SEO for E-Commerce Growth

Speaker 1 0:00

It doesn't matter what kind of e-commerce brand you're building. You still need a rock-solid way to grow and scale your company like clockwork. Welcome to 7 Figures and Beyond an e-commerce marketing podcast for D2C brand owners and marketers, looking for best practices that include proven strategies and tactics to grow an e-commerce brand to 7 Figures and Beyond, Bringing 18-plus years of marketing experience as an e-commerce brand owner and e-commerce agency owner, please welcome your host, Greg Shuey.

Speaker 2 0:27

Hey everyone, welcome to the Seven Figures and Beyond Marketing Growth Podcast. I hope everyone is having a fantastic day today. I'm really excited about our guest today, so I was just recently introduced to Colin Gardner. He is one of the founders of Longtail and Longtail is a full service platform for helping marketplaces scale their programmatic SEO. So I was introduced to Colin from John Doherty, who was a guest about a month ago, and I am excited to dive in and understand the strategy behind Programmatic and how it can help brands really scale their SEO. Programmatic is something that is very foreign to me, so this is going to be a really fun discussion. I'm excited to listen and learn from Colin and Colin, thank you so much for spending some time with us this morning.

Speaker 3 1:23

Of course, I'm excited to be here.

Speaker 2 1:25

Awesome. Thanks for having me. Absolutely so before we jump in, could you just take a few minutes and introduce yourself to our listeners and share a little bit about your history, your personal story and the steps you've taken to get to where you are today?

Speaker 3 1:40

Yeah, I'd love to. So I'm an economist by training, so that's a hearken. Way back to the dawn of time in college I took a microeconomics class and it changed my life and I really felt at home in that and it felt like what I wanted to learn and do. And so I got a economics and math degree and graduated college and went and worked at the Federal Reserve in San Francisco. I worked for Jenny Yellen, who now runs the Treasury. I had the really cool job of studying the US labor market during the great financial crisis and understanding why none of my friends and fellow students could get jobs.

Speaker 3 2:25

That was what I did, but it really started me into this world of marketplaces. Economics really is the study of economies, but also what are underlying all those is marketplaces buying and selling, demand and supply. And from there I got a job in San Francisco in the early 2000s, and it's hard to throw a stone in that neck of the woods and not get into tech, and so I was going to go get my PhD in econ, but I met my wife and decided I didn't really want to be poor doing a PhD program in the Bay Area.

Speaker 2 3:01

She probably decided that for you, right.

Speaker 3 3:04

No, no, she was super supportive either way I wanted to do, but I was like you know, maybe I don't want to go that route. And so I went out and started applying for jobs in tech and was like I wonder if someone will hire someone that does numbers and analytics and things like that. And it just was right around when people were starting to throw around the terms big data, data science, and so I got a job very quickly and it happened to be for a marketplace called Just Answer, which was a horizontal marketplace, or is horizontal marketplace, where you can ask a doctor, a lawyer, a vet, you can ask a priest for confession, you can do fortune telling, you can do it all the whole kit and caboodle. And so that's where I cut my teeth on online marketplaces. These are super cool and super powerful businesses where, if you can connect supply and demand, you can do really cool things. You can grow really infinitely.

Speaker 3 3:58

From there I ended up going to Ancestrycom. We talked a little bit this pre-show in your neck of the woods in Utah. I got to spend a lot of time there and really what I managed there was everything by button forward on the product side and that had a lot of SEO involved with it and really spent a lot of time with like marketing and growth from a product perspective and how to support that, and so that was really kind of like the first foundations of this like programmatic SEO, and where I really got to understand the opportunity set there. From there I went to Trippingcom, which is a vacation real aggregator Again, you know something where you wanted to rank for many different keywords across many different geographies at scale. After that I went to Outdoorsy, which is like Airbnb for RVs Again wanted to rank for across everything.

