If you turned off your ads tomorrow, would you still have a business?

Transcript

Charles Travers: Hey guys, welcome back to another week of e commerce marketing chats with myself Charles and Jimmy. Jimmy, it’s been a couple of weeks. What’s been what’s been happening, mate?

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, so obviously couldn’t do last week. I was actually at an e commerce retreat for the students in one of the academies that I’m a coach in and yeah, I’ve I thought it was quite funny because I I had a few comments saying, Jimmy, you look so different without the the red headphones on. So the red headphones have almost become iconic. But I was just I was saying in the group chat this morning, I’ve actually I’m I’m rebranding at the moment and everything’s purple. So I’ve actually just to keep everyone happy, I’ve I’ve bought some purple headphones to match the match the brand branding and they should be coming this week. So next week’s show, as you guys can probably tell, the red headphones are starting to fall apart. They’ve run their race. They’re actually they’re actually Nokia Monster headphones. I won them like ten years ago. So they’ve they’ve stood the test of time, but it’s time for an upgrade, and I am getting some

Charles Travers: There we go.

Jimmy Dalgleish: some purple headphones rocking up to go along with my branding. So yeah, everyone I I I said to I said in the group too, look, if the red headphones mean a lot to you as just in the booking notes for our meeting, just say, Jimmy, I’d really like you to wear the red headphones and I can accommodate that for the students in there too. So but yeah, some some interesting topics were covered. So this

Charles Travers: Very on Brand.

Jimmy Dalgleish: This event was run for the elite members of this community. So they’re all doing quite well in the e-commerce world. one of the guest speakers was one of the co-founders from the brand Ocrap, which is like a a dog like a dog poop bag. and they were talking about like biomegradable by biodegradable materials, compostable materials, and all the little intricate details that went into like creating that. product. So it’s a really interesting story. The guy was the guy was fantastic. But a few things that I took of that from that, like when they launched they just focused super heavily on SEO. and you know, they were writing a lot of blogs. They were making I don’t even know if this is still relevant, Charles. So it might be worth asking you, but they were going finding search volume for kind of even search phrases that had like 70 seven as low as 70 searches a month and They were creating like a almost like a collection page with this description around it and putting just all the products that were related to that query just in there and having like a page almost dedicated for that query. So I don’t know how relevant that is now or you’re using that tactic, but I’d be keen to find out. it sounds like they did SEO a long time ago, so I don’t know how relevant that is now. But yeah, the SEO was interesting and other and obviously the other hot topic was was AI. ’cause the community that I coach in, we are heavily focused on AI, improving improving your business with AI, trying to get AI to do a lot of the heavy lifting. So is it we’re trying to get people to have their businesses run 80% on AI and 20% human input. so and it’s not AI slop either. We’re y we’re using AI for like the back end systems. So yeah, it was a it was a great week away. I took the family away, great family time hanging out with some amazing e-commerce people. So if you are if you are in the e commerce space, it’s it’s almost I think it’s something that a lot of e commerce owners, founders kind of aspire to do, like build a business where they’ve got the freedom to hang out with other like minded people and learn and grow and and just see different different parts of the world. So I know that’s kind of why I got in it for that freedom, fun and adventure from our our early mentor, Charles Timothy Mark, absolute legend. Shout out to Tim. but yeah, I think a lot of people get into e commerce for the lifestyle of it. So yeah, it’s great to great to meet obviously the students that I coach in person, but some of the students, Google Ads isn’t their primary lever, so I haven’t had the chance to have a good chat with them. But yeah, just a a really good week and and just circling back. on what I said for SEO Charles. What are your what are your thoughts on kind of, I guess, category pages for almost unique search terms?

Charles Travers: Yeah, absolutely. It’s something that I I still I still implement today for for my clients. And like you said, sometimes, you know, in my experience, you know, you can find just because a certain, you know, long tail keyword, phrase or question, or query gets a very few amount of searches based on, you know, SEM Rush or whatever you know you’re using now. In my case S E rankings, now I’ve moved over.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Hey no no plugs unless they’re sponsoring.

