"If I hadnt started with SEO, I'd be out of business"
Good SEO and content strategy can help ecommerce store owners be less reliant on paid traffic.
Do you rely on paid ads to get traffic? What happens if you get banned from running ads or traffic dries up?
That's exactly what happened to today's guest. Without Facebook and Google ads to generate traffic, he had to figure out an SEO strategy to replace the lost traffic to his eBike store. The solution? Study affiliate marketers and apply their strategies to ecommerce.
The Unofficial Shopify Podcast
John Murphy
Kurt Elster: Today on The Unofficial Shopify Podcast, we are discussing what happens when the traffic store, when Google and Facebook dropkick you from their platform and say you can’t run ads for your otherwise successful store with us anymore.
Sound Board Clip: DENIED!
Kurt Elster: What do you do? What happens then? Well, today we’re joined by a merchant who is a drop shipper, is a successful drop shipper, was successful with Google-Facebook ads, got kicked off, and then developed an SEO strategy that entirely replaced that traffic. Only now, of course, it’s more profitable than ever, I imagine, since he no longer has to worry about the customer acquisition cost from PPC ads, so maybe getting kicked off these platforms is a blessing in disguise. I mean, I’m sure we’d rather have access to it, but…
So, joining me today is John Murphy from eBikeGeneration.com, and he is going to talk us through the horror of being banned and what he did about it instead, as well as a couple of other things, because he has an interesting store and story to tell. Mr. John Murphy, thank you for joining us.
John Murphy: Thanks, Kurt. It’s a pleasure.
Kurt Elster: All right, let’s establish the… How long have you been in eCommerce?
John Murphy: I got the store open in mid-2017, but I really wasn’t making any sales until 2018. I think I made two sales in 2017.
Kurt Elster: And when we say sales, what are we selling?
John Murphy: I sell eBikes to hunters. Not originally, I was just selling eBikes and online drop shipping eBikes in the U.S. But I eventually then niched it down to just serve hunters, and I just decided to try to become polarizing and just own the hunter space for eBikes.
Kurt Elster: All right, so you start… Well, initially, why did you pick eBikes? This is your first drop shipping store, your first eCommerce endeavor ever.
John Murphy: Yeah, yeah. I was just looking for a way out of my day job. I did the usual thing of going online and searching how to make money online. I read The 4-Hour Workweek-
Kurt Elster: As we all did.
John Murphy: As everybody, yeah. As every drop shipper has. That’s usually the big catalyst, as well, especially for drop shippers. And yeah, I just went down that rabbit hole of YouTube videos, and how to build a store, and a few courses along the way, and yeah, then that was my first store.
Kurt Elster: And what was it about eBikes? How did you pick that?
John Murphy: So, the course I was following along with at the time, it sort of mapped out a certain criteria. Not too heavy, not too complicated to explain, expensive enough for it to be a decent margin, enough suppliers in the U.S., enough demand in the U.S., stuff like that. Like for example, are there lots of competitors? Are there enough suppliers that you can get enough suppliers, maybe be rejected by a few, but still have enough to open a store?
So, eBikes just sort of fit the criteria, really, and they were sort of getting popular at the time, so it just made sense.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I was gonna say in 2017, you probably still had to explain to a lot of people what an eBike was versus-
John Murphy: I still do.
Kurt Elster: Really?
John Murphy: Yeah, sometimes.
Kurt Elster: Even in 2021, they’re still like, “What in the heck?”
John Murphy: Yeah. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: How do you describe an eBike?
John Murphy: Well, basically it’s a bicycle just with the addition of like a low-powered motor and a battery to power that motor so you can propel yourself like a scooter, so like a moped, without pedaling it, or you can get assisted bike pedaling.
Kurt Elster: The pedal assist is the fun. So, I’ve ridden these many times. The pedal assist is the best part because it makes you feel superhuman.
John Murphy: That’s exactly how it feels. That’s how I like to explain it because there are motors in the back wheel, which is like a rear hub motor, and those are like the lower end for… They’re not gonna climb mountains or anything, but they’re fun and you feel like you’re being pushed from behind like a kid as your dad would, running, pushing from behind. But when you have a bike with the mid motor, the motor that’s down in between the pedals, and you pedal, it feels like you’ve got superhuman legs. It’s great. It’s very enjoyable.
