w/ Patrick Rice, Ecom SEO Pro
Did you know over 60% of online experiences start with a search engine? In e-commerce, visibility in these search results is crucial for success.
This episode dives into SEO Tools & Tactics for Shopify. Joining us is experienced SEO professional Patrick Rice, who shares the strategies and tools he uses with his Shopify clients.
We delve into the practical use of tools like SEMrush, Matrixify, and ChatGPT, exploring their impact on online store visibility. Patrick provides valuable insights on selecting the right keywords and effectively optimizing product pages.
Tune in to enhance your store's SEO. This conversation is your stepping stone to improved online presence.
Kurt Elster (00:02):
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(01:30):
Hello my friends. I love my tools. I love my toys, I love my gadgets. We all have shiny toy syndrome. You want the latest and greatest. It's fun to play with the toys and it feels productive even when it's not. But when you get the right set of tools, when you figure out what works for you, suddenly productivity goes up, your output improves, and that turns into ideally revenue. A better website that converts better or a website that gets more organic traffic to it or just campaigns that run better. The potential energy of the right tool set is thrilling and exciting to me. Buying a new cordless drill has the same value and excitement as trying a new SaaS product. And so I want to talk today about tools. I want to talk about SEO tools. I have some experience with SEO tools. I have moderate experience with SEO, but I need an expert.
(02:37):
I need someone who does SEO all day every day, has years of experience and knows these tools backwards and forwards and can give the crash course could talk it through with me. And so today I am joined by Patrick Samuel Rice, who spoken on SEO runs an SEO agency knows SEO for e-commerce at Shopify. And I talked to him a couple of weeks ago and had him, I'm like, what tools do you use? What do you use them for? And just a wealth of knowledge. And so we're going to have that discussion today on the Unofficial Shopify podcast. And of course, I'm your host, Kurt Elster. Jack Nasty. Mr. Patrick Samuel Rice, thank you for joining us. Alright. Traditionally, if your name is given as three names, you're an assassin, a serial killer. Isn't that the rule?
Patrick Rice (03:31):
I don't know what the rules are. Normally I do go by Patrick Rice though.
Kurt Elster (03:36):
I dunno why it was in my notes and in the calendar invite as Patrick Samuel Rice,
Patrick Rice (03:41):
I probably added it in there like that.
Kurt Elster (03:45):
Yeah. All right, Lee Harvey, quickly tell our audience a little bit about your journey into becoming a e-comm SEO expert.
Patrick Rice (03:55):
I've been doing SEO for about half a decade, maybe a little bit longer, and I have had a long journey going from an SEO agency dropping out of that and starting my own freelance career for several years and then eventually landing myself in e-commerce, SEO specifically for Shopify. I have my own Shopify brands I play around with, and then I have a lot of Shopify clients. And the way I sort of fell into this was really near the beginning of my career, I had an opportunity for a large Shopify client and I got started working on Shopify SEO pretty early. That was five years ago. And ever since then I've been fascinated by that whole world of Shopify.
Kurt Elster (04:45):
So you're running an SEO agency now? What's the name of it?
Patrick Rice (04:48):
So right now it's Patrick Reco, which is kind of a lame name. It's more so me.
Kurt Elster (04:55):
Agency names are so tough and every domain name is taken, so good luck. I know.
Patrick Rice (04:59):
So I actually do have a business partner and we're considering rebranding soon. But yeah, so right now it's Patrick Reco, but I think of really an agency is mostly about the people behind it, your reputation. So that's what I'm really building right now.
Kurt Elster (05:19):
A majority of your work, 80% or more is e-com is Shopify. How'd you end up focusing on e-commerce?
Patrick Rice (05:25):
Because five years ago I got this large e-commerce SEO client doing 200,000 monthly organic. They were selling all kinds of crazy self-defense gear or whatever it was. And I just had the opportunity because my old mentor, Craig Lawson, who was my boss, my first SEO agency boss, he actually supported the move from one year in SEO as an employee to being a freelancer. And the way that he proved that is he gave me a massive client and that client so happened to be a Shopify brand doing about 200,000 monthly organic traffic. And that was really my first sort of foray into the whole world of e-com seo. And yeah, I seemed to just kind of find my footing there and later on I would go about increasing organic revenue by over a hundred percent for several brands. And I think that it was almost out of necessity. That's what I had to work on and I was like, okay, I need to make it work and I have this opportunity. So sort of just fell into it and then now, I don't know, I think when you get good at something, that spark of passion just kind of throws in you. So that's sort of how I fell into it.
