How To Grow Your eCommerce Store in 2022 with Neil Patel

Hey guys, welcome back to the podcast this week. I am so excited you guys. I hope you have a notebook ready because we have one of the brightest minds in all of digital marketing on the podcast this week. If you Google E commerce or SEO solutions, chances are you've run across Neil Patel or one of his several companies to help optimize your e commerce site and entire digital performance. Today, Neil is with us Just to break it down and make it so simple for you in terms of how to grow your email list, how to build an affiliate marketing campaign, how to optimize your website, how to really make sure SEO is working for you and how can you get more exposure online. So truly one of the brightest minds in marketing. I'm so excited you guys have this opportunity to meet him. Without anything further, let's welcome Neil Patel. Let's talk about your business strategy and the juicy details of what actually works from mainstream fashion to fashion on Main street and the entire ecosystem behind it. How do we scale your company and do it with the balance and the happiness that we all seek? Let's hear from those insiders, experts and strategists that actually make it happen. I'm your host Ashley Alderson from the Boutique Hub and I can't wait to chat. Hey guys, welcome back to the show this week. If you are catching the podcast, you can also catch us on YouTube for a video version of this week's episode. This is kind of a big deal episode you guys. We have one of the greatest marketing minds, I would say in the world on the show today. It's a really big deal. Neil Patel, I have followed you for such a long time. Thank you for being a part of.

The podcast today and no problem, thank you for having me.

You have so much experience in every single topic. I would love to rabbit hole down today so I'm not going to hold back. We're going to jump right into it. A lot of our listeners today are E commerce store owners. Many of them also have brick and mortars but I would say the far majority are E commerce. And what a changing landscape we've seen just in the last couple of years post pandemic. I think more change in E commerce than we've ever seen in this industry. So I'd love to know, let's just start out here. Advice you would give, let's say first to new business owners, new e commerce store owners in 2022.

So the big thing that we're seeing with new e commerce owners is they focus on one channel, like whether it's Facebook ads or SEO or Google product listing and or even Amazon. And once they get one channel working, they focus on it, they scale it up, they get their business going but they usually stop. They don't tackle in most cases the other channels. And there's. That creates a few issues. One, if something happens with that channel, there goes your business. Two, if you ever try to sell your business, people aren't going to pay you a lot of money for a one trick pony type of business. They want diversification, multiple revenue streams, even if it's one product. But what are the channels that are driving the revenue? So my big piece of advice is yes, you should start off with one channel but don't end with one channel. Once you start getting it going, you have to really quickly adapt and leverage more channels whether it's Facebook, whether it's snap, whether as you have the resources and bandwidth most mom and pops don't. So that's why I said start off with one channel. That could be SEO or paid. Paid is usually quicker to get results, more expensive, less of a roi.

But, but let me go back to the first question. So that was advice for new business owners in 2022. What about more advanced e commerce stores in 2022? Where should their focus be?

Conversion optimization. It is one of the ugliest topics in marketing because when most people talk about it, no one wants to listen. But it's where e commerce stores need to spend their time. Great example of this is Legion Athletics. My buddy Mike owns it. Okay. And it's a supplement company. And they're not small mom and pop anymore. They're well into the eight figures. And when you think about them, you know they've been around for a long time. They didn't really spend too much time and energy on conversion optimization until 2021. And you're talking about conversion optimization provided a 40 plus percent lift in their business, made their paid ads more profitable, made their SEO more profitable, made their influence marketing more profitable, made everything perform much profitably. But no one wants to really talk about it and take the time and energy to run these experiments. But you have to. You have no choice because marketing is continually getting harder and more expensive over time.

That is such a good point. I always compare it to the field of dreams, right? Everyone kind of feels like an E commerce if I build it they will come and such crap. So talk, let's talk about that. Let's break it down for you. I would love to hear from again a beginner side of things and advanced side of things. Conversion optimization. Where do I start on my site?

Conversion optimization. The easiest place to start is you look at your analytics and you look at what pages within your flows have the biggest drop off. Is it that the cart page, the checkout page, the product listing page, and then from there you start running tests. You survey people, hey, what's wrong? What else do you want to see on this page? Go to some of your competitors that you know are bigger, look to see what they do on those specific flows and try to get some inspiration and run AB tests. You can use software like Crazy Egg, vwo, Optimizely, all to run the test.

That's so good. I think so often I'll say specific to a lot of our customers and listeners on this podcast. Everyone's using Shopify so they feel like, oh, I got this out of the box solution. It should be optimized for me. What else do I need to change? I would bet that you would argue with that statement. Correct.

That's correct. Yes. It's never fully optimized. If that was the case, then most people like me would not be in a job.

Perfect. All right, talk to me more about conversion rate optimization. So what do you think? Specifically on a cart page is a common miss or a missed opportunity for people?

Yeah, so the, the cart pages are pretty simple, but sometimes you get a drop off because people aren't sure if they want to continue. So showing the value in the product, a quick overview of what they're buying, maybe some bullet points, sometimes some testimonials help letting them know that there's a money back guarantee or refund policy or free shipping is huge in E Commerce. So some of those things, adding them to the cart page can sometimes help push people over into the checkout page.