Charles Travers: But yeah, it’s it’s yeah, yeah, no, I can’t start mentioning SEM Rush anymore, can I? ’Cause I’ve I’ve I’ve been put you know, labelling them all sorts for the last few weeks, but no, no no no drama there, SEM rush. It’s you know, it’s what it is. but yeah, there’s there’s definitely opportunities. you know, even if say a

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: the keyword phrase gets so yeah twenty searches a month. Sometimes in my experience, when you go after those keywords, you actually drive more more clicks and traffic than what the SEO tool suggests there are in terms of, you know, search volume. So yeah, one thing I would say you’ve got to take some of these tools kind of as a as a guesstimate or a an idea rather than you know, pure factual.

Jimmy Dalgleish: How d how do these so how do these pages work, Charles? Is it literally just set up the collection page, write a good description for that collection page and then populate it with products that are relevant to that? Is that how it works?

Charles Travers: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Optimize the title, the meta description around that that keyword phrase that you want to go after. yeah, I mean it was one of the first things that I l I I look at when I’m working with a client. It’s like, okay, what are firstly I’m reviewing the collections on the existing website and I’m like, okay, are there any that firstly need to be reoptimised or yeah, for example I started working with Recently with a sports apparel brand that had already worked with an agency before. So actually some of the the foundations were already in place, like optimized meta titles, descriptions. but then when I looked at the site, they had certain collections linked to the navigation that were basically empty. So there was no products in those collections. So the first thing we’re gonna do is we’re gonna review okay, what collections are too thin. Do we need need to add more products? If we can’t add more products from a business perspective, then should we merge and redirect to a more established collection? are there any opportunities to create new collections based on search volume, but also what products the client can actually sell? Because you know, I can provide them with a bunch of different suggestions on new collections, but if they’ve got no products that fit those collections, then it doesn’t make sense to set them up. So I like to as a rule of thumb, I would say you really want to have at least four products on a collection minimum. if not, it becomes a bit of an uphill battle to actually rank that page. You can do the optimization, you can optimise the title, description, get an optimised collection description on the page. But if you’ve got one product on that page and your competitors have got twenty five products with their competing collection page, y it’s gonna be a bit more challenging unless you’ve got a very strong, you know, domain authority, you’ve got a lot of backlinks, you’ve produced a lot of kind of content on the site already and you’re pretty established. so yeah, there’s vario variables.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Now how much like how how much is like too much, would you say? And when I when I mean that it’s like okay, say you’ve got like a a core group of products which are all circling around the same keywords and you’ve you’ve got about ten, but then there’s like I don’t know, like ten different strong kind of keyword variants for those descriptions. Would you make a collection page for each, or would you just include all those keywords in one collection page? Like

Charles Travers: Yeah, it depends.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Trying to think of a good example without giving away kind of my own client examples because I don’t want people to jack their products. So let’s

Charles Travers: No, I know exactly what you mean. You’re you’re ba what you’re basically saying is you know you’ve got these different keywords to go after. They’re all very sip similar in variance. So, you know, they’re they’re they’re very similar. So do you merge you know a collection of all the products related to all of those keywords into one collection or do you spread them out across various collections to rank for more kind of targeted keywords. the answer would be it really depends because yeah yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I was about to say it depends. The the the old famous line from every market air. And I like I say it a lot ’cause there’s a lot of variables that go into different things. And I think I think the important part is ex yeah, the important part’s explaining the variables for why it depends. So I’m keen to hear what you say now.

Charles Travers: It’s yeah it’s cliche, but Yeah. Well, because you know, I’ve had situations where I’ve been able to let’s I I try and I try and give some example here. So I’m working with a an automobile parts e-commerce store at the moment and they have they sell different generations of different parts. So say like wheels of a truck and there’s like First generation, second generation, third generation, fourth generation. You could could create one collection of of wheels. but actually some people are searching for first generation wheels or second generation wheels for a particular brand. So building out those individual collections, you know, I found in my experience actually was is able to drive more traffic to the to the website and to those individual generation pages. and sometimes it’s a bit of trial and error. Like, you know, you can Yeah, it it it really is a case of testing it and seeing. And if you’ve like, for example, if we built out those generation pages and we’re finding that we optimized the pages and it just it wasn’t driving any traction, we would then merge those and redirect those pages back to the master collection page. I I think my answer would be also it’s like it I I like to look into the data. Like let’s test these things out because you know no no mar no marketer hundred percent knows or no SEO 100% knows until they actually do it. It’s either based on previous experience, they’ve tested it and they found that it you know it works so they’re gonna

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, that makes sense.

