Catherine Langman:
Welcome to the show, Karen. It’s so good to have you here today with me.
Karen Mapperson:
Thank you for having me.
Catherine Langman:
It’s going to be fun. So we’re going to be having a bit of a chit-chat about SEO, or search engine optimization, if we use the full term, which is really basically about how to be found on Google without necessarily paying for an ad, right?
Karen Mapperson:
Yes. That’s correct.
Catherine Langman:
So anyone who’s had anything to do with SEO, would know that this is a really big topic, so we’re not going to try and cover absolutely everything today, but what we are going to try and do is, I guess, hopefully paint a picture for our listeners on where to start with their SEO journey, like really what are the most important things to get in place right in the beginning. So maybe my first question for you today, Karen, would be, what is SEO, and then second to that, why is it so important for E-commerce business owners to work on it in 2022?
Karen Mapperson:
Okay. So SEO in a nutshell is, we’ll call it Google but there’s lots of search engines like Bing, Yahoo and Google. But since Google is the biggest one, we will focus on Google.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So basically what you want to do is, you want to tell Google what your website and your website pages are about. So when somebody goes onto Google or any of those other search engines, and look for a specific topic or product, that your name appears at the top of the page. And it’s pretty easy as that. There’s a lot of rules in SEO, and a lot of people think of SEO as being very technical, but it’s not really. Once you understand that all you need to do is tell Google, adding a keyword to certain pages and into certain positions, tells Google that, that page is about that topic, Google with automatically rank your page better.
Karen Mapperson:
Because ideally, Google wants to show its customers or its users websites they are looking for. So if you’re selling, let’s say for instance, you’re selling dog accessories, like leads, if somebody types in, dog accessories, Google wants to show the user what they’ve searched for, and if your website’s optimized the best out of everybody on the internet, your website will rank first. To answer the second part of your question, why is it so important, in E-commerce, obviously you have to see all your marketing efforts as different channels that all work together.
Karen Mapperson:
SEO is free, so you don’t pay, unlike Google Ads, for that listing. It also shows intent, so if somebody is scrolling through their Facebook feed, they don’t really have intent to shop, therefore you have to re-market to that viewer of your ad, a different time, and you obviously have to pay for those ads. Whereas with Google, people already have an intent to either investigate the topic or to actually purchase a certain product. So usually you’ll see that traffic that comes from Google or organic search engines, convert better than traffic that’s coming from paid advertising, and that’s because they already had an intent to buy.
Karen Mapperson:
Lastly, it’s also really important for your paid marketing efforts, one for Google paid ads, if you work on all your meta descriptions and meta titles, when those pages displaying your ads, you’ll already see better click-through rates, and if your ads have great click-through rates, it means that you’re going to be paying less per click. The same for Facebook, a lot of people scroll through Facebook and see your Facebook ad, but they’re not quite ready to buy.
Karen Mapperson:
Later on they might go Google your name or they can’t really remember your name, so something about your name and a keyword, if your name pops up as a top listing and you have a great meta title, meta description that entices them to click-through, that means that your Facebook ad inadvertently will convert through a organic ad channel.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, we do see that quite a bit, don’t we?
Karen Mapperson:
Yes.
Catherine Langman:
You’ve actually just reminded me of a bit of a story, and it’s about one of my brothers. I actually have several siblings, two brothers and two sisters. But this particular brother of mine is an artist, and he was setting up his own business a year ago. And so he had an art installation business, so it’s not actually E-commerce, but it was such a common scenario that I see, and I’m sure you do too, Karen, with lots of E-commerce business owners.
Catherine Langman:
So he got his website up, he was feeling pretty chuffed, and I was pretty chuffed too, because he is an artist, and seeing a creative person like that battle with trying to build his own website, and he did quite a nice job. So anyway, he got that up, and then he rings me up and he says, “Hey, Cath, I just Googled myself and I can’t find myself anywhere on Google. What am I doing wrong?” And so, it is really important, isn’t it, to do at least the basics of SEO with your website, because otherwise, you’re just going to be Google’s best kept secret, they’re not going to know we exist.
Karen Mapperson:
That’s right.
Catherine Langman:
It was a little step too far for my brother to resolve that one himself, but anyway. So the opportunity is really there, I know, because there’s a lot of businesses in E-commerce that don’t bother to, or they don’t know that they have to do this stuff, or that they should do this stuff. They don’t think that it’s important beyond posting on social media or running paid traffic, they don’t realize that there’s this huge opportunity to do a little bit of SEO work and start getting some free traffic.