Speaker 3 4:49

And then after leaving there about two years ago, I didn't know what I wanted to do. I started advising and sold a bunch of marketplaces and what was clear is that a lot of people wanted to do programmatic SEO. They just didn't know how to do it, nor did they have the budget or the expertise in-house to go do it, and so it just happened to be around that time I had another co-founder of mine, a former coworker at Adorzee plus some other places, who was like looking to do the same thing and we were like, let's go solve this once and for all, let's go, and it just was auspicious timing. At the same time, I also realize that lots of early stage marketplaces and companies also need funding and don't have money, and so I've also launched my own venture fund which focuses exclusively on early stage marketplaces, called Yonder If you want to check it out yonderbc. But yeah, we really fund early stage marketplaces. So two very I would call synergistic businesses yeah, that's awesome.

Speaker 2 5:53

That's quite the story, quite the history. So let's just jump in. I mean, because we probably have listeners on here who have heard of programmatic SEO and they don't know what the heck it is. So what is it and how does it differ from traditional search engine optimization?

Speaker 3 6:12

Yeah.

Speaker 3 6:13

So I kind of consider programmatic SEO is like just a subset of the overall big picture of hey, my brand, my website, whatever it may be my company, whatever your entity, is kind of your footprint on the internet, and I kind of view Google searches like this canvas right and this landscape of keywords and searches and really just entry points into different things. And programmatic SEO is really a way to essentially carpet the internet around the terms that you want people to find you for and specifically around this very long tail hence the name of the company of keywords where traditionally you may not see enough volume to go write a blog post specifically about that thing, and to do that and do it at scale requires some expertise. So programmatic SEO to me is really about defining a strict keyword set and then some permutations with it, whether it's location or different modifiers, and really rolling those out kind of at scale with the template, and so that's what I consider programmatic SEO.

Speaker 3 7:28

And we'll go into more specifics on examples of it, but that's the gist.

Foundation Elements for Successful SEO

Speaker 2 7:32

Cool. So for a brand who is brand new, they know they need it right. They've got so many pages and so many locations. Where should they start? What should those foundational elements look like in order for them to be successful?

Speaker 3 7:50

Yeah, I think there's probably a lot of opinions on the SEO community of how to start, obviously, have a homepage domain that works. I think one of the things that's underweighted is a lot of people go for a domain name that they really love, maybe on a TLD. That isn't the best, like io or whatever. It might be biz and those are fine and Google does treat them more fairly now. But I think one of the things for folks I say is try and go buy a domain that's been around a long time doing what you've done or pretty closely associated with it, so that's a pretty easy hack to starting to rank faster just because Google has history. It's just like anything If you know someone and you have some rapport, you're more likely to trust them.

Speaker 2 8:43

That's my favorite conversation to have with prospects is, oh, your website's two months old. You're probably not going to rank very fast.

Speaker 3 8:51

Exactly. So that's one piece of it. The next piece I would say is backlinks in general. Like can you get? I kind of view it as like a bibliography right. Like, do people reference you as a trusted source? And if not, then you probably are. You know it's going to be harder to rank in Google, but if you can go get those citations and kind of get those continually, it'll really help. So those are two big picture things that I see that really help people be successful.

Speaker 3 9:20

Now, flipping over to the actual content on the website, there's two buckets. One I would put more in this, what I would call blog content slash long form content, where you maybe write about a query, something like how much does it cost to do XYZ, or what is the value of this, or how to find this, A lot of different queries like that where you may want to write a long form piece just specifically addressing that. And then there's what I consider your money terms. Let's say you're an e-commerce website selling widgets and they're kind of localized like you want to sell them in particular geos you might want to rank for buy widget in St Louis, buy widget in Salt Lake, so on and so forth. And so all of a sudden, you realize, well, I need a page for every city that I can service hopefully, every city in the world and so programmatic SEO.

Speaker 3 10:18

What you need to do, then, is be able to stamp out all those pages and have unique content on them, whether it's unique listings of what you're selling or even unique written content. So the foundations typically are going to be having a good platform too, like, whether it's like shopify um, you know, we see a lot of people on webflow and wordpress as well. Um, you know, picking a good platform where you can actually scale is probably one of the most important things, uh, from day one are there some platforms that you absolutely don't recommend?

Speaker 3 10:52

I don't want to speak ill of anyone. You know what it really comes down to technical expertise. If you are a founder owner, business owner, that's technical. Do whatever you want, whatever works for you. But if you're non-technical, you're really probably going to want to specifically around e-commerce Shopify. It's hard to beat. If you're more marketplace style, though, obviously Shopify can do that, but I wouldn't say it's as built out.

