Wix eCommerce | Advanced eCommerce SEO

You

welcome to our WIX E Commerce workshop. This week we're going to be talking about advanced E Commerce SEO. My name is Liat. I lead E commerce marketing at wix. And joining me today, we have Mordy. Mordy, would you like to introduce yourself to our audience?

Sure. I'm the SEO liaison here at wix, which basically means that it's my responsibility to keep the SEO community abreast of what we're doing here at wix, to evolve the platform for SEO, and in reverse, to keep WIX updated into the latest and best practices in terms of what's going on within the SEO industry.

Very cool. So you guys don't know this, but Marty is a real SEO expert. It's a real privilege for us to have him here today. And you can ask him all the hard questions. Please do. I will enjoy hearing him answer you guys.

Thank you.

So on the agenda for today, we really want to talk about how you take your E commerce content to the next level. Understanding the role of intent in SEO, learning how to identify intent on the serp, using intent analysis as a means to find new opportunity, and finally, understanding what site identity is and why it even matters so much. And as I said, we'll be taking questions throughout the sessions today, and we will try and answer as many as we can. So without any further ado, Marty, I'm going to hand over to you.

So we're going to be talking about understanding the role of intent in SEO. What I mean by intent is the reason why a searcher searches for something, and there's many reasons why the same query or the same keyword might mean different things. So it's a really, really hot and broad topic in SEO, and. And it's a really important topic. So let's get started. At this point in the SEO journey, or in the SEO process, I'm assuming that you've already optimized your title tag, which is the titles that appear on the Google results page. Product descriptions or service descriptions, product names and titles, page headers, link structure, meaning internal linking. And that means that you should be linking to the really important pages throughout your site. So you have a blog post, let's say, that talks about whatever it is that your product does or your service does. You should be throwing links into your products, to your products, into those blog posts as they are, in a natural way so that Google can understand which of your pages are really, really important. And I'm assuming you've done things like alt text for images and so forth, even if you haven't done them yet and it's a continuing process. This presentation assumes those things have been done. The question is now what? I've done all the basic things. What do I do next? I've gotten into the ballpark, so, you know, how do I get onto the field kind of thing to do that. One of the ways to do. There's many ways to scan a CAT and SEO, but one of the ways to do this, to reverse engineer the serp, that means to uncover user intent and to find new opportunities. By doing that, I'll explain exactly what I mean by reverse engineer the serp. I think this point we have some questions to go over.

We do already have a few questions that we'd like to ask you before you dive into the details. So the first question that we have for you today, Mordy, is from Crystal and she says, I've been told that WIX websites rate low in Google. How true is this and can it be bypassed? Yeah, we're not going to take it easy on you today, Marty.

I like that question. By the way, I recently did a whole presentation about this on Semrush, one of the SEO tools. So let's go back to 2017 and Google's John Mueller, who's that's Google's main advocate in the SEO community, was quoted saying, there is nothing preventing a WIX site from performing really well in search. And just maybe last week, the week before, I was having a whole conversation with John, who again is Google search advocate about cmss and about WIX in particular. And John said, you know, one of the things he sees is that the CMSs, like Wix in particular, do a really good job of handling the technical SEO aspects. And he likes that because it allows you as a business owner to focus on where he sees the lack, which is content. The main thing, the main, the most important thing you can do in terms of SEO is write really, really good and really targeted content. And Google was telling me, look, we really see business owners, there's a gap there and that's where the issue is. And you can use a platform like WIX to not have to worry about those other technical things so you can focus on creating that great content. Now with that, we have an absolute plethora of advanced SEO tools. If you want to do more advanced things, those things are totally open to you. But there's absolutely nothing preventing you about ranking when you use the WIX platform.

Amazing. So you guys all heard it from the experts. Now you just need to do the work to make sure that your store is ranking. So Morty, someone else asks, how long does SEO actually take to work?