Kurt Elster (06:50):
Once you try it and discover you get a win and you get that hit of dopamine, nothing, pizza it, you're like, I want that again. And you do it again and you get it again only in the process. You're also getting better at it, but you need to do more complex things to gain that same dopamine hit as the novelty of getting good at something wears off. And so if you can repeat that process, it is an absolute delight to become skilled at something, isn't it? Even if it's SEO technical, it's something that might be boring to nine out of 10 people. It's just if it's exciting for you and you get that thrill from it, don't let anyone take that away from you. Just jam on it until you're great at
Patrick Rice (07:30):
It. I absolutely love it. I might be an SEO nerd, but I absolutely love it. There's something about seeing the rank tracking, there's something competitive about it, like positions. You're number one, number two, number three, right? It's inherently competitive, so I don't know. I love it. Oh,
Kurt Elster (07:47):
I never thought of it that way. Oh, that's clever. You've done SEO for e-com, but also non e-com. What's unique about SEO for e-commerce stores? For Shopify stores,
Patrick Rice (08:00):
The difference is the number of pages typical and the complexity of the websites. So when you think about a local website, maybe it's a plumber, a plumber in whatever your local city is, it doesn't really make sense for him to have tons of pages. He's going to have maybe five to 10 services. He's going to have some blog posts, but overall the website's going to be maybe a couple hundred pages, and that's even for more competitive location. While an e-commerce brand might have thousands of pages and they're targeting tons of different product keywords and they have to really rely on optimization of not just 10 money pages. Usually a plumber has 10 services. Those are what he cares about. He wants to rank those 10 services plumber in Atlanta. That's of his goal for e-commerce, we like to have these ideal keywords that are these big keywords like shoes or whatever. It's at the end of the day, you need to rank for thousands of keywords, even hundreds of thousands of keywords because there's a lot of ways that people search, there's a lot of products, and the real difference becomes number of pages. I hope I don't go into too much jargon, I'll try to stop myself wherever possible.
Kurt Elster (09:23):
No, it's quantity and be breadth of topics available to us of keywords we're targeting. That's what creates the issue, that adds the difficulty to it. And just sheer quantity of content that we have to optimize for. Geez, do we talk tools or strategy? Well, I said tools. So let's start with that. Give me the crash course on what are the must have tools?
Patrick Rice (09:49):
The must have tools, especially if you're just getting into SEO, so you don't have a lot of experience there. SEM rush, and then a Shopify app called Matrix.
Kurt Elster (10:03):
I love Matrix.
Patrick Rice (10:05):
Yes, it's the best tool ever for Shopify. SEO.
Kurt Elster (10:10):
If you're a power user, you can't live without this.
Patrick Rice (10:12):
And I think a lot of the audience might know Matrix I, but if you don't, it's a fantastic tool allows you to update, optimize, and organize products at scale. You can export all of your products, you can optimize them and then import them back to the website. Same with product categories. And so there's tons of tools we could talk about, but those three, especially for someone that's getting into it and wants to do some quick and dirty optimization, those tools are incredible. SE EMR matrix, you could run a whole SEO agency with those tools.
Kurt Elster (10:51):
I believe it. And it's not because of any individual tool, it's because of what that enables you to do at scale. So you talked about the difficulty with e-commerce is just the sheer number of pages that it can be there, hundreds to thousands doing products, collections plus interior pages and then maybe blog articles as well. So you need a way to be able to see all that, to be able to bulk update it and to be able to get that data out. Matrix advisor tool there, matrix, formerly Excel, apply as in Microsoft Excel until they politely ask them to change the name. We'll export nearly any piece of data that's in the Shopify store into a spreadsheet so that you can see it, manipulate it and then import it back in, update it, merge it. I get that chat, GPTI get it. We could do data analysis with IT content generation and any number of data transformations with it. SE emr. Alright, that's where my knowledge gets fuzzy. That's the SEO specific tool.
Patrick Rice (12:02):
Yeah, so let's dig
Kurt Elster (12:03):
In. What are we doing with it?