Speaker 2 11:24

Definitely not as easy to use.

Speaker 3 11:26

Yeah, so there's platforms like ShareTribe. There's another one, a really cool new one, that has a little bit more of a social commerce angle to it, called districtnet former Snapchat folks. It's a really cool product. There's a lot of bigger platforms out there to run marketplaces on too, so the list goes on, and we could add them to the show notes. But yeah, overall though, I think a lot of people could get away with Shopify as a pretty good starting spot Cool, awesome.

Speaker 2 11:58

So, when you look at all the different kind of businesses out there who could benefit from programmatic, what types of businesses or what industries do you see benefit the most from a programmatic approach, and why?

Speaker 3 12:11

Yeah. So I think that the straight down the fairway easiest to understand is anything that has a key term like their money term, rent or buy XYZ thing plus location. I think those are the easiest to understand, and it doesn't even have to be goods, it can also be services. So I think anything home services is a perfect fit for programmatic.

Speaker 3 12:39

SEO, pest control, lawn care, whatever Exactly and those are really interesting because they actually can be even more localized in searches than, say, like, with Outdoorsy. We were like RV rentals, so it would be like RV rental People search RV rental plus city name. They really wouldn't go any lower than that. They wouldn't pick a neighborhood, they wouldn't pick a zip code. But for things like roof repair and things like that, people actually search zip code for roof repairs and things like that. So it really depends on what you pick or what your area of focus is. But people can get hyper-local and so that's where, like, if you have a really good programmatic setup, you can actually rank for every zip code term as well, you know, and so I think that's you know. Just figuring out the search pattern in your space is really important to kind of help dictate it. But definitely location-based searches are really important.

Speaker 2 13:35

So if I'm thinking back to consumer product companies, we're looking at people, brands who have a lot of storefronts across the entire United States that have a geographic location. Those would be a really good candidate.

Speaker 3 13:42

Yeah, the other big segment I would say is things that have a lot of permutations. One of the clients that we work with is in the sticker space or printing space, and so there's a ton of permutations. So one of the clients that we work with is in the sticker space or printing space, and so there's a ton of permutations around band sticker, car sticker. There's just a ton of long tail permutations around that.

Speaker 3 14:06

We also have clients in the home goods space and there's a ton of permutations around blanket and blankets types, but also blanket materials and how the blankets made you know. So it could be like vegan, it could be hemp, it could be, you know, like there's just a women owned, so on and so forth. There's a ton of permutations there which make programmatic just perfect yeah, got it okay, cool, all right.

Speaker 2 14:31

So once you've identified you're a good candidate, like, how do you approach keyword research and content creation differently than just someone who doesn't really qualify for programmatic? I would imagine it's pretty resource intensive.

Speaker 3 14:46

Yeah, I think. Just talking a little bit about the resource intensive piece of it, I think that's a lot of why we built Longtail was one. People in-house are like, okay, hey, I want to go rank for 1,000, I'll make 1,000 pages to rank essentially for roughly 1,000 terms. Let's call it right I want to rank for every major city in the United States plus my term. Okay, well, that's great, now I have to.

Speaker 3 15:13

Does my platform allow me to just upload a list and it just auto-populates that? Typically no. There are ways to do that with. I at least know how to do it with WordPress Webflow. Shopify less so, and we actually built a plugin for Shopify to be able to do this because it is a limitation there. So we have an app for that. So that's the first thing to figure out Within your platform. How do you even go about doing this? Webflow has collections. The issue then becomes around how to manage the content on those pages the listings, but also the written content on those. So you have to usually have a CMS and a syncing to your platform. So there are ways to do it. It's just it requires some technical ability and some gumption, I would say.

Speaker 3 16:09

But on to your question about the keywords and figuring that out. So everything to me comes around user behavior and intent. So the better you understand what people are looking for, the better off you are. And so I always try to get people to go back to first principles of what is the pattern people are after. And so, for example, at Outdoorsy, people would search RV rental plus location. That's what they would search and so that's what we really anchored around Other spaces, you know, they may have a different search pattern around, like you know.