That's a great question. There was a study, I think Ahrefs did a study on this. I can't remember exactly what they the timeframe they gave, but I think it takes six months to really start ranking. I don't want to put a timeframe or a number on it, but it's a long process. And think about it like dating. You want to get married after the first date. You wouldn't ask Google to marry your website after the first day that it's up. Google needs to understand, and it takes time for Google to understand what your site is, what it's doing, what these pages are, what the pages are trying to do. And as you're more active, as you're updating more content, as you're creating more content and you're showing Google, hey, I'm alive, we're a live active site. Those things will be helpful to you in terms of getting Google to crawl your site more often in terms of getting Google to better understand your site. So it does take time. Just keep creating that content, keep doing the work and slowly but surely it will get there, right?

Yeah, it's definitely a long term effort and I can say we ourselves are always investing in that long term haul. So you definitely want to take your time and put in the effort. So Justin wants to know, he says Google's description of my site has words that I did not add in my SEO settings on wix. Why?

That's a very good question. And in fact, most of the times Google won't use your own words. This is referring to the meta descriptions or the description that you see underneath the title and the results page. And studies have shown that most of the time Google will create their own. Now it's still a best practice for a few reasons. It's still a best practice to write those meta descriptions yourself. One, on the off chance that you do appear, you control the narrative. However, Google did say, and while meta descriptions are not a ranking factor, they do not determine how well you do or don't rank. One of Google's advocates, Martin Split, said at one point that they do kind of look at it to get a general sense of what the page might be about. So backhandedly you're kind of helping Google better understand your page. Now what's really important to also understand is where Google takes that content when it rewrites the description and, and it's rewriting it based on the search queries. Trying to match the description to the search query itself, Google usually pulls it from the very, very top of your page. So when you're thinking about content, when you're writing content, and you want to consider what's going to happen as you appear on Google, consider that Google's going to pull those meta descriptions or rewrite those meta descriptions, usually from the top part of your page.

Gotcha. So I think you partially answered this, but Sweta is asking, how does metadata help SEO?

Right. So there's metadata that has nothing to do with SEO that some people think has to do with SEO. Meta keywords, those don't apply anymore. That's way back when Google was first getting started. The major factor that in terms of metadata that you need to think about are your meta titles or your title tags, and those are the titles that show up on the results page. Google does use that to get an understanding, like any reader would looking at a title to understand what your page might be about. It's not going to necessarily move the needle one way or the other if Google gets a general understanding of your page, but it can and it does help Google better understand what your page is about.

Great. So Richard says that my product names don't tell you exactly what the product is. How do I not confuse Google?

So the product should at some point mention what the product is. The product name. For example, I was looking at throw pillows the other day, and you have the name of the throw pillow. You know, stars and stripes throw. It'll say stars and stripes, and then it'll be like maybe a spacer or colon saying throw pillow. So you can have the particular name of your product there. You can, you know, jazz it up a little bit. And then after that maybe throw in throw pillow the name of the product. So Google does. And that should be in an H1, usually if it's on a product page. So that's really important for Google to understand what exactly it is, because if you just put the name of the fun name that you gave your product, Google won't be able to really understand what it is.

Gotcha. So we're saying you do want to be straightforward and specific, like alongside the branding and the fund, but make sure that you're actually including that product info in there.

100%. Yes.

Cool. So while we're talking about H1s Seth asks, what is the difference between H1 and H2 and should we just put all the product information in H1?

That's a very SEOs will like that question, because SEOs. Okay. So there's different structures to your page. Think of like a college essay. Maybe you have, you know, you have a title to the essay. You have the various headers. You have your H2s, maybe your H3s. It gives structure to your page. It helps Google, helps your reader really understand what's on this page. So maybe the product name or the service name would be in the H1. You might have some content there and then have some H2s, like, you know, shipping details or product specs or product description. And then you might even have an H3. But, you know, the H3 is maybe for more. For your. For a blog post, you can go to H4 and H5 and H6, but you don't need to go crazy like that. But it does. It's really important to Google like it is for a reader. It gives your page structure. It tells Google, okay, this page is about this. This section is about this. The next section is about this. And Google can look at those headers and say, okay, we understand what this page is really more or less about without really having to understand every word.

Gotcha. Okay, great. So I think that for now, those are the questions. So let's continue.