Karen Mapperson:
Yes, and I think a lot of it comes also from the fact that everyone knows that SEO takes time.
Catherine Langman:
Right.
Karen Mapperson:
So, you kind of go for the fastest impact channel, so if you run a Facebook ad, you will see great results on your investment, or not so great results often as well, but you will see results.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
Whereas with SEO, it often takes a bit longer, and I think you can see instant results, I’ve seen plenty of instant results, but you need to know how to do it, and it’s not quite as technical once you start learning about it, but there is, I think, this bit of hesitation and fear around, “SEO is really technical, I don’t have time to do that now, it’s just too hard, I’m going to focus on Facebook advertising or Google Ads.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, or all of the above. Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
Yes.
Catherine Langman:
So, I guess, for people who haven’t learnt anything about SEO or they know they need to get started with this, what are the three key steps that someone who is new to SEO needs to look at on their site, initially?
Karen Mapperson:
Initially, I’m going to start with Google Search Console, because I see so many business owners that haven’t even installed and connected Google Search Console to their website, and it’s not tricky, Google has a tutorial and it explains to you how to do it, there’s different methods, you can go through your domain, or you can put a little code snippet on your website. Again, it sounds really scary, but it’s not, and once it’s done, it’s done. So if you run Facebook ads, you have a business as business manager.
Karen Mapperson:
If you run Google Ads, you have your Google Ads manager. Google Search Console is kind of an equivalent of those paid advertising business centers, but it’s for free. This is basically where Google gives you feedback on your website and telling you, “Hey, you’re not ranking for these keywords because you have all these errors on your website.” Or it tells you, “We’re ranking you for these keywords.” Again, I’ll use the example of the dog lead store. If you’re selling dog accessories and Google’s ranking it as swimming pools, there’s obviously something very wrong with your content, and you need to have a look at it.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
It also tells you which page is your ranking for, how much traffic you get, and it tells you what your click-through rate is to those pages. It tells you what your position is, it tells you how much search volume it has. So, first off I will say, if you haven’t already, please install Google Search Console and submit your site map. So you’re basically telling Google, “Hey, I’ve got a website, this is the map of my website, please go look through it.”
Karen Mapperson:
And then Google will start giving you free information, it usually takes a while, but once you submitted your site map. And once you created new content on your website, you can go and submit that as well to Google search consul. So without waiting weeks, sometimes months for Google to find these pages, you’re saying, “Hey, Google, I’ve created this new page, please go have a look at it.”
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
And that’s when see your SEO’s efforts, you’ll see quicker results, because you’re not waiting for the Google bot to find the page, you’re actually putting that page into a queue for Google to go and crawl through.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Yeah. Love it.
Karen Mapperson:
Another… Sorry, Cath, you go.
Catherine Langman:
No, I was just going to say, I love that. So first step is to make sure you have the Google Search Console set up, and I don’t know about you, Karen, but when I’m trying to find this stuff, I just Google, Search Console, and then I find it.
Karen Mapperson:
That’s the easiest way, just type in Google, Google Search Console, and then there’s a little flip button on the edge, you click on it and it will talk you through how to set it up.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. All right. So what’s the second really important thing to get in place when you’re starting out?
Karen Mapperson:
Is keyword research. So many people overlook keyword research. So previously I spoke about telling Google what a page is about.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Karen Mapperson:
So where you have to put in little keywords and the meta titles, the meta descriptions from the images and the content. But if you don’t know how much search volume is around a keyword, you’re shooting blank into the dark, you’re just guessing.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So you can spend a lot of time optimizing a page, adding keywords, and you’ll get very small results because there’s no search volume. So tools you can use to do keyword research with is Ubersuggest, SEMrush, and Google also has a free Google Ad keyword tool, which if you have running Google Ads, it used to be only for people running Google Ads.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
But these days it’s for free. So if you just set up a Google Ads account, you have access to that tool.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
And then the fourth one is, Google Search Console. In Google Search Console, you will see which keywords Google’s already ranking you for, and the amount of impressions you’ve had. So if a keyword has a high volume of impressions, it means those keywords is a search term that does have a lot of search volume around it.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
And then, the third thing, which I’m probably going to speak about is a few little things, is the homepage. I’ve done a lot of website orders and SEO orders, and I’ve probably only seen one small business who’s done this right.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So once you have your keyword and you know what your core product is, you have to add that keyword to your homepage, to your favicon, to your favicon file name, your favicon all tags.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
Your logo file name and your logo all tags and to your homepage meta title, meta description. I’m going to use a quick story, or tell you a quick story about a client I recently started doing SEO work for, and I mean, I’ve been doing this account for about two weeks-
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, so it’s super fresh.