Speaker 3 16:47

Like in the travel space, it can be like, really varied. It'll be like rooms for rent in, like you know. And so those all have actually very different intents and very different purposes. Um, and so, like airbnb is like, definitely goes after a room for rent, yeah, like term, whereas airbnb, like probably doesn't do as well in a hotel term, right, right, um. And so you need to figure out what, of all of the search patterns out there is your right fit and, colloquially, makes sense For e-commerce. Usually it's product name plus some other permutations like location or whatever it might be For sale or for rent. Those are usually typical modifiers. So figure that out and then say, okay, of that key term, what is it, for example, rv rental. We knew we wanted to get every permutation of city, but then we also learned that people search for the class types of RVs. So it was like A, b, c Travel trailer.

Speaker 3 17:48

Yeah, exactly. And so then we're like, okay, well, we actually want all those permutations plus all the locations.

Speaker 2 17:55

Oh, my goodness.

Speaker 3 18:12

Yeah, and so that's where it balloons in a good way. Oh my goodness, high intent. And so in aggregate, it makes sense to do that to capture that volume, Whereas if you just looked at an individual keyword you'd be like there's 30 people searching this a month, like why bother? But when you aggregate a thousand of those pages, 30 to 50 people searching a month, and like a pretty high conversion rate. Then you're like okay, this makes a lot of sense, got it?

Speaker 2 18:36

Okay cool From a content perspective. Are you like leaning heavily into AI to help you? Kind of scale that? I mean I can't imagine someone's writing that content from scratch.

Speaker 3 18:48

Yeah, well, you'd be surprised.

Speaker 3 18:49

When we were at Adorzee we actually had a whole team, and when I was at Tripping as well, we had like whole teams that did this outsourced writers, it was expensive, it was hard to manage, ops heavy Do not recommend it anymore in the age of AI.

Speaker 3 19:04

What we do is we kind of have like a tiered system, I would say. And, like you mentioned, john Doherty, they run an editing business and so that's a good example of like something in the tiering that you would need, and so that's a good example of something in the tiering that you would need. Basically, what we do with our system is we try to create an LLM specifically by client and pull in lots of interesting data so whether it's competitor content or customer interviews or even just interviewing their customer service person for frequently asked questions, and then putting that in so ragging data, and then producing AI content on top of that in a very formulaic way. So, specifically, here are the bullet points we need to hit for this and we spend a lot of time iterating on that and then we actually have a human editing team that's optimized around SEO, and so that makes it amazing. Then push up and edit and publish.

Speaker 2 20:06

Cool. That leads me into our next question, the automation side of this. What other tools or technologies would you recommend to make that process as tight and as efficient as possible for someone who's getting into programmatic?

Speaker 3 20:22

Yeah, it's hard to go wrong with ChatGPT on all of this, I think for keyword research. I think pretty interchangeable SCM Rush, ahrefs I prefer Ahrefs just for keyword research and understanding competitive research and pulling down those things. But realistically, a nice combination of Ahrefs and ChatGPT can produce a whole keyword set for you pretty easily and some of the I would say, more manual solutions outside of Longtail out there you could probably put all your keyword sets into a database and then use just functions, whether it's in Google Sheets or in Airtable, to permutate and create all the variables that you need, the values you need. So that's probably what I would do. There's also another service called Whalesync which if you connect to Airtable, it can also connect to webflow and then sync your data. So like that is a one way. That would be like the diy um version of it, um, yeah that's awesome.

Programmatic SEO Success Stories

Speaker 2 21:31

I'll tell you what. Our show notes and links are going to be super long. Today we've got a lot of tools to share. That's awesome, cool, awesome. Well, can you share a success story where programmatic SEO led to significant traffic growth and revenue for a business?

Speaker 3 21:51

Oh, of course the list goes on. I think one of the you know an interesting business to look at is Land Trust. It's like the Airbnb of land for hunting, fishing. You know really recreation Interesting and you know they did a really great job early on bringing on really unique supply. You know going out convincing landowners to put their land on and make it accessible to people Because you know traditionally private land is not accessible. That's theitionally private land is not accessible. That's the point, it's private.