Charles Travers: they’re pretty confident to do that again or they haven’t done it before and they need to test it out to see if it actually works. so yeah, that would be my my answer really would be there is, yeah. It it depends. There are some, you know, variables and I think being able to test these things is key.

Jimmy Dalgleish: important is like in internal linking from like those kind of pages in the description. Is it important? Like if you’ve got blog articles talking about the products, would you link the blog to that collection page or would you go the other way and collection page reference one of the blogs?

Charles Travers: No, I would go from blog to typically I go from blog to collection and then obviously the collections link to the products. or if we’re talking if it’s a like a product review or roundup, which only typically works on a site that is selling multiple different brands because if you do a product roundup of your own product, it doesn’t really make sense and it you know

Jimmy Dalgleish: Okay. Yeah. Yeah, hey, here’s here’s our worst product. Yeah. Can’t see anyone doing that.

Charles Travers: Yeah, i it yeah, exactly. Or it’s certainly or even like our top yeah, I guess you could but they might not have as much traction. but yeah, that’s how I like to do it is from blogs to collection pages linking internal linking and then from there obviously your collections link to your products. But again, if you’re talking about a particular product within your blogs, then then link to the direct product page as well.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, interesting. Yeah, like like I said, this this founder from the brand O Crap, like just he mentioned SEO a lot. and then yeah, ’cause people didn’t mention they do SEO, but it’s like, well, what exactly did he do? Like SEO is so broad, like they could have done could have done absolutely anything. And then he did talk about the he did talk about those collection pages. He mentioned one other thing too that they did I forget it off the top of my head. He was doing blogs. Blogs was a blogs was another one too that they were using to drive traffic. But yeah, it’s just it’s just interesting that a a business that did that well, he said, yeah, during like they he they were doing SEO before COVID and seeing really good results from that. So yeah, the games change a little bit now, but I still think the fundamentals I’m still saying the fundamentals for SEO like drive traffic to e commerce stores. I think the the barrier to entry to create blogs is a lot, lot lower now. people say like people are punching out AI slop, but honestly I’m reading the AI now and it’s more informative than half the articles out there anyway. So I don’t care if it’s written by AI, I just care if it’s actually genuinely gonna help me or answer my question. And honestly, that’s what most people are gonna be concerned about. They’re not gonna be reading it and saying, my gosh, a human didn’t write this when in the majority of cases the humans that do write it are just outsourced from the Philippines almost. So, you know, what’s the difference?

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah. I think actually now there’s there should be more focus on and not that there shouldn’t have been in the past, but there should be more focus on format and design of the blocks because that’s gonna be the differentiator. Most people they okay, the the first barrier is there isn’t really one because you’ve got AI, but the second one is spending the time and effort to actually put the right elements on the page, you know, whether it’s a linkable Table of content, an FAQ section at the bottom, which is nicely designed. You know, there’s actually some styling to it, using custom images, adding potentially a video supporting that that blog. These little things will give you the edge. and nine times out of ten, the kind of the main keywords that you want to go after, you know, I find in the top three on Google or even the AI overview. there’s always something you can do to improve and beat those top positions. so yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I agree. actually I I saw I I read something interesting this week, Charles. it was the effect of the traffic traffic drop-off on Backlinko since AI kind of become introduced, and it’s literally crashed. But the only reason that made me think of that, you spoke about like beautifully designed sites. Back in the heyday, that site was phenomenally designed when they did the redesign.

Charles Travers: Interesting.

Jimmy Dalgleish: was so simple, there was just like massive informative guides. But now now with AI, no one’s no one’s going there. And I think Brian Dean, who who owned it, sold at the right times.