Karen Mapperson:
It’s super fresh.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
I performed keyword research, I found the keyword with a huge search volume, I added that keyword to the favicon, the logo, the logo file name, and file tag, the favicon file name and file tag, and meta title and meta description, and within hours that website ranked for eight new keywords that contained that exact phrase.
Catherine Langman:
Wow.
Karen Mapperson:
So again, example, if the keyword was dog leads, it would have been dog leads, dog leads Australia, or dog lead, or leads for dogs. So all those types of variations of that one keyword, that website ranked for, by just changing that on the homepage.
Catherine Langman:
That’s incredible.
Karen Mapperson:
That is so important.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. And when people think that you have to be working on your SEO for six months before you’re going to see any difference, that goes to show that, that’s not necessarily true.
Karen Mapperson:
That’s right. And imagine how much missed opportunity this website already missed in on sales and free traffic. It took me 15 minutes to change all those things. So it’s such a quick and easy fix. It’s basically telling Google, “This is what my website is about, please rank me for this keyword.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Yeah, yeah. And I guess, when we’re talking about keywords then, I mean, they’re not just single words, are they? What are keywords really? Can we talk a little bit more about that, how we use them and all that kind of stuff?
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah, absolutely. So keywords is any words or phrase of words that a person would type into Google search. So for example, if somebody’s looking for dog leads, they might be looking for dog leads or pet accessories, dog accessories, puppy accessories, dog harnesses. So they’ll be typing in different keywords. So some keywords show different intent. For example, if they were to type in, what is the best dog leads, they might be in a research phase, where if they type in, pink dog lead Australia online, that phrase shows a lot of intent.
Catherine Langman:
To buy.
Karen Mapperson:
So a person typing in that, is really ready to buy a pink lead online at this moment.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So based on the search volume, so obviously some products, for example, and Apple iPhone might have a search term of 120,000 searches a month, versus dog leads might only have 3000 searches a month. And also the intent, based on both those things, and how many people are competing for that keyword, you can also see that metric in any of those tools I mentioned above, the Ubersuggest, even Google Ads keyword tool, or SEMrush, will show you how difficult it will be to score for it.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So if you are just starting out in SEO, it might be really tricky, for example, if you’re going to sell Apple iPhones, you’re probably go against, JB Hi-Fi, Apple Optus, Telstar, all these websites with great authority scores, then you’ll never ever rank for that keyword. But if you were to go for longer tail keywords, for example, Apple iPhone Melbourne or Apple iPhone Ballarat. So you add a location to it or you add a color to it, that’s called a long tail keyword, and they will also show really great intent, and they’re usually easier to rank for.
Karen Mapperson:
So my advice is, if you’re new to SEO, is to go for the longer tail keywords, and try and find keywords, we call them, Unicorn Keywords. So try and find keywords that have a high search volume but low competition. And don’t start out too ambitious. Don’t go for the 30,000 search volume keyword from day one, go for the 500 and above. We do have a nifty keyword metric we use to calculate how much potential revenue each keyword would have.
Catherine Langman:
Yes, please.
Karen Mapperson:
And that would be the search volume of that keyword times by the position. So if you rank first for that keyword, you will get 40% of the traffic, if you rank second, you’ll get 18% of the traffic, and if you rank third, you’ll get about 10% of the traffic. So if you’re going to go for the number one spot, you can go, search volume, if that’s 1000 times 40%, then times it by your conversion rate, so- [crosstalk 00:19:19].
Catherine Langman:
That’s the website conversation rate, you mean?
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Karen Mapperson:
So you’ve worked out how much extra traffic you’ll get, you times that by your conversion rate, and then you times that by your average order value.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
And you can work out how much this keyword, how much is that going to end up being extra sales or extra revenue for you. And then you can base those keywords in priority of which ones will actually be obtainable, and then which one would be worth all the effort of going for that keyword.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. And that’s such an important consideration too really, isn’t it, because you might think it would be fabulous to rank for a iPhone, but that big one that you were talking about, but if it’s going to take you 10 years of chipping away at your SEO, to even get close, what’s the point? Your not going to get any return on effort there. So yeah, but at the flip side-
Karen Mapperson:
[crosstalk 00:20:15] to go for 10 small ones, rather than the one big one, is that attainable?