Speaker 2 22:22

You can assess it, you might get shot.

Speaker 3 22:26

You're paying not to get shot. They did this wonderful job of collecting these really amazing assets. I think for them, them and for most people, programmatic SEO is not some skill set that just is obvious or you know about, and so I got the pleasure of working with them as our first client at Longtail, and they're a great team. We basically rolled out a programmatic SEO strategy where we got to rank for basically every species plus state for hunting. It's a huge list of all these things and then different activities they have.

Speaker 3 23:10

I don't think I can say the exact amount they've grown, but they've hundreds of percent year over year, just on that volume alone, and it's highly profitable. So once you pay the piper on it, you have relatively fixed costs and then you're just pulling in traffic as an annuity and so it can be really this huge lifeblood for the business and really change the whole profitability structure behind the business. And I think that's what's really exciting for me and something we learned at Outdoorsy too. Once we started ranking number one for all the RV rental terms, the business took off.

Speaker 2 23:46

So, after you build the page structure, after you build the content engine, what does maintenance look like? You've got to continue to build links into the website and into certain sections and pages. What does that look like?

Speaker 3 23:57

Yeah, I'd say the after-programmatic generation. It's actually not that bad. I think the cycle that we see is you launch it. It doesn't immediately take off. It's usually Google's slow, that's their thing, that's their shtick.

Speaker 3 24:16

But one of the things that we recommend immediately is starting to cross-link across your site and finding tons of contextual ways to cross-link between all the different content in your site. That is the number one thing we recommend. And as soon as we see people add links to their homepage, to their other key pages, not in the nav or the footer but actually in the body of the homepage massive improvements for just crawlability. It's like you could add the same links in the footer and the header and they wouldn't have the same impact as in the body, and then you add it into the body content and boom. And then going back through all of your old blog content, adding contextual links where you might mention location or permutations, like any of those keywords, and then back-linking to your programmatic pages. Any and all cross-linking between the site that's contextual is really valuable. Really, the purpose is to spread domain authority. Then, like you said, external back-link building is just still so powerful. I know people say it isn't and people Google doesn't want you to do it. Most people don't know.

Speaker 2 25:23

SEO.

Speaker 3 25:26

Maybe it's an unpopular opinion, but I think in the age of AI, backlinking will become way more important again than it was before, mostly because so many people can create content and it's hard to discern who's expert. So if you can get proper backlinking from other trusted sources, it does really signify how valuable that content is. That's my counterintuitive. Backlinking's not dead.

Speaker 2 25:58

And I guess one last one in relation to our discussion today is we just talked about backlinking. What role does content like building blog content and resources? How does that play into programmatic strategy and helping those programmatic pages rank better?

Speaker 3 26:17

Yeah, totally. I think they really fill in the gaps around things that programmatic probably isn't the best for Like very specific query type searches. So I personally, and I also think that like head terms versus like long tail terms tend to be better suited for like longer form content.

Speaker 3 26:38

That's not like that's a generality, it's not like always a given, but I think that tends to be the case, and so what I really like doing is viewing the blog content as a hub and spoke to those programmatic pages where you can start layering in really relevant query type blog articles and then back linking, orinking or cross-linking to all the other programmatic pages, so really giving contextual linking for terms that are really related, so just increasing your footprint across all the things that matter. And then the other thing is that I find that the blog content you may be reaching a person that's a little bit different point in their purchasing path where they're a little less's a little bit different point in their purchasing path where they're a little less intended. They may just be in the find-out phase and then being able to point them to the programmatic pages as a user path is a good one, because that's really where they can keep building their intent and then also when they go search for that particular term, they see your brand around that thing. That's just a virtuous cycle.

Future Trends in Programmatic SEO

Speaker 2 27:43

It's awesome, so kind of wrapping things up and closing out our episode. We know, as we've witnessed over the last 20, 30 years, google likes to change things really fast. They like to change the way that they display search results on a SERP. We've seen that in e-commerce like nothing I've ever seen over the last 12 months. So, looking to the future, how do you see programmatic SEO evolving? How do you see things needing to change to adapt to the way that Google lays out search engine results pages? What trends should brand owners and marketers be aware of as they start to sit down and map this out over the next few years?

