what I wanted to do. You know, there are like a handful of weird edge cases where a URL to redirect on a live page is something we might want. And no, doesn't allow it.
Jason (41:50.766)
But if you fix the collection permalink structure, that should negate that, right? Am I correct? Okay. So if you fixed the collection of product permalink, then go ahead and do the redirects and everything should go as needed.
Kurt (41:56.784)
Yes. Yeah.
Kurt (42:04.016)
I think the collection would have to be...
One of them would have to be unpublished, like the handle can't match. Or it'll just override it.
Yeah, I could try it.
Jason (42:17.502)
Oh, unless Shopify might default redirect also the old collection to product. Look at us Shopify experts. Yeah.
Kurt (42:25.992)
So I want to... Yeah, yeah, already, like, you can see where this stuff gets squishy and vague very quickly.
Kurt (42:37.964)
Rich, as long as we're doing technical stuff, rich schema data. This is where we add extra code to a page to describe what's on it. And there's standards for it. So it'll be like, this is how you describe a breadcrumb, a logo, a collection, a product. And the product's the important one we want. And so one of our standard operating procedure for look for opportunities on a site and also
Is that rich schema data there? Will this pass in Google's rich snippet testing tool? It feels like I'm doing something important and useful. Does any of this matter? Am I wasting my time? How does rich schema help, if at all?
Jason (43:28.298)
Yeah, so there's two aspects to schema. One of them is the nerdier one, which I'm not gonna dive too much into, but that's the semantic web. It's just a giant collaboration of entities and tying as many things together as possible. Like Tom Cruise was married to this person, he's also the star of Mission Impossible. He also believes in this ideology, whatever it might be. I don't know, I just don't want them coming outside of my house. I don't want them popping up outside of my place and staring at me, but.
Kurt (43:48.932)
Which one would that be? Yeah, I forgot too.
Jason (43:57.99)
With that, it just helps provide more information about what a page is about. And it just gives search engines and it's not just Google. The Semantic Web is a collaboration between W3, the founders of the internet, Bing, and Google and some other big search engines. So that's the nerdier part. But with proper implementation of schema, you can get these little snippets below your search listing in Google search that includes, if you have reviews on your site, star ratings.
Average star count. Average price in stock, out of stock, shipping price or free shipping and some other more recent ones when tied correctly in with Google Merchant Center. You can get even like a coupon code below if you have a good promotion going on as well. So there are also apps that can add in, like if you have a review schema, a review app like YoPo, for example, they can include product schema by default.
But then at the same time, if you have SEO manager, which can also help include product schema, you might have confusion for Google as to which one might be the best or most accurate. And one of them also might not be 100% accurate, especially if it's just pulling in information from the page content. So long story short, good product schema can help increase your clicks from search because it catches someone's eye.
It's just more real estate on the page.
Kurt (45:27.032)
Okay, so if possible to implement, I should be doing it.
Jason (45:31.998)
Yes, but also consult with the dev on proper implementation to ensure that you don't have duplicate, missing important information, because if things aren't structured properly, schema, technically, the best way of delivering schema is through a coding format called JSON-LD. You could also do micro data, but that's kind of a bit outdated. Google prefers JSON-LD format. And if one of the entities is incorrect or a comma is missing, the whole JSON-LD code can become invalid. So that's where apps can help significantly.
but also if you hard code it and have fields within the schema code being dynamically populated by aspects from that specific product page, that just, I think personally is the best way to go and not rely on apps because there are some times where apps do things that, like I've spoken with the old people before about things that aren't logical. And they're like, oh, sorry, it's just the way we do it. But with some of their other, not their reviews widget.
Kurt (46:26.576)
Yeah, I have noticed that. That's like, when you're using apps to implement those things, it can get a little maddening very quickly when you're like running it through the rich results tool and it's like, hey, this is listed in here twice and you discover like, oh, that's how they did that. All right. I won't name names, but I've seen what you're talking about. Okay.
Jason (46:45.886)
Yeah, and schema and rich results for the longest time have almost been exclusive to specific product pages. But now with seller ratings and Google Merchant Center, you can get them and a little bit of a snippet in your collection pages and your specific PLPs as well, which will show your overall seller rating, which Google has so much documentation on it. So you can go to Google seller ratings, Google Merchant Center, Google free listings. Those are all things that are a good source of information.
Kurt (47:16.036)
The moment you bring up the specter of Google Merchant Center. We we got to talk about Google shopping Where how does if at all how does SEO intersect with Google shopping?
Jason (47:29.542)
Now, more important than ever with Google's new release, especially in the US, of free listings, as they call it, which they got to think of a better name. It's just called free listings in Google Merchant Center. It's the product grid.