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Karen Mapperson:
And then also to really look at the intent as well. So if it’s a search term that people would mostly search for to get information about, obviously you can re-target, again, this is where your other channels come into play. So you can go back and re-target those customers with targeting ads and Facebook and Google, but then obviously your conversion rate on that keyword will be much lower. So those are all the kind of things you need to keep in consideration.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. So that might be, how to XYZ, you’re going to end up on a blog or an article or something, explaining how to do something.
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Whereas, I know for me, like the other day I was, actually, this was pretty funny. My swimmer boys, they’re always needing more gear for training and for competition and blah, blah, blah, there’s this item that they need called, drag pants, which is not for something strutting on a stage with fancy makeup and wigs and dresses at all, but it’s like these kind of loose-looking bather material things that they have to put on, like shorts to make it harder to swim, it literally ads drag to them in the water. And so, they needed some of those, and they’re Googling, but of course they’re looking at the U.S. website, so I had to go, buy drag pants Australia online, or something like that. That’s a pretty high intent.
Karen Mapperson:
That is a great intent.
Catherine Langman:
Oh, dear.
Karen Mapperson:
I’m thinking, I’ll need anti-drag pants [inaudible 00:22:09].
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, I need the-
Karen Mapperson:
Something that’ll make it easier for me.
Catherine Langman:
Flotation pants is what I need.
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
With a motor on the back. All right. So that’s kind of talking a little bit about how we approach keywords, how to select them and research them, and how to use them in our strategy, I guess, and figure out which ones to go for. What about some other aspects of the website. What about website speed, for instance, is there other things that kind of impact our organic search results?
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah. I think website speed, I don’t want to debunk the myth, but I think this is where it becomes really technical in SEO, and where a lot of people say, “This is too hard, I’m going to put this in the too hard basket, I’m going to go post some social media instead.”
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
There’s actually two tools you can use, Google has a speed test tool, and again, you can just Google, speed test tool.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
Or the other one we use is Pingdom. If you use the Pingdom speed test tool, make sure you toggle the correct country you’re in, otherwise your website will read a lot slower, because it’s based on where your server is.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
To measure how fast the homepage is, how fast blog posts are, and how fast your product pages are. Your website speed affects your bounce rate. So for example, if the person has to wait for your website to load, after 3% the drop-off is quite big, and then your bounce rate affects your SEO ranking. So it’s not necessarily the actual page speed that affects it, it’s more the fact that people click to your website, and then automatically bounce, so that’s one of the main factors Google look at.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative). Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
Because when somebody searches for something on Google search, and Google ranks your website and somebody clicks through, but that’s not really what they wanted to see, they bounce off.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So Google uses bounce rates to determine whether the search term and what a person eventually sees is what they were expecting to see.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Relevance.
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah. In E-commerce, it’s really hard to have a low page speed, because we have so many photos and videos on the website that slows the website down.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, and apps and all of that stuff. Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
All of those things. So we do find we have a lot of clients that have low page speeds. For example, we have one client who’s optimized one of her product pages, so this is her core product.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
She’s added customer testimonials, she’s added videos, she’s added all these things on this website to convince people to buy this product.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
And because she’s added all these things, that product page converts really well, and it’s actually ranked third on Google search, but the page feed is over seven seconds.
Catherine Langman:
Wow.
Karen Mapperson:
There’s also a lot of websites, like Amazon, that are really slow, but still we all know Amazon converts really well.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So if you’re going to work on SEO, this is probably the last thing I would look at, is your speed. If there’s easy things to fix, like your images are too big and they don’t load, obviously, compress them, resize them, when you resize them, change the file name as well.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
But if you have a really well optimized page and that page is slow, that’s okay, Google will look at other factors of, is that page converting over how slow that page is.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. Well, no, that’s a good explanation, and I guess that helps people to sort of prioritize the order in which to maybe tackle things. So that’s good.
Karen Mapperson:
Yes.
Catherine Langman:
What about things like, I think we were going to talk about the menu as well and menu labels, or do we want to talk about just homepage generally?
