w/ Jeff Oxford, 180 Marketing
Still trying to crack the SEO code in 2025? Jeff Oxford has worked on 300+ eCommerce sites, and he’s here to share what actually works for Shopify merchants now. From why your $300 product may be killing your rankings to how AI tools can scale your SEO ops, Jeff cuts through the noise. This episode delivers a tactical, no-fluff breakdown of SEO strategy in a search landscape increasingly shaped by AI, user behavior, and smarter content.
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Jeff Oxford – 180marketing.com
Kurt Elster – kurtelster.com
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Kurt Elster
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Jeff Oxford
So happy to be here, Kurt. Thanks for having me.
Kurt Elster
And uh, you know, what's your business? What's your background? Why are why why are you qualified to talk about SEO?
Jeff Oxford
I'll just kind of give you the the one-minute TLDR. Um I first got in e-commerce in 2011. I was just out of college trying to make some beer money on the side. So I started an e-commerce site drop shipping beer pong tables. Um got that to rank, you know, top three for every keyword. Um ended up selling that off to a manufacturer, wanted to try to find a niche that had was more profitable, so then I got into drop shipping three printers. Um that I don't realize that some industries are more notorious for credit card fraud than others, and 3D printers happen to be one of those industries. So I got I was you know twenty-four at the time, got I was so excited because my first month I got like thirty thousand in sales. Well, next month I got hit with it turns out 90% of us were chargebacks. Oh no. It just took me down. And that was a very pivotal moment for me where I'm like, you know what? I enjoy SEO. I enjoy e-commerce marketing. I'm going to stick with that. And I've been doing e-commerce SEO ever since.
Kurt Elster
Uh all right, so having done this for 15 years, what's changed in how stores get traffic from Google?
Jeff Oxford
Well, I think the biggest one that's probably on everyone's mind is AI. So, you know, it's been pretty s you know, first if I go way back when like 2010, it was just 10 blue links. And then it was like 10 blue links plus, you know, people, then you start to get the featured um snippets boxes at the top and people also ask and it was kind of the search results were evolving, but we're seeing a big evolution right now with the AI overviews. So now Um and and you might find this interesting. Uh there's a lot of AI overviews, but they only show up really for informational keywords. There's a big study done. Ninety-nine percent of of AI overviews are showing up for just informational keywords. So they haven't really stepped on the toes of e-commerce yet. If someone's searching for like gaming laptop or you know, white t-shirt. Those queries are pretty much safe from the AI overviews, but we are starting to see them come in and really take market share and clicks away from like, you know, blogs and informational posts. You know, we typically have an AI overview showing up, the clicks on that search result go down about 30%.
Kurt Elster
You know, I I just tested your theory. I searched an informational query, I did best time to visit Disney World, and immediately comes back with uh the the AI overview. And scanning it quickly. Uh uh yeah I more or less agree with it. Um and then I did gaming laptop, no AI overview, goes straight to like the typical results one might expect.
Jeff Oxford
The the one exception is when you look at like middle-of-the-funnel keywords, like where someone's researching a product, maybe it's like Best Smoker Grill or um Dell verse Lenovo laptops. Some of those you start to see it a bit more because it's kind of it's not fully transactional, fully informational, and somewhere in between. Um, those are the ones I'd say are kind of in the crosshairs where uh where AI can give a really good user experience. I mean one of the the worst feedback Google's had and kind of the critiques these past few years is everyone was sick of these junky affiliate sites writing articles about, you know, best gaming laptops, best credit card like maybe not so much best credit cards, but like all this best this is. Oh for sure best credit card is one of them too. Yeah. And it was just all they would do is go on Amazon. They'd just, you know, regurgitate some reviews and product information. They would never touch the product. They don't even know anything about it. And this was just flooding. Google search results. I'm sure there's probably people listening to this who have seen these, you know, for some of the products that they carry. And, you know, Google's response to that was kind of stomped these sites out and they had a bunch of updates that just killed blogs. Um and I think that's one place where AI can really help gather all this data, do really in-depth reviews. So I I wouldn't be surprised if we start to see a little more AI presence for them, some of those middle-of-funnel research type queries.
Kurt Elster
I think the other question that we we hear a lot about SEO these days is is it still worth it? Because we have AI overviews are starting to take over. And you know, we have tools that replace Google search with AI like perplexity. Um, and you know, ChatGPT will do research and web searches as well. What uh what's your feeling there?