Kurt (47:42.008)
Are they free? I could just use Google product, Google shopping for free. Like, what's the catch here?
Jason (47:47.262)
Yeah, I mean, you then you I mean, the catch is you have to work with a good dev to ensure the product feed is perfection. Thankfully, Merchant Center has a good integration with Shopify.
Kurt (47:54.58)
Oh, I know. That's, I've torn my hair out trying to troubleshoot those Google shopping feeds for Google Merchant Center because it's always very vague about it's like, hey, there's an issue. Oh, yeah. What is it? Hey, there's an issue. OK, here we go.
Jason (48:11.338)
I was just in a client site yesterday and they're in the SA beauty space, kind of just a broader beauty space for men. And some of their shampoo is being labeled as disapproved for being a prescription drug. Meanwhile, it's not a prescription drug. It's their own formula of things that are not illegal. So they do screw things up quite often. But yeah, you can get free listings. You just need a product feed.
you can have the option of letting Google scrape your website and use your website as a product feed, but almost nine times out of 10, we see issues there and wish they have a hard time using that. So if you're on Shopify, there's the Google Merchant Center. I think that's the name of it. The app integrates it very nicely as long as everything is configured properly in Shopify from the backend. And that just makes it easier to get free listings and free visibility in Google search. The free, not the PLA ads, the product listing ads, let's say
sponsored with tiny letters, but the actual grids then now appear in certain e-commerce queries in the search results.
Kurt (49:18.448)
So they the official app is it's the awkwardly named Google and YouTube channel is what you add in Shopify And then that both handle you probably haven't installed Because it adds your GA4 layer, but that'll also handle The data feed to sync products to Google Merchant Center And so I'll include that in the show notes You got a tap or swipe up on the episode art get to the show notes because this episode
more than usual has quite a few links to resources in here, which is excellent. Okay.
Jason (49:55.19)
What kind of SEO would I be if I didn't ensure that there's links going to other places, I guess, I don't know. Pumping up our industry.
Kurt (50:01.096)
The, yeah, it's all internal links, external links. We got 301 links, 302, we got all your links, all kind of links here. What?
Jason (50:08.942)
As long as there's no 4XX, we're good.
Kurt (50:11.796)
final topic here back links we haven't even touched on backlinks how important is that and do I have any hope of all at all of getting a meaningful number of backlinks to a site
Jason (50:25.258)
Oh, Fiverr is the best place to get backlinks, no I'm kidding. Please don't, my bad for mentioning it. Backlinks are still very much important and more important in more competitive industries where you might need an upper edge. So everything we've been talking about up until now is technically in that larger classification of on-page SEO. All actions, optimizations, that's taking place on the website.
Kurt (50:27.3)
Okay, ow! See, that's the link I'm not including.
Jason (50:54.274)
But then the other half of it would be theoretically off-page SEO aspects taking place off of your website. On-page SEO is great for signaling relevance, what you do, what you sell, who you serve. But if you and your competitors are all serving the same thing, how can Google classify which one is better than the other? And that's where trust comes in via off-page SEO. So if I say, hey, Kurt, you have a great plumber, like, yeah, Jason, use ABC Plumber. I'm going to trust ABC Plumber.
because they came from your recommendation. So good quality links, which we can dissect in just a moment, going back, good quality links, going back to your site is very much still an SEO ranking factor that's sometimes downplayed by mostly Google spokespeople a little bit, because people game too much and get spammy with it. So I get that part. But it's hard. It's an initiative. We have a whole d***.
We call it digital PR because that's the new nomenclature for backlink building nowadays because the old school stigma is with backlink building. We have a whole department dedicated to it like 100%. That's all they do is helping devise new strategies to build links for our clients. So it's a lot of work and very important.
Kurt (52:05.256)
Give me an example. There's like tons of ways to do it. But give me just give me one example of a link building strategy.
Jason (52:15.018)
I mean, we've already touched on kind of the you can put if you put an into is called the statistic link building. If you have an article that dives into everything, someone needs to know about hiking shoes and all the statistics market demand, how the shape of the shoe has shifted against your heel, everything, the sole quality and other people in articles are writing about statistics, but those statistics are from like 2005. You could.
And it's best to do this in bulk and there are tools and scraper tools to help with this. But emailing say, hey, notice you're referencing the statistic from 2005. We've actually updated it and done some research to show that this is the correct number. We've sourced all the information on our website, so you can feel free to check it out. And if you think it'll be helpful for your readers, feel free to use our site as a source. Now, it might be obvious like, oh, you're just doing this for link building.