Karen Mapperson:
I think on the homepage, there would be other than the off-page SEO, which is your image file names, your file tags, your meta titles, meta description. On the on-pages, there’s only really two areas that you really need to focus your SEO efforts, and that is your homepage navigation. And then also, a lot of websites like to add a little bit of copy on their website homepage that contains those core keywords you want to rank for, which links to those collections or pages containing those products.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So I think, let’s address the homepage navigation because it is so important, not only for SEO, but for usability as well.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So once you finished your keyword research, you can actually go and see, let’s use an example, versus dog lease, again, or dog lead and dog harness.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
You might see that dog lead as a 6000 search volume a month, where dog harness only has 3000. So you want to make sure that on your homepage navigation, your navigation says, dog lead and not dog harness. I know that’s technically different things.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
And the reason for that is, not only will you rank higher for that keyword, but more people are looking for that product- [crosstalk 00:28:27].
Catherine Langman:
They’re more likely to click on it.
Karen Mapperson:
Yes. So they’re more likely to click on it, or you’re technically showing someone who’s searching for something exactly where to find it- [crosstalk 00:28:42].
Catherine Langman:
As opposed to just having the word, shop, in your menu, right?
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
We see that a lot.
Karen Mapperson:
Shop, shows a lot of intent, but what are you shopping for?
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So we do advise on the main menu, so that the item people see at the top, all contains, shop. So for example, a pet store should have, shop cat food, shop dog food. So all your main keywords should be at the top.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
And then in your dropdown menu, you will list other high ranking keywords, like leads and water bowels and fleas, and worming tables, so things like that.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
But definitely not just, shop, and then a dropdown menu with random products that are not based on any keyword research.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
Not only do you not get any SEO value, but also, you’re not actually showing people what they’re searching for.
Catherine Langman:
No. I think one thing that I see, or I have seen many times over the years is, in that dropdown menu, people will label it with their sub brands or their product collection brand names. And I’m talking about unknown things here, and I put my hand up with my very first business, I didn’t know anything about SEO when I first got started, and I made this mistake, and it’s like, I had the brand name and then each range within that brand had its own name, and that was initially what we put on the menu. And it’s like, “Well nobody knows what that is.” Whereas they would know what a bundle is, and they’d know what a nappy is and a bag.
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Those are the things that people knew. Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
I find a lot of small business owners base their navigation on their competitors’ navigation. So they will go and look at some of their competitors and see what terms they use. And if that competitor has based those on keyword research and a lot of research, then that’s great, but if not, you’re basically copying something that’s not that great to start with.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah. So if you’re going to copy someone, maybe go look at THE ICONIC and places like that, that seriously know what they’re doing.
Karen Mapperson:
They’ve done a lot of keyword research, THE ICONIC.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So definitely go copy them if you’re in the clothing business. They also have great information pages that have been optimized for SEO as well. So those are great for anyone to go and have a look at to see what they add to their shipping policy, or any of those pages.
Catherine Langman:
Yes. Good idea. So, homepage navigation is definitely one thing. And what are the other, I guess, easy steps that business owners can do to improve their SEO, that maybe we haven’t spoken about in detail yet?
Karen Mapperson:
So there’s two ways to go about this. You can go all out approach and fix everything, or you can start at one keyword at a time, and then slowly see the results.
Catherine Langman:
Yes.
Karen Mapperson:
And have little wins and little victories, and then go for the second keyword. So I highly recommend going for one at a time. Depending on, if you have a small catalog, it might be worth getting everything done in bulk, but if you have a big catalog, it might be easier just doing one at a time. So again, we’re going back to keyword research, identifying one keyword, so just one keyword that has a huge search volume. Potentially one you’re already ranking for. Again, if you use Ubersuggest or SEMrush, it will give you your position for that keyword.
Karen Mapperson:
Another way to do it is to go and enter that keyword into an incognito search window in Google and just counting, so you don’t have to pay anything for it, just counting on which page, or maybe first just look on which page to do this, and then if you’re on-page, to count the position you’re on. Then identifying the keyword will be huge. Search volume, again, you can use the little metrics calculator to see how much extra revenue the potential is to rank for this keyword. So you choose one keyword with low search volume, that ideally you’re already on some page for, so Google has already found you for it.