Kurt Elster: I’ve only ridden on the hub bikes, and they were a ton of fun, so I can only imagine the more proper ones are probably a blast. And so, initially it was general, and then you hit on, “Maybe I should niche down.” And so, you went with hunters, which at the time, like, well, that’s strange. But then when you see the site, you make the argument for it, and obviously the site’s very successful. But how did that come about?
John Murphy: Well, basically, so I thought I was the only one with the original idea of coming up with eBikes as a specific niche or market, and quickly afterwards I discovered that everybody was having the same idea at the same time, and we all just looked like cookie cutters of each other, all using very similar themes, all selling the same bikes, with the same stock photos, the same prices, and it just didn’t really seem to work for me.
So, I started looking at what I was already selling and there were one or two brands that the brands were hunters. They were hunters building bikes for hunters and they were the higher end. They were better quality, which more expensive, margins were better, and I figured I could kill two birds with one stone here. I could just sell the higher margin bikes and not sell the lower end bikes that also comes with a lot more customer service and issues, because when people are buying an electric bike and their budget is $1,500, that’s a lot of money if that’s your budget, because that’s all you have to spend, but that realistically is the lower end, so you’re gonna start getting some of the more mechanical issues can arise with the lower end bicycles.
So, by going with the higher end bicycles that are more expensive, I need to sell less of them for the same profits and I was also eliminating a lot of the customer service, because it was all on me. It just made sense to go that way.
Kurt Elster: Selling eBikes, drop shipping them solo, and you’re largely selling them in the U.S., and you personally do not live in the U.S., do you?
John Murphy: No. I live in Southern Italy in a region called Puglia.
Kurt Elster: Oh, wow.
John Murphy: Yeah. Yeah, it’s cool. I’ve been living in Italy for like 18 years.
Kurt Elster: And that is not an Italian accent, I take it.
John Murphy: No, I’m Irish. From Dublin.
Kurt Elster: All right, so quite the geographic hopping here. Honestly, if it were me, I would be terrified selling an expensive, high touch, hard to ship product like this, and you had the foresight to go, “Well, if I go up market with it, I could sell the exact same thing, nearly exactly the same thing.” But as soon as you raise the price and you go higher up market, okay, the product becomes better, the quality of customer may become better, often it does, and we end up reducing both customer service issues and some of the profitability issues that are part of drop shipping.
And so, from there, well, did you have any experience with bikes, eBikes, or hunting prior to this?
John Murphy: So, I’m an animal lover. I’m not a hunter. I mean, in Ireland hunting really isn’t a thing, so I know in the U.S. it is, and I’ve been submerged into the industry for the last few years, so I know it well, but I’m not a hunter personally, and I didn’t… I had never ridden an eBike I think until like 2019.
Kurt Elster: You’d been selling them for two years and you’d never ridden one?
John Murphy: Yeah, yeah. You can learn about anything. You can learn the theory about anything. And then anything I couldn’t answer, I would just give my best, “I don’t know the answer, but I’ll let you know.” And then follow up. You can figure anything out, really.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. I mean, fundamentally, you’re right. It is not that complicated if you’re reasonably mechanically inclined. You can figure this out. I say this as someone who worked… I’m a SRAM certified bike mechanic. I worked in a bike shop for a couple years part time in my 20s.
Okay, so this business, you found the product, you found the niche, you’ve got the branding, miraculously you were not into either of the hunting or the eBikes, necessarily, but no one knew, and no one cared, because you were providing great customer service, and information, and that’s what I love about this site. It sounds like you were generating your traffic with Google ads, Facebook ads. Isn’t it… You were in the drop shipping community, and that’s like the thing they teach you is find the product and then just run Google ads and cross your fingers.
John Murphy: Yeah, basically they’re like… When you’re learning how to set up a store on Shopify or whatever else, and it’s for drop shipping, it’s basically pick a niche, recruit suppliers, build a great store, and start running Google ads. Google Shopping, mostly. And then Facebook also if it makes sense for the audience. And that’s it. And then it just… Once you figure out how to do it well, just scale it from there, but it’s Google ads and Facebook. That’s all. That’s the method.