Those are really good questions. We're talking about intent, understanding intent and identifying intent. The question is, how do we actually understand what Google is showing us in terms of intent? How do we pick up the various intents that Google is showing us? And my clicker's not working now. It is. So I don't want to get too far down the rabbit hole with this, but in 2015, Google released its first machine learning property called Rank Brain. It's not exactly AI, it's technically machine learning. And there's a slight difference to it. I don't want to. You don't need to know all of the nitty gritty detail it, because it's really interesting. But what you need to know is these things. Rank Brain and the further developments Google has made along the way since then have shown Google the ability to understand what exactly people are searching for. And Google kind of realized, you know what? For this very same keyword, one user might mean this and another user might mean something totally different. And Google said, you know what we should do? We should show results that speak to both of those user intents or to both of those users. And on the same results page, by the way, the SERP stands for search Engine results page, which is.

Hang on, hang on, hang on, Marty, I'm getting some requests here from the audience. They're saying Please, please, Marty, this is complicated. Go slow.

Sorry. Sorry. Okay. The search engine results page, which is basically the Google page, has many, many purposes or is trying to cater to many different users. And users are search using the same search term, but they might mean very different Things. And since 2015, Google's been really good at figuring out the various meanings to a search. And I'll show you in a second exactly what I mean. But there might. That means overall that there's some very unexpected things that show up in the results, some very unexpected pages that you wouldn't think should really show up. And it also means there's some really unexpected opportunity. Here's a concrete example of this. So buy life insurance was the query I ran here. Now, five years ago, six years ago, 10 years ago, whatever it is, all you would get here are pages where you can buy life insurance. And it seems pretty straightforward. If I type in buy life insurance, don't you think? I mean, to buy life insurance? Well, the answer is no, because the very first result, if you scroll past all of those ads and you'll see why in a second all those ads are there, if you scroll past all of those ads, the first result is how to buy life insurance. You can't actually buy life insurance on the very first result for this query. Now you know why the people who sell life insurance want to advertise and get above that result, right? So the moral of the story is commerce sites really need to create informational content because it opens up a whole new set of doors for you and that can increase your chances of ranking. Let me show you exactly what I mean by this. So let's take a look at the entire page. One results page for buy life insurance. And what I'd done here was I color coded the results page for you. In red are all of the pages that talk about information, how to buy life insurance, where to buy life insurance, the best life insurance, and all the results in yellow are places where you can actually buy life insurance from Geico and Allstate and all the other insurance companies, what you'll notice is there are six slots for informational pages, and there are only four slots for commerce pages. In other words, if you're a commerce site, if you sell life insurance, for example, and you want to rank on the SERP here on the results here, you only have four opportunities to do that. And no matter how amazing your content is, how great your page is, how amazing your website is, you are limited to just 4, 4 slots, where if you have an informational page you have six opportunities to rank. Now, if you have both pages now, you have 10 opportunities to rank. So the math kind of works to make sure that if you're a commerce site, you do also have informational pages on your website, like a blog, to make sure you capture the most opportunity possible. Also consider, and I know we talk about ranking a lot in SEO, but consider who ranks first on this results page. Let's jump back for a second. If I want to buy life insurance, I've already done all the research. I know everything about life insurance. I know the whole spiel. And I go and type in buy life insurance, which is the first result. It's not policy genius. I don't need that result. I'm going to skip over and to me, GEICO is the first result. So when you look at your rankings, you look at your data and you're trying to figure out what's going on. You have to really qualify things a little bit. And I'm saying that somebody used to work for a rank tracking software company. I know a lot about rank tracking. You have to under. You have to really go to the results page once in a while and see what's happening