But if the content's good and the source of information is good, why wouldn't a site want to link to your site? You know, I.
Kurt (53:20.545)
Is it helpful to be upfront about it? Be like, yeah, this is link building, but also this helps both of us.
Jason (53:25.918)
If they ask, sure. I'm like, you know, no one's going to spend time emailing someone else outside promotion requirements. So you're trying to promote yourself. So it's not out of the realm of possibility. And it's not also unrealistic. I mean, our site, we publish content on Break the Web and I have no problem linking to a source of information, even if it's a direct competitor, you know, that's backing up information that's stated. So you got some stuff to go, you're just trying to get a backlink, but yeah.
We also have good information on the site that's more accurate, more up to date, and could in fact be more beneficial to their readers of the other site. So that's one again, I'm getting real broad in it, but one way of nothing likes.
Kurt (54:08.468)
Uh, yeah, and that one's it's like it's so time-consuming And it's a lot of being ignored and you know told no Or getting called a spammer But i'm sure that has That has the benefit because every vote or every link in it essentially is a vote of confidence in the site, especially when it's from Using the right anchor text or you know from sites and related categories
that helps with your ranking, I'd have to think.
Jason (54:41.534)
Yeah, absolutely. Again, we consider it the trust factor. Relevance on your website, trust out of your website. Again, it's like content. Everyone can write a really awesome article that may in fact be really good. Quality of the article or being better than the competitors is subjective anyways. People say it when it comes to content. Links definitely help.
Kurt (54:46.004)
Trust factor, yes.
Kurt (55:02.76)
And certainly, like, the link's source makes the difference.
Kurt (55:11.496)
I mean, you could get... So if I can get links from, like, actual news organizations, that's more valuable than, you know, like, some random blog.
Jason (55:11.753)
I would think so, yeah.
Jason (55:23.422)
Yeah, here's how we classify it. We say that we build links that we're proud to share with our clients with the metrics being that Google loves social bookmarks and you remember back in the day throwing things on dig, dig. Yeah, we're going to take a big throwback. Don't make it a link to dig. Oh man, wow, squid you, but they help. I mean, I forgot what we're talking about.
Kurt (55:31.016)
So it's not blog comment spam.
Kurt (55:38.645)
Oh, dig.
Forgot about dig. I'll just post it to FARC.
Jason (55:53.522)
Links. Oh, we build links that we're proud to share that Google likes also because we can see through a trust or semantics that Google themselves is sending them non branded traffic. So we already kind of good in Google's eyes and thematically relevant to our clients. So it makes sense in the site is kind of relevant. So if you have a site about parks in Montana, then getting a link from parks in Montana to our hiking boots article. Is thematically relevant.
So it'll pass some good SEO value. And again, if they themselves are getting some really good backlinks, some good SEO traffic, that gets passed on to you.
Kurt (56:30.972)
Got it. Makes sense. Okay. Where can we learn more about you? I want to hire Jason Berkowitz to rub some SEO on my site. Where do I go?
Jason (56:37.677)
Yeah.
Jason (56:41.322)
If I had a daughter, you can find us at BreakTheWeb.Agency. We have a dedicated Shopify SEO landing page because we only work with DTC brands. So that's BreakTheWeb.Agency slash Shopify dash SEO is one way to find us. We can just go to Google and type in BreakTheWeb.
Kurt (56:59.864)
I will break the web dot agency slash Shopify dash SEO is currently a 404 page.
Jason (57:06.482)
It's gonna, I just remembered that we changed the promo link earlier this week. I got to redirect it. We just launched it like two weeks ago. So I got to add the 301, but you can still go to it. It'll 301 over. Now it's a slash industries slash Shopify dash SEO.
Kurt (57:13.658)
Okay.
Kurt (57:17.724)
Alright, I will.
Kurt (57:24.692)
Does that work? Okay, got it. I just wanna make sure I not like, in an SEO episode, linking to a broken link is the first thing in the show notes. Yeah, I just stuck it in there. So, and we'll cut that. I guess we'll just cut that part out. Okay, beautiful. I appreciate your time. I enjoyed the chat. I, it's always fun to nerd out about geeky things. And, you know,
Jason (57:32.43)
And you can add the industries parent. Okay. Sweet.
Kurt (57:51.74)
Feeling feeling more confident about my SEO knowledge and skills here And I think I'm gonna waste a couple hours today playing with all these tools you shared
Jason (58:01.134)
and I'm sure they'll be very happy you did. But I appreciate you having me on, Kurt. It was awesome.
Kurt (58:04.933)
My pleasure.