Also, because when you’re teaching people how to build a business online, like the course creators for drop shipping, obviously the sooner the student makes their first sale, the more of a reassurance it is that it actually works, it’s a thing, it’s not some sort of a scam, so obviously they want you to hit the ground running, start running ads, and get your first sale. And that is the quickest way to your first sale, so yeah, so there’s no other methods or anything taught.
Kurt Elster: And this had been working for you.
John Murphy: I mean, I was profitable, but I really wasn’t… I wasn’t able to quit my job at that stage. I was working for General Electric in finance and just that was the day job, and I was making sales, but it was like, “Am I breaking even? Is there a little bit of profit left?” It was never anything that… It was never a massive success or anything just running ads, but without it I wouldn’t have had any traffic, so I was always just trying to tweak the ads and try to just get a little bit more out of it.
Kurt Elster: So, you had the taste of success in that you were able to push six figures of revenue through this store.
John Murphy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But it was at essentially breakeven or like minor profit.
John Murphy: Yeah. I think that first full year in 2018 I was running ads for the whole year and yeah, I came away with something like $33,000 net profit. Something like that, yeah. So, that wasn’t gonna replace my income or anything, but it was a sign that it could work. I just had to figure out how to do it better.
Kurt Elster: And then, in May 2019, you get kicked off Google and Facebook in the same week?
John Murphy: The same week. The ban hammer came down and there was no… They don’t even tell you why. It’s like, “Talk to the hand,” scenario, you know? There’s no… It’s very hard to get back. Yeah, and I didn’t know how to, which was… It came at a really bad time because I was getting around to the point where I was thinking I could probably quit my job now, you know? Sales are starting to come up. Because in the eBike business, in the season, March is when sales start to come in and there’s that bell curve where it’s like March, April, May, and it’s like, “Okay, yeah. It’s all going. I can probably quit my job by end of summer.” And then all my traffic went away basically in a week, and it was like, “Oh, crap. I was so close to leaving my job and maybe I will never be able to leave my job. I’m gonna have to figure something out.”
It’s a roller coaster, you know? It was very, very like a cold shower.
Kurt Elster: Which, I have access to your store. Would you like to know traffic in April 2019 versus July 2019 or June 2019?
John Murphy: Yeah, go for it, because I don’t have those numbers at the top of my head.
Kurt Elster: All right. April 2019, 20,000 store sessions hit that store, and that’s just that spring, so you know it’s about to come up.
John Murphy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Then you get banned. In June, you had 273 visitors.
John Murphy: Yeah. I didn’t think it was that bad, but yeah, like I said, it was a cold shower. It was rough. And those 272 could have been me just to make sure the store was actually working.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. It just drops off a cliff suddenly, and so you panicked I assume. It’s like step one, panic. You start looking for ways to undo it, discover you can’t. There’s no recourse here.
John Murphy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: And then honestly, for me, I’d pack it in.
John Murphy: Yeah. Well, I mean, I really, really wanted to quit my job. I’d been trying. I’d been doing this since like July 2017 and it was just starting to work. It was too tempting to just throw it in and then just go back to the day job, because I resented my job at that stage. I wanted out. So, it was like it would have been too hard to just go back to the day job and go, “Okay, that didn’t work.” So, no, I wasn’t gonna throw in the towel.
Kurt Elster: All right, so what next? Where do you go from there?
John Murphy: Well, there’s only really one way to go, is to try and get organic traffic. If you can’t get paid traffic, you have to get organic traffic from somewhere, so I just went down more rabbit holes. I started getting desperate. I started out hanging out in Facebook groups for affiliate marketers because I was trying to deconstruct what they do, because basically what their whole business model is, if they can get ranked on page one, they might make some sales, because they get traffic to a product page, then they get somebody to click the call-to-action button, and then they end up on Amazon most of the time or another affiliate store.
And so, I was just trying to figure out if that’s their whole way that they make or break their business, I needed to figure out what they’re doing. So, I just spent months listening to lots of affiliate marketing podcasts, hanging out in their groups, just being a bit of a stalker, really.