Jeff Oxford
I would say, well, first off, it depends on the type of website you have. So if you're a content site, if you're if you're like, hey, I want to make a blog, I'm going to create a blog and make all this money from blogging. it it's not worth it. It's just g all the updates we've seen for like the past three years, the core updates, the helpful content updates have just squashed, you know, private publishers. The only people that are winning in that game are the the kind of the bigger names. But in the e-commerce space SEO is still worth it. There's one caveat. Okay, there's a few caveats. First off, you have to make sure the pr your products are getting searched a lot in Google. So like if nobody's searching for your product and they don't know about it. Your money, your marketing dollars are probably best spent on Facebook ads where it's more of like demand generation, giving people something they don't know exists in the market yet. If people do know about your product and it's just a better product, Um, then SEO can work well if they're searching for it. So you know, first off is check to see are people searching for this? You know, Google has their free keyword planner tool. There's other free keyword tools like Uber suggests out there that are great just to kind of do a spot check to see, hey, if I rank number one, am I even going to get any traffic? Or am I going to rank for number one for a keyword no one's searching for? So that's the first one. There's one other caveat that um people don't really talk about much, but it's product pricing. So if you search any keyword, you know, any if you're looking for a product in the into Google, you'll notice the top three positions and and more so almost Pretty much page one is gonna be the cheapest option. You're gonna see the Amazons, the Targets, the Walmarts, the Best Buys. Like, yes, these are very authoritative site uh sites, and that's gonna help them. But very rarely will you see kind of luxury premium products ranking at the top. And there's a reason for this. If you look at any market and you kind of have a little pie chart, you get it in your mind, you can say, okay, maybe 20% of this is gonna be like budget shoppers. They're gonna get just the bare minimum no matter what. They're going to Timu, they're they just want the cheapest product. Most people, you know, maybe 60%, they're value shoppers. They'll pay a little bit more if they can see the incremental value. They don't want just the cheapest junk. They want something that might last for a while. But then at the other end, maybe there's only 20% that are looking for a real premium top market, you know, dog food or whatever whatever it is. Uh they have the budget for that. So let's say you your site is optimized perfectly. You have all these backlinks, you're ranking number three. Well, if if only 20% of the market is looking for a higher cost high you know premium product, that means 80% of the people are probably going to bounce from your page. And engagement metrics like bounce rate, time on site have a huge impact on on ranking. So you could have the most perfectly optimized page, but if people are seeing your price, getting sticker shock and hitting the back button and clicking on someone else. That's a very strong signal that you don't deserve to rank very high. And very quickly, Google's gonna lower your site. So I I always hesitate to do SEO for premium brands. Just because you have such a strong headwind that in most cases it's not worth it.
Kurt Elster
R okay, so if I yeah, I sell bags of some type and you know backpacks. Yeah. And the price of backpack could be all over the place. I've got a $300 backpack. This is a this is a nice backpack.
Jeff Oxford
Yeah.
Kurt Elster
I happen to show up, you know, and through optimization, I'm at the top of the search. People click through, but then because I have you know Google Analytics installed on my site, or just because they quick backed to the Google search. Okay. So they know it, and then that works against me. Because, you know, that that is an indication to Google that you were not the relevant answer.
Jeff Oxford
That's exactly. Those clickbacks will kill you.
Kurt Elster
All right. And so once I that happens, is there any recovering from it?
Jeff Oxford
There so like if you're 50% above market. So let's say you you you search um bags and you know number one is Amazon. It's gonna be or backpacks. You're probably gonna see things from twenty dollars to maybe seventy dollars. If I had to guess, it's kind of the range you're likely to see. If you're 50% higher, maybe you're like 100 to 120 or 150, you're still kind of in the ballpark. It's when you're like, selling three hundred dollar backpacks. That that's you're when you're like three X the the what's what Amazon's selling, that's when it's really hard to get those to rank well. Because most people, like yeah, there's a a part of the market that wants that But most people want, you know, they're like, hey, why would I spend $300 on this when I can get something for $50 on Amazon? And that's why, you know, that bounce rate and that click back is going to kill you.
Kurt Elster
Could I, all right, if I want to get creative and this has its own problems, could I be like, could I have a note that's a I could hide my product price and instead display a note that says and a cart to see the price?
Jeff Oxford
Yeah. You could try it, but then you also wonder, like, is that gonna hurt bounce rates? Where now people are like, ah, I don't wanna deal with this, I don't wanna add to car, let me just click on something that lists it.
Kurt Elster
And now yeah, I'm I'm certainly not gonna be Google shopping after that. It's gonna kick out my landing group.
Jeff Oxford
And once they see the price, they're probably gonna have going back anyways. You might just be delaying the inevitable.
Kurt Elster
Darn. Okay. I thought I was really clever with the code.
Jeff Oxford
I like the way you think, Kurt. I'm always up for kind of tricky SEO tactics.
Kurt Elster
Is there a theory here that premium brands struggle in search in general because of pricing?
Jeff Oxford
They they in general they do. Jeez. Unless the one exception is someone like for keywords like luxury backpack or like designer backpack, like you'll do fine in those keywords. But if it's just backpack, you know, school backpack, kind of the more general ones, if it doesn't have like a luxury premium modifier, it's gonna be really difficult.
Kurt Elster
Okay. Well that makes sense. Yeah, so we have to change. We have to be explicit in our our target market based on this this keyword. Is that really my only option here?
Jeff Oxford
I'm I'm an SEO first and a marketer second. So like there's there's gonna be some cases where SEO is great, but there's also some cases where m you know, yes you can try to push this boulder up a hill, but maybe your marketing dollars will be better spend on Facebook ads or another channel. So yeah, I think we just have to accept that SEO's a great solution most of the time, but it's not a great marketing solution all the time.