Patrick Rice (12:05):
Yeah, so SE EMR is critical for the operation and it's one of the most popular SEO tools and these are essentially power suites. So they have tons of different SEO tools, but all we really need for is for keyword research. And so you have matrix I to pull all of your products, but you need to know what is the best keyword for each one of those products. And we can use chat GBT to even optimize a lot of the elements of each product, but is so critical, I can't emphasize enough how important it is to choose the right keyboard. And so this is where SEM rush comes in.
Kurt Elster (12:45):
Alright, so where I could get in trouble here is I could take, even if I don't want to use all these tools, but I have Chad GPT, I could say here's my product description, here's my product title, here's my product description, write an SEO title and description for it. It'll do it, it'll just output something. But you're saying I have not given it the right direction, it's just working in the dark. The missing magic here is what keyword to target or what keyword phrase.
Patrick Rice (13:17):
That's exactly right. I couldn't have said it better myself. The thing is chat GPT will do anything you tell it to, but it won't do it, right?
Kurt Elster (13:25):
Whether or not it's right.
Patrick Rice (13:27):
Exactly. So it won't do it right unless you guide it. And so what we're doing in our operation is we're mapping these keywords we're giving saying for each product, this is the right keyword. So if we bring this down to earth a little bit, if you have a say a dog harness, if you just ask Chad GBT to make a title, it might come up with something. But if you target a specific keyword, so maybe small dog harness, something like that, so medium-sized dog harness and yellow. So that would be a type of product keyword that you would want to target and you'd be able to see with SEM rush how much search volume that has. And that's just an example. So no promises that has search volume, but maybe small yellow dog harness does. And so that's going to be your target keyword and once you have that target keyword, you can give it to JGBT and what it can do is just magic. It can look at it, it can understands it, it can understand SEO to a pretty good degree. And so once it has a target keyword, it can optimize a page, a title tag, and a product description pretty well using that keyword.
Kurt Elster (14:45):
Is there extra steps there? What do I, yeah, I'm looking at SEMrush now. I'm just going to give it an example domain name.
Patrick Rice (14:54):
So I would jump into the keyword magic,
Kurt Elster (14:56):
The keyword magic tool. Okay.
Patrick Rice (14:58):
Yeah. So there's two places on SEMrush you want to check check one keyword magic tool. That's where you can add in any keyword and it'll come back with a list. So if you search dog harness, you'll get all the different dog harness keywords, so maybe small, large dog harness, pullback, dog harness, whatever keywords there is, it'll gather all of those for you. And so if you have a product page that's a yellow dog harness, you can search on their yellow dog harness and it'll tell you whether it has search volume and how many people actually search that keyword on Google for a month.
Kurt Elster (15:35):
Alright, so I did it, I typed in cinnamon tea and it came back with, here's some example keyword phrases, and then it's got intent, informational, commercial transactional volume density. How do I decide on what's the keyword phrase I want here?
Patrick Rice (15:57):
Yeah, so that's actually pretty, it could be a long discussion. I'm going to try to make it as concise as possible. But essentially you want something that is relevant to your page as much as possible and that has search volume. So if you're doing this at scale, you don't need to worry about, for example, if you have an individual product page, you don't need to rank it for dog harness, you actually need your product collection page to rank for dog harness. So for the product level, you're going to be looking for something very specific that if somebody is looking for that exact product like cinnamon tea, then plus brand, something like that or whatever, the cinnamon tea then plus quantity of tea. So it's kind of these keyword patterns that often happen.
Kurt Elster (16:48):
Okay, so there's a little bit of it's art and science, it's objective, I got to read through it and figure out all this is a sensible keyword phrase. Are there volume minimums? Does it not matter
Patrick Rice (17:03):
For product pages? It doesn't really matter too much because you're usually going to have a lot of them. So I wouldn't worry as long as it has search volume, you're fine. If you do think about it, even at 10 search volume per month, that means about 10 people search it per month. I mean if you optimize a hundred pages or a thousand pages that all have 10 search volume per month, that gets out there pretty quick. And so before you know it, you're at like 10,000 searches per month. So for product pages, I wouldn't worry too much about high search volume. I'd mainly look for relevance there. So is the person searching for your exact product and does that have search volume? As long as they're searching for your exact product, it's a good target keyword.