Kurt Elster: And so, I get the idea with the affiliate marketers, because essentially they are… They really are a very pure form of can we monetize traffic with information. The affiliate marketer themselves really is just trying to rank and create the best possible content because that’s what Google wants, and that’s what the audience wants, and then… Okay, in there, if we can… we have a lead gen form. We have ads. We have affiliate links. That’s how you then monetize it. And this is… I have seen this with my wife’s business, is that is how it’s been most successful.
So, you had the idea to figure out. You’re like, “All right, I can’t use pay per click.” And even if there were other platforms, it sounds like you weren’t interested in messing with it. You’re like, “Oh, I could mess with TikTok ads.” It doesn’t seem like a thing you wanted to do. And I don’t think they would work for this.
John Murphy: Yeah. I didn’t even know what TikTok was back then.
Kurt Elster: That’s a good point too. Yeah. It would have been pretty new. So, you said, “All right, let’s look at who’s successful at generating traffic. Affiliate marketers.” I think this is smart, especially since you’re now… You’re looking outside of your own circle, whereas like within the drop shipping community, there’s a lot of people doing very similar things, and when those very similar things aren’t working for you, that’s just not gonna help you.
And so, all right, you look at the affiliate marketing community. What do you gain from that? How did you figure that out?
John Murphy: Well, there’s some very good podcasts by… Niche Pursuits is a very good podcast, as well, about affiliate marketing. He has a whole community, even used to have a course on how to teach affiliate marketing, how to create websites and stuff, so a lot of his interviews were very technical and very… They’d lay out the whole process, and a lot of it was build an epic piece of content, the best one on the internet for that one very, very niche thing, and then build a bunch of other supporting content that would then link to it so Google would understand that there was topical relevancy, and authority, that the internal linking, it would highlight which one was the epic piece, so Google would know which piece of content to rank when you’ve got 40 pieces of content for that same keyword.
So, there was a very specific technical process to building our content, and just making content that Google really likes and rewards to put on page one. And then I had to make a few minor adjustments to their process because what they would do is in order to rank time on page, so a visitor is reading the content, time on site is very important for ranking, so what they would do is they would also have lots of… not random, but lots of links from one piece of content to another piece of content and you could go down a rabbit hole on one of these affiliate websites and just keep bouncing from page to page, because that’s all very good, sending good signals to Google.
But time on site without getting people to a product page was redundant for me. I needed people to have a very specific path in mind and so I tried to change the internal linking structure from affiliate marketing to eCommerce, to go from the epic, killer piece of content, to a product page, to the buy now button. So, there was a little bit more linear, because we have to get them to the product page, or we’ll just rank and have great content and no sales.
Kurt Elster: All right, so we know for Google backlinks are votes of confidence. They determine… They help indicate relevance. They’re indicators of this is the important part. And typically when we talk about linking, normally it’s like you gotta get backlinks, backlinks, backlinks. Well, it’s easier said than done. In this case, you’re saying, “Hey, look at internal links.” So, meaning on your own site keep linking back to this one really impressive piece of content and that’s what convinces Google, “Oh, this is the important thing.”
John Murphy: Yeah, exactly, because ideally you will have a bunch of content on one specific keyword, so you can be recognized as the authority in that specific niche or for that specific expertise. But you also don’t want to confuse Google by having 40 pieces of content all ranking for the same keyword because then there won’t be any consistency, so if you have the internal linking structure of those… you can call a silo. Imagine one big piece of content and then a bunch of supporting content for that one, that all of the supporting pieces of content will link to the main piece of content, and Google will see that yes, they have… I don’t know, 40 pieces of content talking about electric hunting bikes, but 39 of them link to this other one. So, that’s obviously the relevant piece of content, and then that’s the one that gets picked by Google for ranking.
Because it’s just-
Kurt Elster: Interesting.
John Murphy: It’s really just about making it really, really easy for Google to understand which piece of content is the best to serve customers. So, the internal linking part just makes it easier for Google to do that when they’re crawling.
Kurt Elster: Yeah, my wife’s website, I think we saw this happen, but I think it was by accident.
John Murphy: Okay.