Catherine Langman:
They know you exist. Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
They know you exist. And then assign that keyword, and this is really important, to one page on your website. So a lot of people find a keyword, and then add this keyword to every single page on their website, and Google’s like, “Which page do you want to rank for?”
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
And you just confuse Google. And you’ll see your position tracking will change all the time, because Google will rank this page better after something happens. Say for instance, you get a back link to that page, or an internal link, or you’ve changed the image, and then you do something on another page, and then you rank for that page. So choose one page, ideally a collection page. What pages are easier to rank for, because you can add more content to them. But ideally you want to rank for your collection page, so if you’re going to sell dog leads, your collection of dog leads, that’s the page you want to rank for with that keyword.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So then on that page, you go edit the meta title and the meta description, and it doesn’t matter whether you’re on WordPress, Shopify, WooCommerce, Wix, all of them have the capability of editing your meta description and your meta title. And you add the keyword at the start of your meta title, followed by either complimentary keywords, or a benefit to the customer, so it could be dog leads, huge selection, that would be the benefit, or free shipping is a benefit or after Afterpay available, that’s a benefit, then followed by your website name. You only have 70 characters, and I prefer to even use less, because sometimes if Google puts a rich snippet on the side, it might try and take your title, and then it loses its impact or its power.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
And then your meta description, which should also contain your keyword, but shouldn’t be stuffed with keywords.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So your meta description is really important to write a little story there, explain to your customer what is this page about. If they’re going to click on this link, this is what they’re going to find. So it’s got to be really concise, you don’t want somebody to come, who’s looking for a swimming pool to click through to a dog lead page, because they’ll just bounce off.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So be as honest as you can, concise as you can- [crosstalk 00:36:16].
Catherine Langman:
No clickbaiting.
Karen Mapperson:
No clickbaiting. Keep it a little bit, ask a question, often helps, “Are you looking for the best dog leads for your furry friends?”
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
Or, “Have you tried lots of leads for your furry friends,” so asking a question is kind of a clickbaite method, but it seems to be really working. Then followed by benefits. So saying, “Your search is over, we have the best dog leads in Australia.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
And then try and finish your meta description with a bit of intent, so that could be, “See the rang today,” if you don’t want it to come across as too aggressive. Or it could be, “Shop the range today,” or something along those lines. For meta descriptions, I know Shopify will give you about 320 characters, that is actually too long.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
Ideally you want to keep it really short, between 180 to 220 characters.
Catherine Langman:
I guess on the meta descriptions, just super quick, I know that one reaction that we would we hear from business owners is, “I suck at writing, I’m not a great writer,” and therefore they might procrastinate or just not want to do it. So, do you have to be a fabulous writer? Can you just kind of write it how you might say it if you were describing something to people?
Karen Mapperson:
Absolutely not. I’m not a copywriter by any shot, and I write tons of meta descriptions every day. Just think about it in terms of two sentences, you need two sentences and a bit of intent at the end, so that’s you need to do. Your topic, you only need two good sentences about that keyword, and then end it with, “Shop the range,” or “See the range today.”
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
And that’s all you need. So just make sure you got the keyword in there. I find in SEO, if you work on your own SEO, you know your product the best, you know your business the best, so surely you can come up with two sentences about each main collection you have as a business owner.
Catherine Langman:
I’m sure we all could. Yes.
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah. And again, don’t do all of them at the same time, because you might be optimizing collections with a search item of 90 searches a month, so that’s really not worth your efforts.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, good point.
Karen Mapperson:
Then go back to your keyword research, look at the volume and think about it, I’m just going to do this one page, I’m just going to optimize one page, instead of trying to do all of them at the same time.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
Another thing to add to your collection pages is on-page copy.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
There’s two reasons for this, again, you want the keyword on the on-page copy. Think of it as a little blerp, you’re just telling your customers, this collection is about this. So make sure the keyword is in that copy. And then, again, highlight the benefit, think about having someone come to your store and explaining to them how this collection or this product in this collection will make their life easier. Why should they buy this product, why should they buy it from you? Maybe that’s the benefit, because you have the biggest range.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So add a bit of on-page copy. Another reason for that is, that often collections do sell out, especially in fashion, so you have a fashion store. That collection, all the products in the collection might sell out, and then that page will be empty, and then Google will penalize you because that page doesn’t contain any content. Whereas if you just add a little bit of on-page copy, you can be sure that, that collection will always contain content, it will never be penalized for error.