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Patrick Rice (19:51):
That's why I don't mind Lower search volume is totally fine as long as there are good keywords that make sense for your products. Sometimes you'll also find more obscure, more general keywords. Like if someone's searching tea, they have clearly not made up their mind about what tea they want to buy, but if they're typing this specific tea in this quantity or something along those lines, this brand at t, they have a higher purchase intent. So I worry more about purchase intent and competition as well as optimizing products and pages at scale.
Kurt Elster (20:31):
So I'm going to use SEM rush and it's keyword magic tool and associated tools to get and to do my keyword research really I think sounds like a step one here. And based on that keyword research, and I see they have a keyword research course you could take, they got documentation, this thing starts at free, I'm playing with it now. I have not paid for it. They got a seven day trial. Alright, seems legit. I go through that step. Now what? Now things are getting more technical.
Patrick Rice (21:03):
So to simplify it, essentially you're just going to have, more than likely you should have an employee do this. If you're the brand owner, you're just going to have them go through each product page and each page on your website and associate a keyword with it. So just what you're doing now, you're going to look at the page that you currently have, you're going to run that through SEM Rush and they also have the organic research tool that will just, if they already have data on that page, so if you're a more established website, they might just have keywords already associated with the URL and then that's very easy. Then if they don't, you go to the magic keyword tool and you search in different topics. It's a little bit of that art and science kind of thing. Like, okay, here's the name of the product. I'm going to search in five different ways that I think people would search for this product, whether that's just the name of the product or it's the brand of the product. You're going to do that and then you're going to attach that in a spreadsheet. You're just going to connect those two things, so the page and the keyword, and from there you can have an employee do that to a hundred products, a thousand products, and that's sort of how we're going to start this process. Does that make enough sense?
Kurt Elster (22:24):
One more time, what are they doing?
Patrick Rice (22:26):
Yeah, so this is a process called keyword mapping. So you are just doing what you just did, which is you're looking at pages, so products and product collection. So what was the name of your product?
Kurt Elster (22:42):
Hot Cinnamon Spice I think is the name of the tea.
Patrick Rice (22:45):
Yeah, yeah. So there you go. You actually just said two different potential keywords you could input into keyword Magic. And what we do is we want to do this at scale. So if you're optimizing one or two pages, you're not going to have too much organic revenue, but if you have a list of all your products, which we can export with Matrixx five, then you can go one by one and just have someone gather a keyword for each page. And so if the page is that apple spice tea, then you're just going to input the two versions, any keywords that make sense for that page that you think people might search. And once you have sort of some keyword from the magic tool that has search volume and is relevant towards that product, you're going to then be able to optimize that page for it.
Kurt Elster (23:40):
You're like, all right, you got the keyword you're going to optimize for it. What does that mean?
Patrick Rice (23:45):
So let's make it very simple for the optimization process at the start. So what that means is you're going to go into Shopify, you're going to go to that product page and you're going to change the product name to include the key, and you're going to scroll down and you're going to add it in the description. So in your product description, you're going to mention if the keyword's apple spice tea, you're going to say apple spice tea. And you might say that at least two times, typically two to four times. Then you're going to scroll down further and you're going to have an SEO title tag that Shopify gives you. And then you're going to add that keyword at the start of the SEO title tag. So apple spice tea dash, buy our apple spice tea, and that's going to be your SEO title tag. That's what actually shows up on Google. So when you're searching on Google and you're searching for products, so on that title tag is going to be the text, the blue link that you actually see on Google, and that's how to optimize a single page. And what I want to talk about today is how to optimize all of your product pages and all of your pages on your website at scale and something that you could do in an evening
Kurt Elster (25:01):
Because what you described sounds hugely time consuming
Patrick Rice (25:04):
To actually go through every page and get a target keyword and then change the description and do all of this work. It's going to take a long time. And this is what SEO agencies have done since the beginning of time is that this is like their thing is that they would usually hire overseas and just have someone go through pages all day long adding these keywords. But with ai, that's an and takeaway old way of doing things and it needs to be improved. And we've found that you can do a much better process with using Matrixx FY as well as SMR and chat GT do the same process, but at scale, do all of your product pages, all your product collections and just make the job a whole lot easier.
Kurt Elster (26:02):
I have a project a client in mind, we're doing a migration and so I've been working, we're going from WooCommerce to Shopify, got all my data over, and now I want to optimize. I want to clean up my catalog and when the site launches, I want to put them in the best possible position and I have the tools you've discussed, I got Matrix, I got chat GPT. Now what I get the approach here, how do I speed things along?