there. Because you might rank number three or four, but you might be the first result for the users that you're targeting. So be careful about ranking. You should be thinking about it, ranking for the intent that you are targeting. Now you sort of can have your cake and eat it too. You can have an informational. I'm sorry, you can have a transactional page, a commerce page, a product page or service page, whatever it is, and add a little bit of an informational touch. What you see here is basically an faq. It is an faq. What did Allstate do here? They have a page where you can buy life insurance and they added an FAQ to it. And then they told Google, hey, Google, you know what we have here? We have an FAQ here. It's through. It's called Structured Data Markup. And it's basically code that you can add to your site. And I'll get it. Don't freak out because I said the word code. It's code that you can add to your site to tell Google really quickly so Google doesn't have to scour your page and figure it out themselves. What's on the page. Like if you have reviews on the page, you can tell Google, hey, Google, there's a review on the page, there's a product on this page. Here's all the information. Well, you can also Tell Google there's an FAQ on this page. And Google might. It's not a guarantee, but they might pull it into the result itself. If you jump back again, I look at that result from Geico on the left. That's a really big, hefty piece of real estate that you're occupying because Google is pulling in the FAQ questions into these tabs. And again, when you expand the tabs, you see the answer. Now, how do you actually add this to your WIX site? It's pretty easy. There's a lot of tool, free tools, Rank Ranger has one, SEO Clarity has one, Merkle has one. And you just need to Google schema markup generator, schema markup creator, and you'll find these free tools and all you do here. In this case, you hover over to the type of schema you want to create. I clicked FAQ page and you just fill in the fields. You put in your question, you put in the answer, and you're literally copying and pasting the content from your page. The tool will create the code you need. You just click copy. You go to the WIX editor, you go to advanced SEO where it says structured data and says paste your JSON LD code here. You paste your JSON LD code here. And that's it. And you've added FAQ markup to your pages. Now, all this sounds really simple. I have to go to the serp, I have to check the results, I have to see if there's informational results showing. And I should probably make, if I see that, I should probably create a blog post to try to target that. Really simple. But it's not that simple because there's multiple kinds of informational content. There's informational content where you can buy something. There's informational content where you can learn how to buy something. There's general FAQs, there's also comparison and reviews. And if you notice, I switch queries here. This is no longer by life insurance, it's by a laptop. And you have a comparison of the 15 best laptops and reviews. Why did I switch queries? Because this kind of informational content did not exist for by life insurance. Meaning for whatever reason, Google didn't think that this type of informational content is relevant. So what you really have to do is not to see is there informational content? Should I write a blog post? Should I write whatever I need to write in order to target that opportunity? But you have to break it down and see what exactly is Google showing what type of informational Content is there. By the way, this applies. I know I'm using more complex products like buy life insurance and buy a laptop, but I did a study back in 2018 about this, and I ran a whole bunch of queries. I did anything from buy toilet paper, literally buy toilet paper, which, by the way, does show an informational result. When I ran it last week, believe it or not. I promise you, I'm not being facetious about this. For simple products, Google. The first page of the Google results, 25% of the results are informational pages. When you go more complex, like something like buy life insurance or buy a laptop, that number jumps up to 40%, meaning four out of the 10 results that generally appear on page one of the results are not pages where you can buy something. Even though the word buy was in the search term, like buy a laptop. 