Kurt Elster
Okay. Interesting. I want to talk SEO pitfalls. We've learned one already and you've worked on what hundreds of Shopify stores or e-com stores at this point?
Jeff Oxford
I'd say hundreds by now.
Kurt Elster
What's what's the number one mistake? What's the most common mistake?
Jeff Oxford
I'll throw a few at you. So one of the I'll we'll do kind of the big beginner ones and we'll get a little more advanced as we go. So the biggest pitfall, one of the biggest mistakes I see. is having category pages or collection pages that don't have any content in there. It's just such an easy thing to do to have 150 to 300 words of content. Talking about your products, your unique selling points, who can benefit from it, you know, just information, like think of like a mini buyer's guide. What questions would people have before purchasing a product? Answer those questions in the copy. And now you don't need to have this big ugly block of content above your products. You know, it's gonna it could impact negatively impact the UI and the UX of the page. But maybe you show just two or three lines with a read more button that's gonna expand it.
Kurt Elster
Okay. Yeah, because that was gonna be my question. Is you collection pages, that's always kind of a balancing act because I know in split tests If I do anything that pushes my product grid down the page, that's going to reduce ultimately that is going to negatively impact my conversion rate. And so, you know, big hero image and a lot of text and I got to scroll down. For the customer, it's just stuff to scroll past. But I see the advantage in, you know, having context, having content that that helps, you know, position and frame the products that follow. But you're saying, all right, the then our balance, our ideal way to do it. collection title, collection description at the top, but then we hide it behind a uh an accordion menu, you know, show more, read more.
Jeff Oxford
Yeah, you give a snippet and then have like, you know, read more. So there's gonna be people that don't care, there's gonna scroll past it, but there might be people that are just on the cuffs and on on the fence of if they're gonna buy it or not, and maybe that description is what won them over. So that that's it's I su I say that because most for e-commerce sites, most of the SEO wins happen at the category page. You know, products are good, but the search volume at a product level is usually a lot lower. It's typically a category page where you see the most search volume that still has good conversion intent. And it it's such an easy thing to to write it. And especially with AI, there's no excuses now to get some good content. So have some helpful content. Um another pitfall I see is people focus too much on word count. In the past, there's been some correlation studies that show higher word count leads to higher rankings. Um that it's it's and as a result, people were just stuff fluffy content on their their collection pages. That can actually work against you. It's not so much that having thousand words ranks better than five hundred words, but if you have a thousand words Chances are you have more bits of information and data that Google can pull. You know, Google actually has something called information gain score. They're looking to see how much information can they gain from your content. And if it's just fluffed and you know hyperbole and all this kind of empty, you know, salesy copy, there's you're there's no value to the user. It's Probably not going to rank as well. So focus more on quality versus quantity and have like a really helpful 250-word category description and basically embedding a blog post.
Kurt Elster
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Jeff Oxford
It's more so like Google's gonna go into your content, it's gonna see like what bits of information, like okay, you say what unique selling points are, you say the different materials of this, you say who can benefit from it. It's like, okay, like different things that they can add to their knowledge graph. And the more little kind of tangible data points they're collecting, It's it's it's more of a score of conciseness. If you have a thousand words, but there's really no information to be gained, you have uh it's gonna be very fluffy. And uh they actually have a a a m another patent called gibberish score. Which is just like how much kind of junk and fluff is in the content. So, you know, word count is a myth. Please don't stuff your your pages full of no padded full of words just to hit a word count. Focus more on having helpful, valuable content. Ask yourself what would my customer want to know when landing on this page and approach from that lens.
Kurt Elster
The you're talking about collection pages. One of the common questions I hear is, well, hey, is it better to have fewer product listings with more options or more listings with fewer options. What's the you know from UX UI standpoint, that's one discussion. From SEO, I think it's a another discussion.
Jeff Oxford
You you pretty much nil it's a balancing act because uh I I always like to start with the UIUX side of it Because if again, if you have a high balance if you have a poor if you have a low engaging collection page, because that one's hitting the back button, it doesn't matter how good your SEO is. Now, on the SEO side, there are some benefits of having a leaner, smaller catalog than this massive catalog with all these pages. You have things like crawl budget where you know maybe Google's not gonna be able to access all your product pages if you have a separate product page for every SKU. Maybe if you have say you let's say you sell t-shirts, you got sizes, you got colors. You know, if you take one product, that could be 20 different SKUs. You know, do you really want to have 20 product indexable URLs for every single product? Um that in cases like that it might be a bit excessive. But on the other side, like maybe you want to have something visual where people can see all the colors and that's gonna, you know, if that will rate and connect with them more and that's gonna have a higher conversion rate and um better engagement metrics. So What I would say is for cases like that, focus on what's going to provide the most value to the user, because I think that would outweigh any downsides of having an inflated catalog.
Kurt Elster
How big how big does a site have to get? How many pages before we start running into crawl budget issues?