Catherine Langman:
Love it. Love it. And that feels completely doable, particularly if you’re really focusing your efforts initially on the ones that have the most search volume. So that pines down the amount of effort that people have to actually do, so that’s awesome.
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah.
Catherine Langman:
Two more questions for you. The first is, mobile responsiveness, so I know from a user experience perspective, that having a mobile responsive website is really important. And by saying, mobile responsive, I’m not talking about literally just buying a website theme that says it’s mobile responsive, you literally need to actually go through your website on mobile to see, is the menu easy to navigate and find what you want, and can you shop easily on mobile, and all of that good stuff. But how important is that also to SEO, is it or not?
Karen Mapperson:
It is. It’s very important for SEO. So Google doesn’t actually tell us in the algorithm how important it is, all we know, a big part of the algorithm is ranking mobile responsiveness. So it’s looking at things that, and again, you’ll be able to see this in Google Search Console, there’s actually a whole tab just to check if your website is mobile responsive. So for example, making sure that the text isn’t too small to read. So if a person’s on your website, and they actually have to zoom out to be able to read the copy on your website, that means your website’s not mobile responsive. Another one people often miss-look is, if you put action buttons too close to each other, or any dropdown function that’s too close to another one.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So it’s actually really hard for a user to click on the buttons and add things to their cart, and because again, they’ll have to zoom out.
Catherine Langman:
Or even having, like we’ve seen plugins like live chat sitting over the top of an add-to-cart button or something like that, that’s not going to be great.
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah. Again, that would also fall under usability.
Catherine Langman:
Right.
Karen Mapperson:
So Google will also have a look at your click-through rate and your conversion rate. So if you put a chat bot on your website that covers your add-to-cart button, or covers your cart button, and customers keep dropping off after adding a product to their cart, because they can’t actually physically go any further, Google will take all that into effect and say, “Well, listen, people are going to this website and spending a bit of time, but they’re actually never buying, so maybe this isn’t a great website to show people who’s looking for a specific product.”
Karen Mapperson:
So number one, mobile responsiveness, make sure that your text is easy to read, so people don’t have to zoom out, and have a look at all your buttons, go through all your pages, your product pages, collection pages, and make sure that it’s easy for you to follow. Another one that falls under that is navigation, because a lot of the things these days, you can change your navigation for mobile versus desktop.
Karen Mapperson:
To make sure it’s easy to follow and navigate through your homepage main menu, and the same as well for your footer. Another one is that your footer link might actually be too close to each other. So people can’t actually click on the individual pages. We see a lot of clients, we do a lot of website orders, and on average I would say 60 to 80% of traffic comes from mobile.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So even if you don’t want to optimize your website for SEO value, think about the user value of and how it will impact your conversion rate, if you were to optimize for mobile first.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, 100%. Love that. All right, the last question for you. What about links. So there’s internal links and external, kind of back links, what impact do these have now in 2022 on your SEO and organic traffic?
Karen Mapperson:
So I actually like to think of it as a free type of links, internal links, back links, and external links. The ones that add the most value, and you’ll see the biggest results is through back links, so that is when another website will search your website.
Catherine Langman:
Mm-hmm (affirmative).
Karen Mapperson:
So it’s kind of word of mouth, Google word of mouth. So if you’re mentioned and linked from a website with a good authority score, so a website that Google trusts, you would want to Google, [Best Friends 00:45:31], and this website’s saying, “Hey, I’m linking to this website, Google thinks that website is linking too much,” also being important. So a great way to get quick results is to add a lot of back links too, or to try and get more back links- [crosstalk 00:45:52].
Catherine Langman:
Do they have to be free, or does it work if you’re paying to be on a directory, for instance?
Karen Mapperson:
It works. It’s easier to pay for back links than it is to get free back links. This is where PR comes in, and it’s a whole other channel we could always take, because it involves a lot of work.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
Ones I would recommend paying for if you’re in the mom and baby industry is Mum’s Grapevine, Kidspot, Mamma Mia, all those websites have extraordinary authority scores, it is in your niche, maybe then take all three, maybe just pay for one at a time, especially if you’re going to keep that back link on their website forever. I think it’d be a surprise that how many of your competitors have actually paid for a back link because they’re so valuable.