Patrick Rice (26:36):
Yeah, so here's the exact process. If you have Matrixx and anyone that hasn't played with it, essentially you can click a button on that app and it will export a spreadsheet with all of your products, all of their names, all of the SEO titles and descriptions, all that nerdy technical SEO stuff. It'll export all of that and allow you to edit it. Now, what makes this magical is that you can take that spreadsheet and you can add chat GBT within the spreadsheet itself. And so if you upload that to your Google Drive, actually, so there's two ways you can do it. One, there's a app called GPT for sheets, and that's just an extension on Google Sheets that will add that in to your Google Sheets. There's also a script that I actually wrote and I have available, but it also does the same thing.
(27:33):
It just requires, it just doesn't add a price. So the GPD for sheets, if you're doing a lot of products, it ends up being $500, but that's the easiest one. Oh my God, well $500 per upload, so it does get just kind of annoying. And so you essentially just drop that into your Google sheets and then you can use a formula. So just like the equals sum, or if you did any of the math formulas or a vlookup, any of these Excel or Google Sheets formulas, they create a new one that's equals GPT, and you can just simply say equals GPT and then say any prompt you want GPT optimize this product name, optimize it for this target keyword, and then do that for every product in my Excel sheet. And then you can upload that back into Shopify and have as many products as you want optimized for SEO.
Kurt Elster (28:38):
Alright, I'm looking at GPT for sheets. It adds a function that you could put in the cell equal GPT, and then it's got you stick the prompt in there. And then I assume I can have the variable B dynamic where, oh yeah, there it is. It's like you can have it read from a different column with GPT for sheets. This thing's going to get expensive. Am I giving it my API to chat GPT or does they have their own and then they're billing on top of that?
Patrick Rice (29:16):
Yeah, so what was my issue with that software is that it used to be free. It used to be you input your own API key and you just use your own credits and OpenAI is really pretty cheap. I mean it's usually synth to optimize a single page. It's like a sent and then what they did that they made it so they're upcharging you on that. I think like 300, 400%.
Kurt Elster (29:48):
Okay,
Patrick Rice (29:49):
Fair enough to them. It is a good tool. I'm not being down on it, but you can really easily
Kurt Elster (29:59):
6 million installs,
Patrick Rice (30:01):
Right? Right. It's really useful. But what I did, which is I just wrote my own script where you can go into Google Sheets, go to the app script, copy and paste it in there and then add your own API key. And that just makes it if you are doing this at scale, so if you do want to optimize a thousand, 10,000 or more products and you want to do this at a budget, that just makes it pretty much sense on the dollar. And since we're doing it at scale for multiple clients, just made sense for me to do that rather than spend $500, I can spend $2 and get the same result.
Kurt Elster (30:40):
I need to find this thing on your website.
Patrick Rice (30:43):
I'm not sure if it's actually on my website. I think it's on the YouTube video. It's called Shopify SEO tutorial, and it's about how to do this whole process in there. You have the GPT prompts as well as the script, so you can just copy and paste. The script also has a template in there, just the template that I use for doing this at scale.
Kurt Elster (31:08):
What's your YouTube handle? I am struggling to find this video.
Patrick Rice (31:11):
Oh, I'm sorry. Let me share that with you. So my YouTube handle is Patrick Rice. If you search YouTube, Patrick Rice, you'll find my YouTube channel. The handle itself is Patrick RiceCo. The YouTube video is called Shopify, SEO tutorial 2024, how to optimize Your Store with chatt.
Kurt Elster (31:31):
Alright, in here it goes to a landing page that opens, I got access to a Google sheet now.
Patrick Rice (31:38):
And so this Google sheet is where you can add in all the matrixy data and if you go to extensions and then App Scripts, you have the actual script in there that runs open AI and you can put in your own API key and everything like that.
Kurt Elster (31:55):
I got that. Okay, so now I've got the prompts to do this.
Patrick Rice (31:59):
Yep, exactly. And so these are prompts that I wrote myself to optimize each piece of your Shopify product and age data.