Kurt Elster: She ranked number one for several phrases around COVID-19 restrictions at Disney World, and it was because throughout the site there was on many articles, at the top of the page, she’d say, “Hey, this may not be relevant, this may not be the case, check this COVID-19 restrictions page.” And so, we unintentionally ended up doing this and then ended up first page and top one, two, three results.
John Murphy: Sweet.
Kurt Elster: For all kinds of keyword phrases around that. But really stumbled into it, truly.
John Murphy: Well, but it worked out, but yeah, that’s why. That definitely helps.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so I need my epic piece of content, which is like The Ultimate Guide to X: How to X. And then I want to link. If I break that up, I can make smaller supporting articles, and then they link back to that, but I’ve got my main… My ultimate piece of content, what does that look like? I doubt it’s like, “Oh, I threw together 100 words and called it a day.”
John Murphy: Yeah. Well, usually it depends, so for example, what you would normally do is before you even start writing anything you would want to go onto the Google and just search for the keyword that you’re trying to rank for and see what Google rewards as a really good piece of content. So, the first 10 pieces on page one will… they will generally all have a similar style to them, so usually when it’s about a specific product you will find out that the majority of the page one pieces of content are listables. So, like top X for Y, that sort of content, and if that’s what you see then you know that that’s what Google likes to put first, so then you stick to that specific style of piece of content, and you just need to see what the average word count is on page one and try to do it better. Obviously, not just making content for the sake of making content. As long as it’s really, really helpful and valuable, you just want to be able to write a piece of content that when the person has read it, they’re so convinced of their decision they don’t need to go and read something else to get more information.
So, you just need to pack it in there. As much value, the kitchen sink, everything goes in there, and then there are technical things you can do to make it more favorable to rank, as well. But basically, the concept would be just to see what’s already ranking and do it similar, but bigger, and better, and more helpful, and more up to date, and just overwhelmingly helpful for people in that research phase.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so especially with… You have a big-ticket item. A typical eBike purchase is gonna be $3,000, let’s say, and so people are gonna research it, and they’re gonna think about it, like it’s just not an impulse purchase. And so, I think this strategy probably works well for any level of average order value, but particularly it becomes necessary for these high AOV items. And so, I’ve got my keyword phrase in mind, which I want to ask you about keyword research, but I’ve got my keyword phrase in mind. I search that on Google. And then I look at the first page, I open up all 10 results, and we go through it. We figure out, “Okay, what’s the common approach here?” And maybe it’s a listicle. And based off that, I can probably create a table of contents. I can run these through word length counters. If you just Google word counter, you’ll find plenty of them. Just copy and paste it.
So, you can figure out like, “Okay, the average of that, of the top five, is probably… is table stakes for ranking for my word count.” And then I gotta create original content. If I’m copying and pasting, if I’m rewriting poorly, it’s not a good idea, so I create my original content and then I have to link to it throughout my site to indicate to Google that this is the one you want to rank, guys.
What else am I missing there?
John Murphy: Well, there are a few different aspects. So, one thing would be that if you have that one epic piece of content that you want to rank, not only do you have the other supporting content linking to it, but you would also have it on your homepage, as well, because another ranking factor for Google is click depth, so if you have to click four times to get to it, Google understands that it’s probably not that relevant at all, so if you can find a way to put that blog, the link to that blog post on the homepage, it says it’s one click away, so that’s as shallow click depth as you can possibly have.
So, for an eCommerce store, you generally don’t want to have a link to your blog section, because you’ve already got them to your website, so don’t send them to a blog post, but click depth is very important, so if you have it somewhere on the homepage, you don’t have to make it very obvious. You’re not saying, “Go read my blog post since you’re on my eCommerce store.” But if you can get a link from the homepage, that sends all the right signals, as well.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so I want to link it from the homepage to tell Google, “Hey, this is important,” but at the same time, specific to eCommerce anyway, if someone is in research, ideally they Google it and then they land on that article directly.
John Murphy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: But if they just land on my homepage, we hope and assume they’re shopping and then obviously we want shopping to be first, so we don’t necessarily want to have a gigantic, “Go read this 2,000-word article,” even though we hope you came here to shop. So, we have a subtle link, or we put it further down the page maybe?