Charles Travers: Well, I think that that I think that might have been somewhat of a a reason is not just the fact that obviously AI is, you know, showing answers to certain queries, but actually Brian Dean was the thing that pulled people to the site. To l you know, i i like aspiring SEOs and he had a very good reputation and I think the fact that he’s not involved really anymore with the brand

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, that’s true.

Charles Travers: People were just like, Okay, we’re not gonna you know, we’re not gonna go to the site and read the the articles. Because he he did really at one point he he not just had great design on those blogs, he created them almost like landing pages, but the content itself was like really, you know, cutting edge and up to date, based on his own experience. Now it’s you know, the writers that they’ve got they’re probably just you know

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah.

Charles Travers: any old writers or maybe they’re using AI themselves. So there’s no first hand experience. And I think that’s one of the differentiating factors. it’s something that again I go back to this client that I started working with. They’ve got the good thing is they’ve on board they’ve got a writer with experience around the sport that they’re trying to promote because they sell apparel and like we can get first hand experience and and content in there. Yes, they might use a little bit of AI to write the content, but they’re putting their personal touch on it, which Google really likes, you know, first hand experience. So that’s something that I would say is if you’re able to put that into your content, that’s gonna be more valuable moving forward because it can’t be replicated. It’s based on your, you know your own experience rather than just what AI’s put together.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I I I had another thing to ask you too. I I just saw this posted today, so I’m not sure if you’ve even seen it and I haven’t tested it yet. I’m just trying to I was just trying to run a test now to see if it came up with it, but still doing a diagnosis. But apparently on the apparently on the Google Page Speed report now they’re giving you like a performance indicator on how crawlable your site is for like agentic.

Charles Travers: Interesting.

Jimmy Dalgleish: searches. So I’m just running a test now, but it’s still diag diagnosed performance issues for the site I’m testing it on. But I wasn’t sure if you’d seen if you’d seen that or not at any point this week.

Charles Travers: No, I hadn’t to be honest with you. That’s that’s something new to me. yeah, no, I I what was it?

Jimmy Dalgleish: here we go. Here we go. It it’s just come up. So I’ve got diagnosed performance issues. Got agentic browsing one out of three. So it’s kind of yeah, for this site that I ran, it’s it as far as I know, it’s it’s it’s only been Check here to ensure high quality browsable sites for AI agents and validate the correctness of web MCP integrations. This category is still under development and subject to change. So yeah, it looks like on the Google page speed report, it’s gonna start giving you I guess kind of reviews on how well your site can be, I guess, browsed by AI agents. And at the moment the s the the Shopify site that I just put in is apparently one out of three. So probably needs some work. Yeah.

Charles Travers: But yeah, room for improvement. We’ll put that one in the show notes then for people to to check that one out and and try out their own store. there you go.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, definitely. So, again I’m not I’m not in the SEO world, so I don’t know how like viable this I haven’t used this sp page speed dot web dot dev page very often, but yeah, okay. So yeah, that that is in there now. So that it may be worth just having a look at it, see what it says, see if there’s some additional things that you can add in there to improve your browsability for AI agents, especially with

Charles Travers: Yeah, it’s quite well known.

Jimmy Dalgleish: what everyone knows is coming. So yeah. It’s it’s got something it’s got something here. It’s talking about w is it it’s talking about cumulative cumulative shift a layout shift as well. I don’t know what that is, but yeah, it’s coup a couple of in a couple of interesting things in here for kind of agentics. So

Charles Travers: Yes.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Definitely worth checking out. I have just done it right now while we’re on this call, so I can’t give you too much depth about it, but just know that it is showing you a ranking for kind of agenc browsing on that Page Speeds Google page. So definitely worth checking out. And I’m sure Charles will be jumping and check it out after this call as well.