Kurt Elster (32:11):
I get into this Google sheet, I make a copy of it, and then I do extensions and I click app script that opens. There's a little chat GPT app script in here. It's not crazy. And there's second line, API key equals API key. And so I put my actual API key in there
Patrick Rice (32:28):
And then especially for Shopify merchants that are independent and running on more of a budget, this will be like 2 cents to optimize your pages and should be hopeful, I hope,
Kurt Elster (32:42):
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(34:13):
All right, so definitely need some technical chops here, but still not really getting into coding and the upside here, if you want to battle with it a little bit I think is huge. I'm going to do exactly what you described later today. I'm excited to try it,
Patrick Rice (34:29):
Right? And if you need any help, you have me on email, just message me. I'm always available. I also made that YouTube video that goes step by step through the process. It's pretty much our internal SOP for how to do this, so watch that too. And that's going to give you really just pretty simple instructions. I tried to make it as simple as possible in terms of getting that all set up and working.
Kurt Elster (35:00):
Alright, this is very cool and this will keep me busy.
Patrick Rice (35:06):
I'm keeping you, giving you homework.
Kurt Elster (35:08):
Yeah. Are there other tools, SEO tools I should be using? I know we've used Screaming Frog in migrations to verify that we've done everything correctly.
Patrick Rice (35:20):
Yeah, screaming Frog is amazing. It's one of my favorites. It's the SEO Nerds favorite tool. I love it, but it is for technical, SEO. And so you're probably pretty experienced in SEO, you're doing migrations. Migrations are pretty difficult for an SEO and so Screaming Frog is incredible for anyone that wants to take a deeper dive into SEO. But I think SEM Rush is a little bit more intuitive with the interface. They're kind of made for business owners, Shopify merchants and brands, digital marketing managers, and so that's probably an easier place to start, but Screaming Frog, if you want to really dig your hands into some SEO and get a little bit more technical, it's a great, great tool. I have several tutorials of how to use it. If you've been doing SEO for a little while, I know there's a lot of Shopify brands and merchants that have their organic traffic pretty good. I know a lot of talented merchants and if that's the case and you haven't touched Screaming Frog, this is your next step. Get into that tool. It can do some powerful stuff.
Kurt Elster (36:34):
If I'm having chat GPT create content that's going to appear on my site, we haven't gotten to like, Hey, it's going to rewrite a product description yet, but using this process a hundred percent, I have discovered that there's a lot of people who are fearful that there will be some penalty, some negative impact on their search rankings just by virtue of the computer wrote it instead of a person tap tap on a keyboard. I don't think it's true anymore, I just don't. What is your take?
Patrick Rice (37:08):
It's something you have to be aware of because Google did recently drop the March update. And so by March, I mean literally this month. And what that did is that it did take down mass AI sites. And so people that were spamming with ai, and by this I mean most of the sites you look at that were the index were like 7 million articles, ridiculous spam. They also have no brand. They're like pure AI spamming. And so you do want to be careful that you're not a spammer, right? And so what we do to ensure that we're providing additional value rather than lowering the value we give on our pages is that we review all of the content by chatt bt. And so in the YouTube video I'm talking about, we do actually generate product descriptions and what we've found is that those product descriptions are oftentimes better than what our clients currently have, and they're actually better for both the users and search engines.
(38:13):
And so my opinion on the AI thing is that you need to be reviewing all the content. And so to make this actionable in our process, we do it by a hundreds. So we'll do a hundred products, we'll optimize all the data, and then we'll have one of our SEO professionals go through and review and they'll edit it. They'll make sure there's no, of course, sometimes AI says false things and you can't be saying that on your website. There's a certain degree of rand there and all of those things should be checked and we have a little SOP for how to edit those and try to make it as quick as possible.
Kurt Elster (38:54):
Yeah, I think that's the issue with it is a percentage of the time it's just going to make things up to please you. And so I mean that's why you can't just let it set it and forget it. And in these tools, when you're doing stuff in bulk, it is much more practical to be doing it With GPT-3 0.5, it's not as good, it's not as smart, but it's way cheaper, way faster than doing everything with G PT four. But I mean G PT four still has those same risks. It's just a little higher quality output in theory. GPT-4 0.5 or GPT five is right around the corner. Maybe that one doesn't hallucinate, but I doubt it. There's another strategy that you had mentioned to me briefly in our pre-interview, and I didn't quite get what it was, but I like how it sounds. Product collection expansion, this is an SEO strategy. What is this?