John Murphy: Yeah. Down-
Kurt Elster: Okay.
John Murphy: Down the page is a good idea because if you’re scrolling to the bottom of the page anyway, they’re probably not shopping. They’re probably curious. So, yeah, so down near the bottom is a safe bet.
Kurt Elster: So, this is my safety net for the homepage.
John Murphy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: You put this at the end and if they hit it, and they’re curious about it, they probably weren’t gonna go directly to buying anyway.
John Murphy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Okay, so we do like our featured articles at the bottom of the page. You said there were some other technical things there that I could do to optimize it. What else did I miss?
John Murphy: Well, so we’re running a piece of content with a specific keyword in mind, so for me it was electric hunting bike, or eBikes for hunters, those sort of keywords. Whatever your keyword is, whether it’s like indoor jacuzzi, or whatever, the niche you’re in, that keyword, you can use H tags, so when you’re writing the piece of content, you can create the content, the headings, like the subject headings, or the paragraph headings could be in H2 tags, because H2 gives more weight to the content in an H2 tag, then there’s an H3 tag, an H4 tag, and each one has a little bit less juice to it, let’s say, but still more than just regular paragraph text.
So, for example, if you can get the keyword in a bunch of those H tags, you can do that in a way by having an FAQ section, or some sort of the most… some common misconceptions category, and then you have a question, and it could be questions that people are asking already online, and you can use websites like AnswerthePublic.com, which is a fantastic resource for finding out what questions people are asking online, and once you know some of those questions you can actually type out the question, and the question could be an H2 tag, with the keyword, and then you answer the question using the keyword, so you’re just putting that keyword in, in a very natural way, but every way you can and where possible using H2 tags or H3 tags. Obviously without keyword stuffing. It still needs to make sense and needs to read well.
But those are some of the signals that Google looks, so when Spider comes in and crawls the website, it recognizes what’s an H1 tag, H2 tag, H3 tag, and if the keywords are in there, then that’s really beneficial for us.
Kurt Elster: I just loaded up AnswerthePublic.com. I’ve never seen this thing. I’ve never heard of it. It’s so cool. I went on it. I typed in Disney World. Within seconds, it came back with a whole bunch of common questions, and then even was like, “All right, here’s some other stuff you could use or just download all of this as a CSV.”
John Murphy: It’s fantastic.
Kurt Elster: It had it visualized in a word cloud. It’s really cool.
John Murphy: Yeah, yeah. And you can see if you want to rewrite a piece of content about Disney World there, you can see what the questions are, even categorized with prepositions, how, or why, or versus, so Disney World versus Euro Disney, so you can just come up with like a year’s worth of content ideas just using Answer the Public, so that’s a great resource. That’s free.
Kurt Elster: Yeah. This thing is incredible. I can’t believe it. I love this. I will put this in the show notes, and I am going to have to play with this later. It’s really good. So, do you use this for… If I’m in a niche, I can immediately use this to create an FAQ on the topic. I can create articles. I could use this to get ideas on ultimate guides. But you’re right, this is just like, “Hey, here’s your data-driven content ideas.” Wow, this tool is worth the episode itself.
Is this the tool you’re using for keyword research?
John Murphy: Well, so I used Ahrefs for keyword… It’s more like keyword reconnaissance because I know… When you’re in a niche, you know what your keyword is, your main keyword. Like if you sell treadmills, then treadmills, or best treadmills, or stair climber, then stair climber is your keyword, so it’s more like not… I use Ahrefs not to research the keyword, but I research who’s ranking for the keyword and why. And then I use that then to make bigger, better content and also I can use Ahrefs to see who they’re getting backlinks from to that content, and then I can go and try to deconstruct that and do it better.
Kurt Elster: Okay.
John Murphy: And then Answer the Public is then basically just for brainstorming ideas of extra… like I could use if I had this epic piece of content, what you call like a skyscraper or pillar piece of content, then when I go to write all of the supporting content around it, and if I want to create 20, 30, 40 pieces of content, I could just go in there, pull a couple of questions from there, and build a piece of 500-word or 1,000 word piece of content on one of the questions that’s in there.