Jeff Oxford
So it's it's kind of a it's again it's kind of a balancing act. It comes down to how authoritative your site is and how many backlinks you have. If you're a brand new website and you have a low authority, um, you know, that you have tools like Moz and HREFs and SDM Rush will kind of give you like an authority score or domain rating. If you're below 20, you know, you Google's not going to crawl your site as often. If you have a very authoritative site, you're getting mentioned in the press, you got all these backlinks. you know, you could have hundreds of thousands, millions of pages, and Google should be able to get all of them. So it all depends on how authoritative your site is. So if you have like a massive catalog of half a million products, but you're only you know a domain rating of like 20 You're probably not getting all your products crawled and indexed.
Kurt Elster
So what you know if I have a big catalog, you know, and I don't have a choice. It's like this is the catalog is what it is as far as size goes. What are my what are my options to to mitigate mitigate it or optimize?
Jeff Oxford
You can do the best you can with internal linking. So have your parent categories, have your subcategories, have your subsubcategories, have different navigational paths. Maybe you have a option for people to shop by color, or maybe have people shop by brand, maybe have people shop by material. Do some keyword research to see how people are searching for your products and then have those collections there. So just having different navigational paths can help kind of M more internal links to your products. Um, on your product pages, you can have related products to get more cross-linking throughout the website. So you can there's some some tricks like that that you can do to help improve the crawling of your website. But at the end of the day, if you still have like a really high uh if you really have a really big product count. Um, you just have to accept that maybe Google can't get to everything. And I'll I'll kind of give one little anecdote here. Um I had a client who had the same thing. They had they sold um kind of just your typical medical over-the-counter products, band-aids, creams. um pain relievers, pretty much anything you can buy from CVS, they carried. But there's really only four product lines that that they white label that had the best margins that they really cared about. And that was COVID test kits masks, gloves, and incontinence products. So, and I don't recommend doing this if you're listening, but what we did in this case is we no-indexed 90% of the website. We literally took it out of the search engine except for those those core four products. It was interesting is we saw in Google's index the number of index pages plummeted, but traffic tripled from that one change for these these ones. So It goes to show that sometimes less is more and consolidation can have a big impact on SEO. But of course there has to be a business case to make those types of change as well.
Kurt Elster
So you had You had a site with a big catalog. Let's just say it's a dropshipping site. It's got a million products. And when you have a site like that, the they span a a wide variety of categories. And so what you did here was knowing that they had out of that maybe 20% or less, so four categories, were what we wanted to optimize for. You did some SEO wise is fairly extreme.
Jeff Oxford
You used what's called a very extreme.
Kurt Elster
A no index tag, which is a little, it's a note that tells Google you're not allowed to include this anymore. Yes. They are allowed if it finds the page, it's allowed to follow and like, you know, find other pages from it. But that page is now exempt. It's excluded. And so like don't do this lightly. Um, because you just banned yourself from Google if you do it wrong. And by doing that though, Google then said, like truly ignored the pages you told it to and said, ah, you know, now we we understand what this site is about. And essentially you optimized for those four categories. So you're able, I assume, get better visibility, better search results.
Jeff Oxford
That's exactly there's two benefits There. One is just having a smaller catalog alone has some benefits because you know now you can ensure Google's crawling all your products, indexing all your products. Now all the link juice um throughout the website is consolidated to a much smaller number of pages so it's not diluted as much. So the benefits is just having a smaller catalog, but there's also something, and we found this out during Google's big um ranking factor leak last year. There's something called site focus score. Which it looks at how focused is this site on one particular topic. So if you have a site that's covering all these different products and all these different product lines, your site focus score for any product line is going to be very small. But if you consolidate to just a few, now your site focus score increases. So for example, a site that sells um, what's the latest iPhone? Like 16 now? A site that just sells iPhone 16 phone cases. All things considered equal will outrank a site that just sells all phone cases. A site that sells all phone cases will outrank a site that just sells iPhone accessories. So the more specific hyper-focused your site gets, the better you rank. And you know, you might have seen the search results like, why is this low, you know, this no authority, low authority competitor that I've never heard of outranking me? Um, chances are it might be because they're just more hyper focused. Like they're just so niche down that that's helping them outrank you in search results.
Kurt Elster
So Should I be if I want to get really aggressive, should I be no-indexing low-performing content?
Jeff Oxford
I wouldn't go that far. I wouldn't okay, I would not do it just from SEO perspective, but I if I had to guess from looking at You know, hundreds of analytics accounts for e-commerce sites over the years. The 80-20 rule almost always applies. 80% of your traffic and revenues usually come in from about 20% of the products and categories. So if there's a business case where it's like, hey, maybe we don't need all these kind of more niche accessory products. Like we maybe we wanted that we added them because we wanted to like have upsells and cross sales, but it's really not working out. If that's the case, it could be worth cutting it. I wouldn't do it for the sake of SEO. Um, yes, there's SEO benefits, but I'd focus more on like, is there an actual business case for it? Um yeah, yeah. Otherwise you can kind of shoot yourself in the foot just cutting things for SEO.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, I I probably wouldn't attempt it. You know, I'm pretty comfortable with SEO. That's as soon as it's like, hey, let's start no indexing things.