Karen Mapperson:
Saying that, there are ways to get free back links, and that would be to register with a free online directory, so you, again, just Google, free online directory. You can, if you’re on the mom and baby niche, you can Google free mom and baby online directories. There’s also, if you have a little warehouse, there’ll be free local directories, and then again, if you have a physical address, one people often overlook is, Google my business. Google owns that directory, so imagine the authorities of being on Google’s own directory.
Karen Mapperson:
And it also improves your click-through rate. If somebody searches your name and your Google my business directory shows on the side of the search page. Another one people often overlook is payment providers, so Afterpay, ZipPay, Klarna, all of those payment providers also have directories that have great authority scores, it’s free. You can just, if you offer that payment method on your website, you can just contact the business manager for your account and say, “Can you please add me to the Afterpay directory, or the ZipPay directory.”
Catherine Langman:
I just see that referral coming up in Google analytics, for a lot of clients. Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
Yes. And it’s got a great authority score. What you don’t want to do in back links is pay an SEO company to add your business to a lot of other websites that have low authority scores, so those are for toxic back links- [crosstalk 00:48:33].
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, you can get penalized for that, can’t you?
Karen Mapperson:
Yes.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
So it used to be a [inaudible 00:48:39] because it’s such an easy thing to do for clients, just to add a lot of back links to it. So Google’s always one step ahead. It does go back and look at the algorithm yearly, and then see a lot of people’s trying to cheat the algorithm, we need to introduce another code to it to make sure we penalize those people by trying to go over those cheats and those shortcuts.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah, that’s definitely caught people out. I know in the past I’ve worked with some clients that had unfortunately been caught out, not knowingly, but like you say, having an SEO agency, you’re doing these things and ranking them with these nefarious directories, and losing, when those algorithms changes come through on Google, I’ve seen basically the traffic and revenue just drop off a cliff, so you got to be a little careful with that one.
Karen Mapperson:
Yeah. And Google does rank, even if your website only has great back links, yearly it does rank that part of the algorithm a bit lower. So it’s not as important. Every year it introduces new things, the big thing for 2022 is reviews, which again, is great for user experience and also great for your conversion rates.
Karen Mapperson:
And it’s actually ranking pages that contain reviews higher over pages that don’t. So you’ll see, especially in SEMrush and in Ubersuggest, there’s a little star too with some keywords. So if you’re actually ranking for a keyword and there’s a little star next to it, that means that you’re actually ranking for the review on that page, and that’s why Google is ranking you for that keyword.
Catherine Langman:
Interesting. Yeah. That’s good to know. And so is this like having Stamped or Judge.me, or something like that collecting those verified reviews, is that what they’re looking at?
Karen Mapperson:
Yes.
Catherine Langman:
Yeah.
Karen Mapperson:
Yes. So again, there’s a tool called, Google rich snippet tool, to make sure that, and you can check your SAQ page against that. Just to make sure that your plugin or your app has been installed correctly and that Google can read that information. There’s also a thing, that if you hide too many bad reviews, that Google won’t rank that page anymore because you’re hiding the reviews, so it’s not a true reflection of your reviews.
Karen Mapperson:
So don’t hide those reviews, respond to bad reviews, keep them on your page, and try and really spend time in your email marketing efforts to gather a lot of reviews. Make sure you send follow-up emails and ask customers to leave a review. You can explain to them, it’s a small business, how much it means to you, how much feedback means to you, because Google is paying a lot of attention to reviews in 2022. And if your competitors don’t have reviews on their pages, that will be a super easy win for you and you will see quicker results.
Catherine Langman:
Love it. It’s so good. We’re going to stop there. I think we’re going to schedule a follow-up episode to focus on a little bit more of the content side of SEO. Because SEO’s are too big a topic, we thought that we would break it into two. So this is the first of a two-part series. So thank you so much for jumping on and sharing all of this fantastic information. Hopefully some of our listeners are feeling a little inspired.
Catherine Langman:
And of course, if you do want to dive a little bit more deeper into SEO, and you want a little bit of help to learn and implement, we teach people how to do this in our Productpreneur Academy. So that’s one option, and of course you could also reach out to us if you’re looking for some outsourced help as well. So either way, just head to productpreneurmarketing.com, and you can get some help from our team. But thanks again for jumping on with me today, Karen, it’s been a great chat.
Karen Mapperson:
Well, thanks for having me, and I hope I didn’t bore anyone. I can talk about SEO till the cows come home.
Catherine Langman:
It’s awesome. Love it. Thanks, Karen.
Karen Mapperson:
Thank you.