40% are informational pages. That number, and this is anecdotal, I haven't redone the study. That number has gone up. And you saw it here with buy life insurance, right? The number now is 60%. Or 6 out of 10 results were informational and only 4 were commerce pages. So there really is a real need to focus on informational content, even if you're a commerce website. It also means you need to know your results and you need to check the queries, the search terms that are really important to you because you might think, okay, I sell forks. I'll search for buy forks. What possible informational content can there be for buying a fork? Or, well, believe it or not, there are three results about buying forks. The best flatware for 2021 buying guide to flatware. The eight best flatware silverware sets for 2021. So believe it or not, there could actually be a nice amount of informational content that you might want to be able to target. But you need to know what your specific results page looks like. You can have a lot of opportunity. You can have a little bit opportunity. You can have one type of opportunity. It all depends on your keywords that are important to you. So run these through Google and check it out and see what's there for yourself. By the way, doing this also points out the limitations to you. And limitations are really, really important because it can make your life much easier. For example, I searched for buy dress shirt. And what I got at the top are a bunch of ads to the right of their main results are called plas. They're product listing ads. They're just more ads. There's a lot of ads here. Then there's this whole Weird map thing Google showing me. And then if you go all the way down, there's a one little itsy bitsy organic result from Amazon. What happened here? That box I have highlighted in the red for you, that's called a local pack. And Google thought, you know what, when you typed in buy dress shirt, we really think you want to actually go out, even though it's a pandemic, and actually buy and actually buy the shirt in the store. Now, Google could show this all the way at the bottom of the page, which it does sometimes. But showing it at the top means Google thinks that's the primary reason people have come here. They've come to the results page, they typed in this query to find a physical place to go and search for their shirts. Is that keyword really worth your time if you don't have a physical listing, if you don't have a physical store? I'm not saying you can't win that keyword. I'm not saying you're not going to get traffic or you're not going to get conversions from that keyword. All I'm saying is if you have a whole bunch of things to do, in theory, that might not be the best place to start because Google's telling you the main intent that people are coming here for is local is to actually go to a store. Which by the way, brings up the SERP features. SERP features are all these box things that you see anything but the actual organic results. I'm a big baseball fan and I love the Yankees. And when you type in Yankees, you get above the fold. Zero traditional organic results. You get a sports box, you get a knowledge panel to the right, you get a whole slew of actual articles from about big name publishers. So understanding SERP features is a major part of doing SEO. And that's a whole lecture unto itself. But for our purposes, what you can do is reverse engineer those as well. So if I search for a new garage door and I get this little slew of carousel of images, it's called the image box. That kind of tells me something. Oh, you know what? Google thinks that users and Google's using machine learning to figure this out. So Google's pretty good at this. They want to see a whole array of visual images related to garage doors. They want to survey what are the various styles or sizes or options for garage doors. And that means on your page, if you want to rank, you should also try to rank a page here where you can show a lot of images about all the various garage doors that you sell. Maybe a collection page would be a good page to target with this kind of keyword. And I've seen this a million times over. For example, if you search for like New York Yankees jersey, and even though it's not a place where you can buy a New York Yankees jersey, it's just, you know, about the Yankees and the history of their jerseys, every single one of those pages has prominently featured very large images showing off those uniforms. Google wants you. And Google put a big old image box on that results page. Whenever you see that image box shows up, that tells you there's an intent to view images. So try to cater to that somehow if you can. Also, it means exploring other media formats. If you see a video box, show up a list of videos. First off, that tells you one thing right there. Google's telling you users might not want to read anything you write. They might want to watch a video instead. By the way, seeing this, even if your page is ranking, you should go after the video because Google's telling you users might not want to read a page. But even if you're not ranking for this particular keyword, and it's impossible to rank for every keyword you want to, there's so much content out there and Google talks about this and there's only limited space on the results page. If you see that you're not ranking, maybe create a video and try to get onto the results page with your video instead. That's a great way to try to manipulate your way onto the server. Manipulate is a terrible word. At this point, I'm going to turn it back to some questions that we have.