Jeff Oxford
Yeah, ple please don't do this without consulting an expert. I don't want any emails in my inbox like, hey, you said to cut all these pages and I did it and now my traffic plummeted. So yeah, that it's a very extreme thing that you want to do a lot of uh analysis and prep work ahead of time first.
Kurt Elster
I want to know what do you think is the most overrated tactic in SEO?
Jeff Oxford
I think people talk about S just on page in general and technical SEO, I think it's it's it's a little excessive and I think people make it out to be the end all be all. Truth be told, when it comes to t and again, technical SEO, that's gonna be things like canonical tags, XML site maps, robot. txt. you know, duplicate duplicate URLs, you know, can Google crawl the JavaScript? Like there's all it's all that the technical stuff about can Google crawl index and rank your website. When I first got into SEO, it was really important. You know, you had side platforms like Volution and Yahoo Stores that were terrible, and you had to like address these issues. But with modern platforms like um you know Magento 2, Shopify, WooCommerce, BigCommerce, out of the box they're pretty SEO friendly. Um, sure, maybe there's a few little tweaks and optimizations you can do here, but there's nothing detrimental that's going to be holding you back. So I'd say Yes, there's some value to technical SEO. Definitely more so if you have a large catalog with, you know, thousands or tens of thousands of pages. Um, for most people You know, it shouldn't be more than I I again, if you're probably sp if you're spending if it's more than a one week or one month project, it's probably Too much for most sites. It's typically get it right the first time, then move on to stuff that really moves the needle. And within that umbrella of technology SEO, I'd say Yes, structured data and you know schema, it's beneficial, but it's not gonna make a real difference in your rankings. Site speed. Yes, it's great if you have a low s uh a slow site and you get it average, but don't worry about hitting all the core web vital metrics with page speed insights. Don't worry about that optimization score. We have to accept as e-commerce um companies that you know you we need a lot of functionality that a content site doesn't need. We have live chat, Clavio integrations, Pixel, Split, like there's a lot of things that's gonna impact side score. So people get hung up on it too much. And what I think it is is It's easy to tinker around with stuff you can control on your website. It's much harder to do link building and do the things that are actually gonna move the needle and get you to rank a lot better.
Kurt Elster
So these are things that you know today are our platform, you know, and Shopify and if we've got a good good online store 2. 0 theme from the Shopify theme store, it's already been vetted and set up to handle all these things for us. Yeah, like structured data, um schema rich structured rich structured data. That's just a a code snippet provided by Shopify now. And Shopify generates the site map and it generates robots. txt and Yeah, it it does all these things for you.
Jeff Oxford
It handles canonical tags. It handles can be awesome. Canonical tags. It does a good job with a lot of that stuff.
Kurt Elster
Just by virtue of you have a Shopify store and a theme from the theme store, the stuff's already handled.
Jeff Oxford
Yeah, that you don't have to do it. Again, it's it's 95% of the way there. Maybe there's a few little tweaks to get it, you know, the extra 5%, but it's such diminishing returns at that point that it's not worth getting hung hung up on. Like too many people think like my site has to be perfect, I have to do this. It's like it's like, okay, if your rankings are struggling and your traffic's declining, it's like polishing the lifeboats on the Titanic before it's hitting the iceberg. Like you really gotta look at the the bigger picture of what's holding you back.
Kurt Elster
the yeah, rearrange those deck chairs. Um earlier you mentioned internal linking. That is something technical and on-site. I could control. What's the strategy? What's the the thought process behind uh you know on-site internal linking
Jeff Oxford
So I'll just give a few simple tips here. If you have a blog and you have some blog posts, on your blog content, link to relevant category pages and product where it makes sense. Context is key. Don't just start spamming your your blog post to try to link to everything. But like if you have a blog, if I have a blog talking about um video games, maybe and I I sell gaming laptops, I probably want to link to my gaming laptops page from that. You know, there's a connection, there's relevance, and there's context. If you have some products that are really important to your business, link to those from the homepage. Your homepage is your most powerful page. Whatever you link to from your homepage is instantly going to get an SEO booth. So if you have a product that's like Rank between position 10 and 15 and you link to it from your homepage. In many cases, that's enough to put in like the top five positions. So that's that's a simple little boost you can do and use it as you want.
Kurt Elster
I like that.
Jeff Oxford
Um Another thing is on your products, I always recommend having breadcrumbs where you know it links to like the pay so you know it'll be like home page, category page, product, and you have the breadcrumbs. Yeah, sure there might be some UIUX benefits to it, but having all your products linked to the parent category is now giving all these internal links to those category pages. That's gonna help them rank better. And if you do have a large catalog to where you have category pages and subcategory pages, make sure that your top level category pages have links to your subcategory pages just to kind of get the flow of link to you. So if you do those Four things, your site is pretty much in tip top shape when it comes to internal linking.
Kurt Elster
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Jeff Oxford
That's exactly it.