Speaker 3 28:29

Yeah, I think it may sound very basic, but I think always doing things in the best interest of the user is really what keeps you in the straight and narrow and safe, so to speak. Quote unquote yeah, that said, how Google shows things in search you really have no control over. I do feel like worrying about it is a little bit. You just can't control it. So it is what it is, but I do think there are opportunities to stay abreast of it and take advantage of it.

Speaker 3 29:09

To give you an example, this is years ago now and I'm not suggesting people go do this because it won't work. Is they really wanted to roll out structured data? This is years ago now and I'm not suggesting people go do this because it won't work. They really wanted to roll out structured data. Anyone that was a first mover with adding ratings, reviews, any kind of structured data, was able to get huge click-through rate increases because Google really wasn't understanding if it was being spammed. I think you have opportunity to capture market share if you stay abreast of the changes and think about it as opportunity rather than an obstacle. If you're just set in stone on the way you do things and you don't want to change, well, yeah, for sure, you're going to get left behind. And then you're really just crossing your fingers and hoping for the best and you're praying that.

Speaker 2 29:51

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 3 29:54

I view it as opportunity all the time. I mean, in a lot of ways, these snippets at the top of these AI snippets or feature content, whatever it is it's actually a lot of opportunity for you as a brand to go try and put your content in the way of those things and get referenced. So that's my two cents on it love it awesome.

Speaker 2 30:17

Yeah, colin, that was a fantastic discussion. Do you have any final words, kind of any final thoughts you've been thinking about?

Speaker 3 30:24

uh, I think you know. One piece of advice I would give to people is programmatic seo isn't for everyone. Like you may have a narrow subset of keywords or you don't have people searching for your keyword, that's fine, that's okay, don't go beat your head against doing this for sure. But I do think for a lot of people they're not leveraging it right now and it's a real opportunity to get customer acquisition costs really low. Some upfront costs, to be clear. It's free, but it's where you pay once and then you can really hum.

Speaker 3 31:05

The other thing I would say on top of all this that we really see where brands do well is where they pair their link building with PR and brand building, and it can be really powerful. Google puts a lot of weight on people searching for your brand name, plus your money terms as well. When we were at Tripping, there was a competitor that actually ran all their TV ads that said search. They still exist today and actually acquired Tripping Home to go. It said search home to go, florida, search home to glow, whatever, and so they basically were just directing people to go into Google and scope, the search and type a certain term.

Speaker 3 31:47

Wow.

Speaker 3 31:48

And so I think there's a lot of opportunity as brands think about how to do marketing where it isn't just like hey, I'm going to launch organic search, hey, I'm going to launch paid search.

Speaker 3 32:01

Now I'm going to launch social. I have three channels. I actually really stress to people what channels can you layer on top of each other that create exponential effects, rather than just three different lanes not really talking to each other? And so if you are going to get into SEO and you really want it to be this lifeblood of your business, what you want to think about is how do you get really strong brand and direct search as well and a lot of external linking to your site, and how do you maybe leverage other channels to do that, whether it's like paid social now or even organic social now, like using TikTok and YouTube that become search engines in and of themselves to actually go sculpt search. So that's my parting thought. It's a fun game to play, but use the marketing Lego blocks to stack on top of each other to make something really interesting. That's the exciting part.

Speaker 2 32:57

I love it. That's a fantastic stopping point. Thank you so much and thank you for spending some time with us. I know you're a busy guy for you. I may make it happen, obviously for this random guy you just met. We made it happen.

Speaker 3 33:12

Hey look, if John Doherty says you're a good guy that's good enough for me.

Speaker 2 33:21

There you go. Well, colin. Thank you so much again. We really really appreciate you being with us today. Thank you for having me Awesome. Well, everyone, we've learned a lot today and I hope that you've been able to take out one or two takeaways that you can then take and start executing. So take what you've learned here, make a plan and take massive action. We only have a couple of months left in the year, so you better take some massive action. We got to generate some revenue here, so thank you everyone for joining.

Speaker 3 33:51

Thank you.