Kurt Elster: And when you say create these 1,000-word piece of content, you just sit down and write it?
John Murphy: Yeah. I mean, like if the question is something like… I don’t know. Which eBike, or what type of eBike is suitable for hunting? Because I’ve been in the niche for a while, I know the answers, so it’s very easy for me to say it because I’ve said it over the phone, I’ve said it in chat, by email, so writing it down is not a problem. I don’t have to research the niche.
Kurt Elster: You’re an experienced authority at this point having successfully sold these bikes for years.
John Murphy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: So, for you, you just need the prompt and then you’re able to sit down and go, “Oh, if a customer asks me this, I know what to say.”
John Murphy: Yeah.
Kurt Elster: Then you just sit down and write it?
John Murphy: Yeah. Pretty much. Yeah.
Kurt Elster: I envy people who can do that. You put together the article. Obviously, we’re using semantic HTML, so we’re setting our heading tags. Are there other things that can make it easier to rank? Obviously, creating the content itself, I have to create good, relevant content. That is the core part of it. If I don’t do that, I’m dead in the water. But once I’ve done that, okay, I can grease the wheels, I can make my life a little easier. Do I need images in it? Do I need video? What do I need to add to this article?
John Murphy: So, adding to the article, the actual content would be you want to be linking to product pages. So, there you’ll have best X for Y, best X for scenario A, best X for scenario B, and then you’ll link to the product, have an image of the product, maybe a lifestyle image of the product, a summary about why it’s the best for that specific scenario, and then a really obvious call to action button, which is one thing I got from affiliate marketers. Even though now it’s a bit more common, but even just up until about a year ago, all the eCommerce blog posts when they were linking to products, it was usually just the name of the product. They would just hyperlink it and one very well-known affiliate marketer said to me, “But if somebody’s on their mobile home, they don’t have a mouse, maybe, maybe, maybe, just maybe they don’t know that’s a link, and then people are not getting to your product page because you didn’t make it simple for them.”
So, the call to action wouldn’t be a link. The product wouldn’t be, like the product name wouldn’t be a hyperlink. You would actually put in an image of a button and whatever the text is is whatever you like. It’s usually not “buy now” because that’s a hard sell when you’re on a content page, but it would be something like, “check price” or “see full details” or “check the specs” or whatever it is and make it the image of a button. Make it look like a button. So, like that oval orange shape with the wording on it, and you can just Google image search for check price button, and you can just choose. There’s lots of them. It’s very simple. And these are all… You can even see the buttons, if you search for them, they’ll be, “Check price on Amazon,” and you just enter that as an image and make it a link to the product page, so people… Even if they’re on a mobile and they don’t have a mouse to hover over anything, it’s really clear that if they want to get to the product page, that’s how they do it.
So, you’re just making the call to action really, really, really obvious, and that then increases more people that travel from the blog post to the product page, so you’re just making it easier for them.
Kurt Elster: You know, you make all of this sound very easy. How much effort do you think you have put into not just researching it and solving for it but just implementing your own process?
John Murphy: Well, it is actually a process. I didn’t learn all of it at once, you know? In the beginning, I had a piece of content, and then I learned something else, and I went back and edited the piece of content by adding the call-to-action button, or adding better images, or maybe having a pros and cons summary of that specific piece of content, and really it just evolved over time.
In the beginning, the piece of content was probably about 1,500 words, and that was the biggest piece of content on eBikes, electric hunting bikes, at the time. But now it’s close to 5,000 words long, that piece of content.
Kurt Elster: So, you have just… The one, just over time you keep revising it, and that keeps it relevant.
John Murphy: Yeah, and making it better, because also some bikes go out of style, or go out of production, so I’ll change it, but then also like one of my pieces of content, I think it was like, “Top 7 Electric Hunting Bikes for 2019.” And then in November 2019 I was like, “Oh, I guess this needs to become 2020,” otherwise people will stop clicking on it, so what I did was I just added an extra two bikes, and then it became the top nine for 2020. Now it’s like the top 11 for 2021. And now it’s November, so it’s probably gonna get edited again soon. I might go in and just maybe see what’s new and see what affiliate marketers are doing this year and see if it’s relevant for my content, as well, and I’ll go and edit it for next year.