Kurt Elster
Okay. And I love the breadcrumb tip because that's something we do. On the product page, from a UI UX standpoint, I want to be able to give people an easy way to go back to the collection. But then I get an SEO benefit out of it as well. So just, you know, easy bonus.
Jeff Oxford
And the I guess a fifth tip would be if you do have a large catalog on product pages, add links to related products. That can just really help get the crawlers deeper into your website.
Kurt Elster
The I want to talk to you about AI tools and SEO and workflow. By chance, are you a vibe coder?
Jeff Oxford
I I'm uh I I consider myself a vibe coder. I dabble.
Kurt Elster
I've got, you know, Chat GPT and I are are great friends. And I've got I I've written some Python scripts with it, evolved over time uh into vibe coding with chat GPT. And it is it has helped me with SEO. I've had it uh plug into the Shopify API and it's able to write alt text for product media. Where like previously it would have been, you know, prohibitively difficult to do that correctly or well. just, you know, based on the size of a catalog and the number of photos involved. Or, you know, I have it write uh SEO title and meta description on products. And it or uh you know using fuzzy logic to match up and create URL redirects. So there's a lot of great SEO benefit that I could largely automate with AI tools. Am I shooting myself in the foot? You know, I I don't think so. Um, but you what are your thoughts here?
Jeff Oxford
I I think when it comes to Meta data like okay, so there's a few use cases for AI. One the four one you mentioned is image alt text. I think that's a safe bet. You know, it's good to because most images People aren't taking the time to write alt text to begin with. So having at least something descriptive is going to be better than nothing. So that's great. And you know, GPT-4. 0's vision capabilities is really good understanding images and writing good alt text. So highly recommend that. Great great job, Kurt. Um there's a few other cases where AI um can help with SEO. So if we go to the kind of the the fundamentals of SEO, you have title tags, meta descriptions, and header tags. It can help with title tags, but it's you know one of those things like the out the quality of the output is dependent on the quality of your input. So if you just say write me a title tag for my gaming laptops page. You know, you're it'll probably have gaming laptops in there, but you're not giving it as much information as it needs. Um what what's gonna be much better is You know, check out your rankings. You know, you can either take a screenshot of your rankings or just like copy it and paste it in. Like write a tile tag for my gaming laptops page. Here's the current rank data with the search volume and current position. And then it will actually deter it'll select the bet it will write a tile tag based on what you're ranking for. So it might incorporate long tail keywords. So it's gonna rank better for that. It might um You know, it's usually good at coming up with like uh high click the rate title tags might say like no free shipping or you know, as low as whatever. But giving it more ranking data is going to get a much higher quality output. And say it will also include that in your meta description. But if you want to go a step further, and this is what we've been doing, is you take a screenshot of the page, You use ChatGPT with the 4. 0 uh GPT 4. 0 model. You give it a screenshot of the page so it knows what it's optimizing for. You give it um the ranking data. And now it has everything to basically make an informed decision like an SEO specialist would. It knows the search intent of the page. It knows kind of what the unique selling points are from the page. It knows what products are on the page. So when it's talking about the meta description, it's not talking about products you don't carry. It's only talking about what you actually have. And it's making sure to use the correct keyword. So the more information you can feed Chat GPT, the much better quality output you're gonna get back.
Kurt Elster
So the the phrase one of the the phrases I live my life by is garbage in, garbage out. You could apply this to all kinds of things. And with AI, for sure, garbage in, garbage out applies. And so, you know, my process was I have to bulk update hundreds or thousands of products. And so I tell it like, here are my SEO best practices. That's in the prompt. Um here is like here's the format to use, here's character counts to shoot for, you know, here's the context of who your client is. And then here is product title and description. Now try and generate SEO title and meta description. And if I'm doing that, you know, replacing SEO title and meta description in bulk on hundreds of products, I'm probably like net better than I was. But then I really want to go through and pick those like you know, the those top twenty percent of products and then go with this more extended approach for the stuff that I want to rank for or I think I can rank for. And you know, you know, maybe set up like a custom GPT that's got all those settings in it. And then I love the idea of give it the page. I've been doing this with um It's a Chrome extension called full page screenshot. And it'll just give me a ping that's like this is the entire page. And I can just drag and drop that to chat GPT. And you're right, its vision is so good. It'll understand it. You know, you could say like tell me about this, analyze it, you know, to verify it. Um, but once it's got that context, you know, suddenly it you get a much better output with it.
Jeff Oxford
Okay. Yeah, he he and just real quick, here's here's like the levels of page optimization. Level one, write me one prompt, write me a title tag for gaming laptops. Level two. Write me a title tag for gaming laptops. By the way, here's the ranking data. Level three, write me a title tag, but here's the ranking data and the screenshot of the page. Level four is the scale part. You can use no code tools like Replit or Bolt. Like I'm not a developer. I don't know how to code, but I know how to speak English. So I I've been using Replit and there's so many APIs out there, like Within 30 minutes, I was able to have it use the screenshot one API to take a screenshot of the page and then pass that screenshot. to ChatGPT to analyze and also we know pull in Href's data. So within 30 minutes, I was able to just no-code a tool. That can optimize hundreds of URLs at once. So that's like I guess that's the the highest level once you get into vibe coding can really start scaling some of these processes.