Great. So Bradley is asking, is it realistic for a small business to organically rank on the first search page when without a large budget?

That's a really good question. It all depends. Everything in SEO depends. If you're creating a site and it's your first day out there, no, you're not gonna compete with the big brands. And when Google wants something a little bit more authoritative, let's say for a health query, it's very, very hard to compete. It could be hard to compete in general. Google, again, think of like a marriage. Google knows these sites. They have many, many pages. It's not about the budget per se, but Google, they have a lot of links pointing to them. Google is very familiar with them. If you see you're having a hard time, that's entirely possible. It means you might want to try going after some long tail keywords or some long tail terms, meaning those kind of things happen. For very broad terms, you want to try to rank for buy a laptop, there's Amazon and Best Buy and Overstock and ebay. It's very, very difficult. It's very true. That means you might want to go more specific. What's something unique about the laptops that you sell or whatever it is that you sell? Find something unique that you do differently that that sets you apart and go after that target audience. Because it's not about getting a lot of traffic. It's about getting the right traffic.

Right. Okay, that's really good advice. So Ashley is asking, how do you do free keyword research? What would be the best way to start doing that?

That's a really good question. So, keyword research. I just want to say something about keyword research to start off with. Be careful with keyword research. Keywords have sort of lost their significance in a way. Google's not focused on keywords. Google understands synonyms. Google understands your page semantically, meaning Google understands what's on your page whether you use the target keyword or not. What you should think about more is topics. Right? What topics do I want to address? There's a topic that's really important for my business to address. I should create content for that. Now, there's a lot of ways you can do this. You can go to the Google results page. At the bottom of the page are related searches, and that'll help you see some other things people are searching for. There's sometimes a box called People Also Ask, which show other questions that are related to what people are looking at for your query. There's a bunch of free tools out there, I think. I don't know if they still do or not, but Moz, their Keyword Explorer, offered some free access. Rank Ranger, their Keyword Explorer, just Google Moz, Keyword Explorer. They might give you a couple of free searches every day. There's a tool, and I like this tool a lot. It's called Also Ask the. Sorry, Ask the People. And it doesn't give you the traditional kind of keyword results that you're looking for, the search volume and keyword difficulty and all that kind of stuff, but it breaks down the topics. It'll take a topic and it'll show you all the questions people ask around that topic, and that'll give you some really great keyword ideas. There's another tool that's also very similar to that. It's called Also Asked. You can Google that one as well.

That's really great. So I love this advice, Maria, kind of focusing on the topics and also focusing on the intent. Right. Like, what are your customers really looking for? And then kind of trying to match those two to each other.

Look, it's really hard if you're writing really well not to use the terms that Google will naturally understand as what your content is about.

Right. So in that way, actually, Google is making our life easier because you don't have to be so mathematical about the keywords. You do just need to meet content that people are looking for.

Correct. And it's a best practice not to get too hung up on the keywords.

Awesome. So Adam asks, still on the keyword topic. But then, what makes a good keyword? And why are some more powerful than others? And how long should a keyword be?

Okay, so should I take all of them in order? What makes a good keyword? A good keyword is something. Think about it like this. Think about it as a match. People are searching for something and you offer something. You want to have the content available for what you offer. You offer something really unique. People are searching for things that are related to the unique thing that you offer. You want to make sure that you have the content to match, that a good keyword is a keyword that reflects what you offer and that people who are interested in that will understand. You're going to want to target your audience with the content that you're writing. Don't think in terms of the keyword per se, but think about what topics do I want people to come to my site for and create content for that? I think I'm skipping over one of them. But how long should a keyword be? So I think there's a little bit of a confusion there. There's two ways to think about a keyword. One is a keyword that you enter into Google. The search term, that's a keyword. And then there's the keywords on our page. Really don't think about it like that. The keyword people are entering. You want to have content on your page that matches up to that. So there's no length of a keyword because you're just writing content to match your user's intent. And there was one in the middle. There's a question in the middle. I totally forgot.

Yeah. So the other one was, why are some keywords more powerful than others?

So that depends what you mean. If you mean certain keywords get more searches every month. Like for example, if you search for buy a laptop, that's a very high search volume keyword. It's getting probably thousands upon thousands of People are searching for that every single day. However, there are keywords that are maybe less powerful in that sense in the number of people searching for them, but they may speak to what your business offers. For example, if you offer really slick, awesome, cool, artistic laptops. So when people search for cool, artistic laptops, so that's not a keyword that'll get thousands upon thousands of searches every single day, but it's a keyword that can generate a lot of traffic to your site where people will buy the product. In other words, it's not about traffic, it's about making money. So a powerful keyword to me is a keyword that helps you make money.

Right. So basically, sometimes going more niche or more specific, even though you might have less volume, you might end up ranking higher and finding the most relevant audience for, you know, your product.

Yep, absolutely, 100%. And Google, by the way, is encouraging you to go specific and go niche in a lot of different ways. I'm not going to get into it here, but that's the trend that Google wants. So create that. Align with Google. That's the best thing you can do.

Very cool. So I think those are the questions at the moment. More detail.

Awesome. So let's get back. So where do we get started with content? Now we understand user intent. We understand how to get a better understanding of the various subcategories of user intent or of informational content. But there could be a couple of snags. How do you actually get started with content? It's really more than user intent. I don't want you to think of. Okay, let me go and analyze user intent on the results page. And that's how I'll start my journey of creating content user intent or analyzing user intent. The way that we're talking about it really fits into another more broader and really more powerful thing, which I'll get to in a second. It's also not keyword research, which we just spoke about in those questions. Keyword research is not, it's really not a good place to start in terms of creating content. It's good at helping you maybe refine that process or maybe refocus you, or maybe helping you find some new opportunities. But the one thing, the biggest, the only place in my mind to start with creating content is understanding your user, and that's being empathetic. It's understanding what your users are going through, understanding what's bothering them, understanding what's helpful to them, understanding the situations that they find themselves in, and creating content to meet that need. That is the one place you want to understand the user and you want to create content for that. And if you want to refine that process and get ideas and understand that in more concrete terms, so then, yes, you can go and you can look at the results page and you can break down user intent and so forth and so forth. But it all starts with understanding the user. I don't want you to think this is where it starts with user intent. It starts with targeting your audience by understanding yourself and understanding your audience, understanding the product that you offer and how that fits in, or the service that you offer, how that fits in, and using things like breaking down user intent to help guide you a little bit along the way. And with that, we're going to turn it over once again for some more questions.