Kurt Elster: I love this idea because I have been around long enough to realize that in the world, very few ideas are new. They’re usually borrowed from somewhere else and then adapted to fit something else, and then you’re like, “Boom, new idea.” You have done exactly that within internet marketing, just taking, “All right, what are the affiliate marketing guys doing? Oh, that works for them? All right, let’s apply this to eCommerce, tweak it, here it goes.” And brilliantly, you, now that you have quit your job. I assume you eventually quit GE?
John Murphy: Yep. September of 2019.
Kurt Elster: My apologies to Jack Welch that we have taken John Murphy from you. And from there, now you’ve got this as your full-time gig. You’ve got another side hustle going. You have a course.
John Murphy: Yeah, so yeah, so last week I moved home, my dog died, and I launched a new business.
Kurt Elster: I’m sorry.
John Murphy: Yeah, so it’s crazy. It’s been crazy this month, but yeah, so I have actually built an SEO mini course for eCommerce stores, so basically what I do, and I just recorded the whole process, so anybody else can just go and do what I do for their store, and then they can stop being reliant on paid traffic. Hopefully, they can get it done before the ban hammer comes down on them like it did on me. I wasn’t actually supposed to build a course because… and it just kind of happened.
Back in September, I was supposed to be in Lisbon as a guest speaker for a very big private eCommerce event, and I was basically gonna spend an hour on stage and just sort of deconstruct what I do and how I do it so then everybody could go away and then go back to work and apply some of it. And then due to COVID, the event got canceled, and I had all of this… It was the first time I’d actually put my process down on paper because before it was like, “Yeah, I know how to do that. I’ll just go and do it.” So, it was all in my head and I found out it was very laborsome for me to try and explain what I do because I never had to explain it to anybody before, so I spent a lot of time building out this sort of presentation talk, and then when the event got canceled I thought… Well, my business coach said, “That’s a course. Just sell the course.”
I was like, “I don’t really want to do that because there’s lots of these guys online standing in front of their Lamborghinis-“
Kurt Elster: Right.
John Murphy: … their private jets and they’re selling online courses and it just feels icky. I had a lot of the work already done, a lot of the basic work was done. It was gonna be like a one-hour talk, but I figured I didn’t get a chance to talk about the Dream 100 process, or my backlink strategies, or some of the technical parts of SEO, so I figured, “Why don’t I just make four or five different modules on each one of these categories, make a course, and then just see what happens?” And so, I just finished last week.
Kurt Elster: And now it is live at eComSEOformula.com, and it’s really… It’s like the expanded look over your shoulder version of what we heard today?
John Murphy: Yeah, yeah, so I’m not in my store doing it, because there are lots of really good examples online, so there is some over the shoulder when I’m in Ahrefs and looking at what ranks for keywords, and I just pick a few random niches, different niches, just to see if this was my niche, how would I approach it? There’s some presentation slides, because it was supposed to be a presentation, so I’m talking over the points and then I show some examples, so I break down some of the process that I do, so there’s a whole module where I explain maybe 10 or 12 of my actual backlink strategies, like strategies that I still do today or have done, that worked for me, that work for eCommerce.
There’s a module on the Dream 100 process that I apply to eCommerce, which never… It wasn’t really devised for eCom, but it is now. So, yeah, so there’s a lot in there. It’s basically what I do, like it could have been a lot bigger, but then I would have just been taking other people’s examples, or other people’s strategies and just adding them in there, so this is basically, “Here’s what I do,” and if you want to know, it’s all in one place on that website.
Kurt Elster: Wonderful. eComSEOformula.com. Check it out. And if I wanted to go buy an eBike, where should I go?
John Murphy: Well, if you are looking for a high-powered hunting bike, or something to go off-road, so that can really take rough terrain, climb hills, you go to eBikeGeneration.com. Otherwise, if you’re just looking for like a classic, run of the mill city bike, or beach cruiser, you do not have to search very far. There’s like 250 online dealers right now drop shipping eBikes, so it’s an extremely saturated niche.
Kurt Elster: Very honest, very fun. John Murphy, thank you so much.
John Murphy: It’s a pleasure, Kurt.