Kurt Elster
I will I will now share the cautionary tales about vibe coding in these AI SEO tools. My first versions of these scripts. were limited to 250 products. They didn't paginate. They could just like if it went over 250, that was it. You know, it it couldn't do it. Um and, you know, so then I was able to work through that, no problem. But you know, initially like it it It's not going to volunteer that information to you. You have to know it and then you know revise your prompt and revise your code. And then the other issue I ran into is I had one version of this alt-text script. Where it was not successfully getting the image and it was getting the URL and then the you know the context, but it didn't error out. It would hallucinate the alt text. Right. And so it it we I did not initially figure it out. But then like I go back through and spot check it. And after a few, I'm like, mm, this doesn't seem quite right. Like not quite what it was That's odd. And then I, you know, I figured it out. But definitely, you know, those tools can fail in spectacularly great fashion. Um, so just, you know, double check your work.
Jeff Oxford
ChatGPT especially. I I've I've used a lot all the major models and ChatGPT hallucinates more than I'd like. My go-to now is Cloud. Cloud, however you want to pronounce it. Cloud C L. Um C-L-A-U-D-E bianthropic. That's my that's my go-to. I probably spend most of my my work in there just because it almost never hallucinates. Like it's really good about if it doesn't know, it tells you rather than just making stuff up.
Kurt Elster
Yeah, that would I played with it a little bit and I was impressed with it, especially for creative writing. It's very good.
Jeff Oxford
So that that was one thing I I want to mention is like You know, another big part of the AI process is content writing. Maybe you want to have a category description for um for your category pages. Maybe you want to have a blog post. Cloud is still probably the best at writing content and and writing in writing well. But what can really make it go above and beyond is if it has this projects feature. We create a project and you can just dump in Everything about your brand. It could be like, you know, copy from your about page. It could be any data you have about personas and target audience. It could be, you know, literally just copy and paste your top product descriptions and put it in there. Give it all this context about your brand, your writing style. Even give it like some writing samples that you're really proud of. Maybe you s you personally wrote a few blog posts. Put that in there so it gets the context of what it should shoot for. And you create this project with all these documents. Now when you write content, It's going to be in line with your brand. It's going to mention products that you actually have. It's going to write for your target audience. And the output is going to be so much better than if you just did a prompt without any additional context.
Kurt Elster
The I like that. And again, yeah, garbage in, garbage out. Like the more the more context you can give it, generally it's going to perform better.
Jeff Oxford
If you're lazy like me, you can just use Chad GPT, use their deep research function to say create me a brand brief or brand overview for whatever your brand is, let it scrape everything from Google itself. Build you a brand brief and then just paste that directly in the cloud and you're good to go.
Kurt Elster
It it is fun when you're like you end up using two of them. You know, you're using like Anthropics Claude and then chat GPT. Like I'll do that, you know. Claude is better at describing images. Uh so I'll give it an image where I'm like, hey, you know, describe this in in great great technical detail. And then when it does it, I'll say, Oh man, that's five of ten. I want ten of ten detail. And then it really describes it. And then I could go to chat GPT and take that. And then now I have You know, I could use that to generate images with it, you know, where I can really nail like brand style um or recreate an image pretty pretty exactly with AI and then remix it. Um, you know, just like you start to learn which which tools are are fine-tuned toward certain outcomes. The um well, okay. I want to talk about diagnosing SEO problems. We recently had a client who's like, yeah, I think we think our Google organic search is dropping off, but you know, we're not sure what's going on. research it and tell us like, A, is this actually happening? You know, is this seasonal? Is this consumer confidence? Like what the heck is it? What's happening? Um so how would you how would you go about it?
Jeff Oxford
First thing is always start with seasonality. So like, you know, is it look at your year over year data, how like what was traffic looking like same time last year? Is it just a seasonal trend or is this out of the blue and things are just going down? So let's rule out seasonality. Next I'm going to look at known Google updates. And you can get this from HREFs or SM Rush. Or if you just search for like known Google updates, you'll get a whole list of kind of the major updates in Google. Does this correlate with an algorithm update? Um most of the time it does. I'd say this that that right there kind of explains most of the drops I see, especially Google's rolling out a core algorithm update every three to six months. Um there's a lot of fluctuations during those.
Kurt Elster
Like how do I know that? Where do you get that news?