Patrick Rice (39:48):
Yeah, so that's one of our core service offerings, which is that if we search dog harness on SEMrush magic keyword, we'll see that that keyword has 60,000 searches per month. Pretty good. But if we look at all of their results, so the whole idea of that tool is that it gives you every keyword that is similar and every keyword that includes dog harness. So the tool will return small dog harness, large dog harness everything, dog harness, and we can see two things. We can first see the total search volume of every keyword related to dog harness, and in that case it's 1.2 million searches per month. So right on the start we can see, okay, there's a lot of opportunity here for Shopify seo. What we then can do is all of those keywords, do you have a page on your website about them? And so you might have a collection page, a Shopify collection page on dog harnesses, but do you have a collection page on small dog harnesses on large dog harnesses on different types of dog harnesses, maybe yellow, so maybe by color. The product collection expansion process is all about doing keyword research and gathering all the keywords that we don't yet have a page on, and then creating new pages for every one of those keywords and then internally linking them on the website. So we're just expanding the,
Kurt Elster (41:21):
So we're making SEO landing pages based on keywords?
Patrick Rice (41:27):
Exactly.
Kurt Elster (41:27):
So that we cast a wider net on our search traffic.
Patrick Rice (41:30):
Exactly.
Kurt Elster (41:32):
Okay, that works.
Patrick Rice (41:35):
Yes. So if you look at any of the search results, you'll actually see this. You'll see if you search small dog harness all the results, there are going to typically be collection pages that what are their titles? What small dog harness, and if you click onto the website, you'll see this is essentially what they're doing.
Kurt Elster (41:55):
So collection pages are easier to rank for this type of keyword phrase than product detail page.
Patrick Rice (42:01):
Exactly. And so this is what SEO people like to call search intent, which all it means is that you look at Google and you see what is Google returning for that keyword, and if it's product collections, then make a product collection. But if it's a blog post, make a blog post. If it's a product page, make a product page. And collections are a lot of the time the main things we're creating because any keyword that's more general is typically going to require a collection page because if somebody's searching small dog harness, they don't just want one dog harness. Ideally, most people would want to see multiple options. And so this is sort of the search intent where you're getting behind the computer and you're looking at the actual person searching. And if someone's searching dog harness, they don't know what dog harness they want yet, they want a collection of products, they want to review multiple options, maybe they want some content about it. And so that's search intent and figuring out what the person behind the screen actually is looking to buy.
Kurt Elster (43:15):
That one surprises me. I had no idea, but hearing the reasoning behind it, it does make sense and that's such an easy thing to do. Create collections, and again, matrix apply. You could bulk create collections if you wanted to, but I imagine,
Patrick Rice (43:33):
No, that's another process of ours. I'm trying to share as much of this information as I can, so I'll try to make a YouTube video on that as well, because this same process where you export all the keywords for Mess rush and the magic tool, you just export them all to a spreadsheet and then you can use Matrix five to bulk create new collections, and then you can even use Matrix five to add content to those collections for an intro paragraph and things of that nature.
Kurt Elster (44:02):
Other strategy I was curious about, I know this is important, but I'm not a hundred percent on the finer points of implementing it. Internal linking, linking on your site two pages within your site has benefit, but I don't get the specifics of it.
Patrick Rice (44:19):
This is one of my favorite things. I told you I'm an SEO O nerd. I love internal links. And the reason is because SEO, since the beginning of time, SEO professionals they've used, and yes, I have my own link building team and we do backlinks, but the easiest opportunity rather than paying for a backlink, which is going to be hundreds of dollars and a backlink is a link on someone else's website. So maybe you get on Forbes and that links to an internal link is just a link on your website to your website. So you could go on Shopify, you can go into the themes, you can go into your blog posts and you can just add a link in a blog post towards a product collection. Say you want to rank dog harnesses, then you're just going to go into your blog and you're going to add a link from one of your blogs to your dog harness collection page, and that's going to boost up the rankings.
(45:16):
And it is also kind of surprising, like I was talking to someone who isn't an SEO and they were kind of surprised to hear that would boost rankings, but it does consistent. If you go into your blogs or any page on your website and you add say, 20 links towards one collection and those are using some relevant text around the keyword you want to rank for, you will almost always see some sort of boost in your rankings. And this goes back to the beginning of Google where Google started off as this page rank algorithm. That's all about links and there's a lot of ways to do it, but that sort of example I gave you there of just going into pages and saying, I want this page to rank for dog harness and adding links towards that page, that's the beginner's method and it does work
Kurt Elster (46:10):
Because such an easy one and I rarely see that implemented. Certainly I'm not going through the effort to do that. Sounds like this is a big missed opportunity for a lot of people.