Charles Travers: Yeah, yeah, for sure. Always learn something new and it’s that’s the great thing about our chats. It’s you know, one of us will always pick up something that we what the other hasn’t seen in the week, haven’t they? So yeah, it’s good stuff.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah. Yeah. And and on AI too, like I’ve taking on two new test clients on the the AI phase as well to go on top of some other clients that we took in the first round of testing for open AI or Chat GPT ads, whatever you want to call it. So that’s gonna be that’s gonna be interesting too. At the moment I’ve seen the traffic come through. I haven’t seen high conversions yet, so still gotta just keep testing and tinkering until we find a kind of a system and a message that resonates and how we should approach these. so yeah, I’m trying to just learn as much as I can because I think it’s going to be a valuable channel. you can already tell the traffic’s there because the traffic is is coming through on on low spend. so yeah there’s an opportunity. I think at the moment I think ChatGPT adds I think the opportunity is probably a little stronger for service based over e com but I mean if you’ve got a got a high quality, high priced product, may definitely be worth a a worth a test. But yeah, my early testing is just suggesting that it it may be it may be better for service based businesses just at this early stage.

Charles Travers: Interesting, interesting. So yeah, it’s a quite a high entry to barrier in terms of cost and well it’s also c considering margins, isn’t it, with e commerce stores, it’s you know, it has to make financial sense.

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, ’cause I I think on our ni I think on our initial call, it was recommending three to five dollars per click bidding. But I have lowered one of our tests to one dollar and it’s still spending, but I tried to set it below a dollar and it just kept coming up with a fail message. So one dollar was the lowest that I was able to bid on the on the platform without getting an error message. I’m not sure if they fixed that or not, but Yeah, I’m just I’m just in there testing and trying different things like everyone else at the moment. So anyone that’s, you know, claiming to be a guru and knows everything about it, you know, they’re just trying to grab some market share in that space early. So we’ll share the we’ll share the wins that we have while we’re testing that. So I know Charles is potentially getting on one of his clients to on board to test that as well. So yeah, hopefully we can have some discussions around that form of advertising as well. I w I did have I did have an interesting discussion and SEO definitely falls into this a little bit. But so one of one of the students I work with, they are they’re heavy heavily leveraged on kind of meta and Google ads. So and and the question is, like if you turn off Google and Meta, do you still have a business? And the or the organic stuff that was coming through was is Like the answer’s no, you can sustain it. Whereas someone else I was working with the other day, they’ve turned off all their ads and they’re still able to do like twenty K a month in sales without kind of any advertising. but this is kind of it’s a dropship product, so he’s playing in that dropship competitive space and it’s like the play is Facebook and Google ads to drive traffic. But yeah, it’s like, okay, at what stage do you start building other traffic channels that A kind of evergreen or free basically. And I was thinking about the the channels that you can do that on. So one of them, the the big one obviously, is is SEO. but then we’ve also got things like Instagram content, TikTok content. This is to one promote your products and also drive traffic to your website, and then you’ve got additional traffic sources like push out that you can install which which isn’t free but like the cost per month is under fifty dollars so i’m gonna basically put it in the free bucket but yeah email not free either but i mean you’re paying a monthly fee and to send it your the email is free but super important so I think a a lot of people that have businesses that are just relying on paid traffic should at some point consider hey how can we drive traffic that isn’t a paid lever? ’Cause I I think it provides a little bit more longevity to the brand too. And if you’re so reliant on paid platforms, it just takes one like Facebook account to be suspended temporarily or something happened to your Google ads and you know, it’s a huge it’s a huge risk. So are there anything that you’re say else you’re saying client side, Charles, the student I mean that clients are implementing tactics, I guess, to drive additional traffic.

Charles Travers: Yeah, I think the one that sprung sprung to mind was b especially because of the the knock on effect it can have with showing up for AI searches or on AI platforms is building a a Reddit community. So, you know, and you know, obviously not just promoting your product but actually whatever the market you’re in, you build

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, actually that’s a good one.