Jeff Oxford
Um so like if you just go into Google and type in like Google known algorithm updates, there's gonna be like already number one is Search Engine Journal has their uh little list every single major update they've had with dates, description about it, links to Google's announcement. So that's that's probably the best place to start. And that will just show you like, okay, wow, my my traffic, and you look at the inflection point, like If you have a downward trend, look at when did it start going downward? Typically it'll be like flat and you'll see like one inflection point. You want to look at what's the date of the inflection point. So that's that's where I check to see does that inflection point line up with any updates? Um and using tools like SCM Rush or Hrefs can also be helpful because it will show you like How many keywords you're ranking for over time and the inflection point's a little more prominent when it's looking at keyword rankings instead of estimated traffic. So you can use those tools to kind of gauge where you hit by an update. So most cases you're hit by an update. Um and cases like that, like, okay, anecdotally, the sites that I see get hit by updates. are typically ones that have like bloated catalogs, low performing pages, maybe they have technical issues that's generating lots of duplicate product URLs with like the same content. Um maybe you have a lot of mediocre blog posts. So I've seen and this is anecdotally, but the sites that can like clean things up, tighten things up, take the quality of a quantity approach typically do better with those updates. If you were happen to get hit. That's an approach. But let's say there's still no Google update during that time. Um look at technical issues. Was there did your developer make any changes? Did you add a new um app and Shopify to handle the merchandising for collection pages or your internal search. Like try to correlate a lot of times it will be a technolestio issue. So those are kind of like the the few main cases where I see Traffic falling off.
Kurt Elster
The so alright, if I've ruled out seasonality core update and technical issue. What then? Like then I assume it's a content issue?
Jeff Oxford
Like I'd say maybe five percent of the time it just doesn't line up with anything and just like Well, you know, either way it's down. Let's just still add the the best practices. Okay, there's one one more. You can look at the search results. Maybe Google started. Maybe for your keyword, there's now an AI overview. Maybe for your keyword, Google's completely overhauled. Maybe they got more aggressive with paid ads. Oh, there's a giant block of paid ads. above you. Um maybe maybe your people also ask box, push you down. So the SERP can also change and push you down. But even if that's the case, like eventually you go through the checklist and it's like, hey, we've checked everything. Nothing lines up. You know, sometimes you just have to accept that you might under the exact answer, but the SEO best practices still apply. Make sure there's no technical SEO issues, make sure your page is optimized, and make sure you have enough backlinks to compete with the competition.
Kurt Elster
Okay. I mean all all good advice seems all sane. Uh and you know really uh when we're talking about this diagnosis work, it's gonna be in like Google Analytics and Google Search Console, right?
Jeff Oxford
Yeah. I would say Google Analytics for sure, but the problem with Google Analytics is it doesn't segment branded versus non-branded traffic. For that you have to use Google Search Console. So, you know, you're always going to rank for your brand. Um, it's really the non-brand traffic you care about. So go and go to Google Search Console, filter out your branded keywords. And then you can look at what what's the actual trend look like. And you can also segment to see which pages which parts your website got impacted. Was it everything or was it just your blog got impacted? Was it just your collection pages? Was it just your product pages? Once you start kind of splicing and dicing, it paints a better picture of what might have actually happened.
Kurt Elster
Okay. All right, let's Come to the end of our time together. Let's let's do some some quick wins here. Give me where would you start? If you're you've got a store, you know, they're at the start of their journey, but it's validated. They're doing uh low six figures annually. What's the but we got to optimize for time and resources. So what's the the 80-20 rule? Where are you gonna spend your SEO efforts here?
Jeff Oxford
8020 would be use a keyword research tool like HREFs or SCM Rush to see what are people actually searching for. Make sure I have those and when I'll give an example. Like if I sell t-shirts, I don't just want a t-shirts page. I want a blue t-shirts, black t-shirts, or maybe I maybe also by brand, Haynes t-shirts, Frulaloom t-shirts. Or maybe you go even more long tailing and start combining the brand name and the color. So like Fruit of the Loom black t-shirts, you know, Haynes green t-shirts. Find what people are searching for for any keywords that has high search volume. Make sure you have a page that can capture that. That's where a lot of these kind of bigger players are sleeping on is like the really long tail keywords. So the 80-20 is Find what the keywords that are more specific more detailed cat make sure you have a collection page in place for those pay for those keywords. Yeah, use AI to create a a really good 250 to 300 word description, put it on the page. Um That that's that right there is gonna be your 80-20.
Kurt Elster
Okay. And then give me pick a favorite single SEO win that you think our listeners, Shopify merchants, have overlooked.
Jeff Oxford
We already talked about categories, uh, content on category pages. We've already talked about um internal linking. Those are those are the easiest wins. I'm trying to think, is there anything else? Um if you if you're a manufacturer or if um If you're reselling from your manufacturer, a lot of times they'll have like a um buy our products here page where it lists like all their distributors or resellers. Go to your manufacturers, try to get listed on those pages. It's an easy way to get backlinks.
Kurt Elster
That's uh yeah, that's a good one. That's a smart uh backlink strategy. And you're a wealth of of SEO info. Where could people go to learn more about you?
Jeff Oxford
Sure, yeah. Our website is 180marketing. com. Uh my email is just Jeff at 180marketing. com. So love love helping people. If you have questions or just want to reach out and say hi, totally fine. Shoot me an email.
Kurt Elster
Jeff Oxford, 180 Marketing. Thank you so much.
Jeff Oxford
Thanks, Kurt. Appreciate it.
Kurt Elster
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