Patrick Rice (46:22):
It would probably be one of the biggest opportunities that I see people not taking just because it's too much manual labor to go through and do that, or they're just not aware that internal links can boost rankings.
Kurt Elster (46:38):
Let's give people an actionable takeaway. If someone wants to start proving their SEO today on a Shopify store, what's the first step you tell them to go do?
Patrick Rice (46:47):
The first step is get SE EMR and start figuring out what are your keywords and what is even the ROI on your Shopify SEO, because in some industries it's going to be very competitive. So vape for instance, there's tons of money there, but you have companies been doing it forever. Same with running shoes, you're competing with Nike. You have to do some research to just confirm that your industry is right for Shopify SEO. You can also see how much search volume is there, exactly what we did with Kurt, where we talked about using the magic tool to get an idea of the overall search volume of your industry. And so start off with just kind of a research phase. Figure out what are your keywords that you might want to show up for? Start searching them on Google, have some fun with it and see what competitors are doing, see how much traffic they're generating.
(47:46):
And then once you decide, Hey, this is something I want to do for my brand, then just start experimenting. So maybe you create a collection. You say, Hey, I want to try to rank for dog harness. I'm going to create a collection of dog harness and I'm going to link it in my navigation. Or maybe you just start writing blog posts, so I'm going to write four blog posts a month and I'm going to try to rank for different informational keywords. What are dog harnesses? That kind of thing. I would start there, just start experimenting and then seeing whether you rank for those keywords so it becomes this sort of fun game after a while where you're like, okay, I wrote a blog post. Now we're ranking position 50. How do I get that higher? Maybe I add some internal links towards that page. And so if you're going to DIY it, I would recommend that as sort of a very beginners starting place to learn. Shopify SE,
Kurt Elster (48:39):
Just going through your YouTube channel, there's a ton of resources there. I've linked to all this stuff in the show notes, tap swipe up or Paul Admonishes me. If you're on Overcast, you swipe right, I believe. Take it to your show notes. But in there I've got all the links you mentioned and your YouTube channel, just a wealth of knowledge, just great screencast tutorials and nicely edited, produced, which I appreciate. YouTube videos are hard to make a lot of extra effort there, but for sure, I'm going to attempt your tutorial, optimizing your store with chat, GPT. I'm going to try it, a real client store, we'll see how it goes out, how it goes down. But even so, you've saved me a lot of time. It's still a lot of work and it may be difficult or maybe I've got more money than time if I wanted to hire you to do it. How do I do that?
Patrick Rice (49:29):
So you can reach out to us on my website@patrickriceco.com. You can also just stop by the YouTube channel or my LinkedIn or Facebook and drop me a dm. I'm pretty available. I also have Calendly links and I've been taking a lot of strategy calls where I essentially just like I'm doing here, I'm pretty much an open book. I'll take a look at your site, I'll tell you whether this would work for you, and we can just have an honest conversation. I'm not going to do a hard sell if I think you don't have an opportunity, I'm going to tell you. And so I would recommend just stopping by the website, booking a call if that's something you are interested in exploring.
Kurt Elster (50:16):
And no matter what, just check out some of these resources that he's got. Check out some of these tools, even if you're not the one doing it, share it with a team member, have them give it a shot. Quite incredible stuff here. And I'm like a power user with this stuff, and I still have not yet attempted what he's described, so I'm looking forward to making it work, to playing with it. We'll see. If I tear my hair out, I'll be, I've got your phone number, Patrick. I'll be texting.
Patrick Rice (50:41):
It doesn't work. It doesn't work,
Kurt Elster (50:44):
But no, no, I'll get it. I'll figure it out.
Patrick Rice (50:46):
That's what it's all about, testing, so I'm excited to hear how your results go. Keep me posted.
Kurt Elster (50:52):
Patrick Christ, appreciate your time. Thank you so much for being an open book.
Patrick Rice (50:56):
Thank you so much, Kurt, for having me.
Kurt Elster (51:00):
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