Charles Travers: a community around that and you educate people, you you know, interact with them, provide value, and provide a platform and then as a as a you know, a knock on effect that can then drive traffic to your site. And also Reddit’s one of the most cited websites for for AI search along with things like Wikipedia. so yeah I think Having a Reddit strategy in place, I think, is g seems to be an important channel right now. and it doesn’t seem to be slowing down from what I’m seeing. so yeah, that’s one thing that I’ve

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, I’ve heard they’re I’ve heard they are kind of cracking down a lot more on links and and things like that now too. So I I like Reddit’s really kind of protective of their brand and like the community doesn’t like promotional materials how it is anyway. So it’s one of those it’s one of those platforms that yeah, I was just about to say that you that you’ve gotta like play by their rules, play the game, but

Charles Travers: Yeah, you’ve got to do it right.

Jimmy Dalgleish: There are some instances where you can game it. So you just gotta learn the game and play it. And yeah, you can see some you can see some really good results from doing that. and then I kinda wanna make a I kinda wanna make an overall list of all the kind of channels and when you should use them, when you shouldn’t. we should make a master list of channels. I think it would be useful for not only our clients and our students but also the the general public too that’s even listening to this to just see, okay, I’m doing meta in Google, like where else do I go from here? And then they’ve got a whole list of channels that they can explore, like SEO and email and push owl and TikTok, Instagram. Yeah, just a whole whole world that they can

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: go and explore to to drive traffic to their store ’cause yeah, at the end of the day the if you’ve got no traffic, you’re not gonna get any sales, are ya?

Charles Travers: The other one. No, and absolutely. the other one is is what we’re doing right now, Jimmy, is we’re recording a I mean a podcast as well. you’re building an audience. that then gets syndicated a and and published across various platforms, which helps you drive more, you know, generate backlinks to your store. often from from, you know, good quality websites like Apple Podcasts, Spotify. You know, we’re posting this on YouTube. which we can then create shorts and content from. So

Jimmy Dalgleish: You YouTube YouTube’s a really good one too that I didn’t mention. So creating a YouTube channel, Facebook group, community, yeah, there’s so much you can do. it becomes a bit overwhelming for business owners sometimes. But yeah, I think well let’s let’s commit to that, Charles. We’ll start making like a master list of all the channels available to marketing and we’ll put together

Charles Travers: Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: a well presented sheet and use clawed design to help us make it look good too. Cause gosh, I’ve been relying on that for good looking design. But and it’s doing a great job. But yeah, let’s w we’ll we’ll pay we’ll paste it in the Facebook group. We haven’t posted in the Facebook group for a long time just because it it’s not that active at the moment. So if you want if you come in there and ask a question, you’re gonna get it answered by me or Charles because we do get notifications when things are posted in there. So You can check that out at Shopify Marketing Secrets on Facebook. And then yeah, we’ve we’ve just hit the thirty minute mark as well. So obviously you can find us on all the podcasting platforms too at e commerce marketing chats. And yeah, we might call that a wrap for this week and yeah, commit to that list in the Facebook group by next week and see how we go.

Charles Travers: stuff Jimmy just a quick one just let people know so we we now actually have a website riverside.com which is what we actually record this podcast on there is a feature so we are you can actually watch all the episodes back you can filter learn a little bit more about the podcast if it’s the first time you’ve been listening to us at

Jimmy Dalgleish: Yeah, so.

Charles Travers: It it hasn’t got a custom domain yet, there’s not a setting to do that, but you can find us at e commerce marketing chats dot riverside dot com. That’s e commerce marketing chats yeah. Yeah, there we go. I I I c I I hadn’t told Jimmy yet, so that’s the first time we to

Jimmy Dalgleish: That’s cool. I didn’t even I didn’t even know that. That’s actually that’s actually a really good play from them. They’re almost becoming like a a content hub as well. Yeah, imagine if imagine if they sort out like being able to search certain episodes and having all the transcripts so you can just go to a channel and say and type in, hey, I wanna find an episode that talks about this. It searches the transcripts and shows you which episodes and when it’s talked about. I think that’s great. I had no idea that was happening. So Yeah, check it out. What was it? Charles Ecommerce Marketing Chat stop Riverside dot com.

Charles Travers: Exactly that, Jimmy. Yeah.

Jimmy Dalgleish: I think I think I’m gonna check it out after this as well. So we’ll leave that with you guys. Go check it out there and we’ll chat to you next week.