I think trust, like something that you managed or that you just said really stuck out to me. That's just trust. There's so many E Commerce stores and when you are fighting a battle with someone like Sheen, for example, specifically in the fashion industry and you can buy some knockoff crap for $8 that came from overseas, people want to know, am I going to get this and it's going to fit me or it's going to fit like a Cabbage patch doll, what's going to happen here? So I love that example. What about a product page? Let's take it like back one step further. What are some of the most common mistakes you see on product pages?

Not having beautiful pictures. Yes. That is one of the simplest things that we see. Boost conversions, 360 degree review, multiple shots, multiple angles. Talking about benefits like free shipping, ratings, reviews. If you're selling products that have usage amounts like cost per serving, that would be another one breaking it down. So that way people have another way to compare price points. Overview on the benefits, the pros, the cons, other related products, bundles. These are all things like if you have low inventory, letting them know how much is actually left. If you're running promotions, countdown timers, all those types of things could do really well on product pages.

I love all those things. I hope you guys took notes on that. I think a lot of times people get into this business and they think I can compete on price. And I always use the Walmart example. Cheap ain't loyal, right? People are not coming to your website because they want something cheap. They want value. And that's how you have to describe it. What about the use of video on product pages this day? Do you think that's a deal breaker or where our industry's headed? Got to have video?

No, I think video is great. So. And we see hybrid examples of this in product pages. Some people will showcase a product and it'll be like a 3D interactive tour where you can zoom around or control the mouse and you can actually see the product by dragging the mouse. It's kind of like a video, kind of not. Videos also help. Unboxing videos also help when people unbox and they record it. You know, showcasing that as well helps too.

All right, let's back up to the homepage. Ways to optimize for conversions right on someone's homepage.

So on the homepage again, free shipping, I can't emphasize that enough. Showcasing your most popular products, your deals having the right hierarchy and structure, so the site's easily to navigate. Make sure that the search bar, if you have multiple products is there so people can quickly find what they're looking for. Use learning search that continually adapts and showcases things at the top that people are most likely to click on. But those are some of the things. Also, having your site really load fast, whether it's your homepage or internal pages. You know, letting people know that you have free shipping and money back guarantee. So not just free shipping, but letting them know that money back guarantee or refunds, all this is really useful. The Amazons of the world or the Walmarts don't have to do a lot of this stuff because they already have trust and people know they're big. So they're not as worried to see a testimonial on Amazon on maybe A specific page, like a checkout or cart page. But we're mom and pops, right? Mom and pops. We have a little bit of a disadvantage or quite a bit. And that's okay. Yeah.

Two things you mentioned. I just want to make sure if you're a new business owner, that you are familiar with what these things are or maybe how to test for them. One is page speed. So can you talk first about where do I go if I want to know what my page speed is and how to optimize my page speed?

So go to neilpatel.com SEO analyzer and. Or you can go to ubersuggest.com, put in your URL in the site, left hand navigation, there's a site audit button. And it'll actually tell your page speed for free, how to fix it, what's wrong, and it'll tell you for both desktop and mobile.

I love that you've got all kinds of good tools. I liked watching you try to go through that in your head there, navigating your own website. How about AB testing? I know a lot of business owners, even advanced ones in our community that have probably never actually AB tested their site. Can you explain first what that means and then how to go about testing?

Yeah, AB testing is you're showing one variation to a portion of your traffic, let's say 50%, and another variation to the other 50%, and you're seeing what converts better. And you don't have to be a developer to AB test. There's tools like Google Optimize for free, or there's tools like VWO or Optimizi or Crazy Egg that costs money. They all probably have free trials. And you can use wysiwygs. Those tools have wysiwygs, at least some of them. And you can literally adjust elements on your page or adjust your checkout button or the color, and you can see if it causes more conversions or less.

We're gonna go through and like pull all the things that you just said and leave them all in the show notes. So everybody's like, ah, okay, I got it. I'm gonna click on all of these links. Is there like a suite if you think about a business owner? Right. Is there a suite of E commerce tools everybody should be using?

No, there's not really a suite, like one suite. There's a lot of different products that you can end up being used. But as a small business, I don't want to drown you with tools and I can. This is actually really easy for me to do. I seriously would say focus on one thing, get it right, and then expand to another thing, get it right and then do another thing. You know, like we were talking about pretty much the. The QVC model on social media and how you can sell live and it is popular and it's growing a lot of more. Mom and pops are using it over large corporations. I've dealt with the large corporations and talking you mentioned on Nordstrom's is doing it. A lot of the large corporations, it's hesitant. They're like, oh, what percentage of sales is it going to impact who's going to do it? They're more hesitant than the small moment. And pops, right. And what I would recommend is just get a few things right and then keep expanding. Because if you try to do everything at once, you're not going to get the results you want. Nothing's going to work out.

That's so true. And it's so. Especially for mom and pops, it's just so easy to get overwhelmed, right? You could go a million different directions. I mean, everyone listening could probably raise their hand if they're like, I'm scared to death of TikTok. Like, it's great, it's powerful, but it's pretty intimidating for some people. If I am trying to plan out my revenue for the year and I need.