So Shanika wants to know, how do you go about targeting a specific audience?

That is like the million dollar question, right? To me, it starts with understanding yourself, like understanding your product. Every product has identity, Every business has identity, every service has identity. That makes you stand out, makes you different than all the other people doing this. And understanding yourself and who, what is my product? What's its identity? What's my service? What's its identity? And saying, who does this speak to? What kind of person does it speak to? What problems might the person who is interested in this have? What problems does this solve? So you're understanding yourself, and you're understanding yourself in the context of understanding your audience, again, being empathetic and understanding where they're coming from, what their situation is, so that you can create the content to meet that, and you can showcase your product and service in the context of helping people solve their problems.

Right? And I think here, like some of those other tips you gave before in like, looking at other brands or products that are appearing in those search results and looking at the kind of content they're creating. You can also go and look at their social channels, see what their customers are talking to them about, look at, like, common questions your customers ask you. There are a lot of ways for you to get deeper into your customer mindset and really understand what you know, what's bothering them or what do they need.

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cool. So Juan is asking, how can I optimize SEO for blogs? And does putting YouTube videos on my page help or hurt SEO?

Well, in all likelihood, it probably helps. And that's what your users are looking for. I mean, if you're speaking, your audience is visually impaired, then maybe a YouTube video is maybe not the best thing to show. But all things being Equal, if you understand your audience and it's helpful to them, then yeah, YouTube videos are great in terms of optimizing your blog. So there are some basic things you can do, like the page structure that I mentioned before. Having a title to your page, you can using H2s, using H3s, bullet points, lists, tables, images, all these things to offer structure to your page to make it really easy. Think about it like this. Whatever makes it really easy for a user to understand your content. Also makes it really easy for a search engine to understand your content. And the best thing you can do is just write. I'll quote Google here. Write really helpful content for your users and write prolific. Look, don't just put effort into it. If it's a matter of writing, spending an extra hour writing an extra couple of paragraphs, do it. Write something that's really authoritative and really substantial.

Great. So Dale says my industry, which happens to be a florist, is very competitive online. So how do I actually get myself listed in the top searches?

So again, I mean, so if you're a local business and you have a physical listing or your service area business, it's a Please make sure to set up a Google My business profile. That's an absolute must. You won't. Things like the local pack that I showed you, that map with the three listings, you won't be able to get into that unless you have set up a Google My business listing. So please definitely do that. And there's a fill it out completely. There's a lot of features there. Explore, do some research. There's all sorts of features you can take advantage of to really fill out that listing and definitely do that. If you're competing in a really competitive industry, it's the same advice across the board. I'll say find the thing that you do better. Find the thing that 10 exit. Find the thing that you do differently. Find the thing that differentiates you. Find the thing that makes you stand out and push that to the max. Target that, showcase that, be proud of that, create. Put it on social media. Put out content, whatever you can do to promote that aspect of your business, do that.

Awesome. So I'm going to say Dale here, if we're talking about florets, definitely stuff that's super helpful. Is anything around how you're doing shipping and delivery, maybe the kinds of bouquets or flowers that you're offering. Like again, going back there to what Morty's saying, figure out like what your specialty is and focus on that. So Felicia wants to know, how do you find your targeted audience.

That's a very good question. First, like I mentioned before, really starts off from your own brand's identity, is what do you do? Like again, what differentiates you and who does that speak to? Right. If once you understand who that speaks to, now you sort of have a really good starting point of who is this helpful for? Well, there's your audience and then you can do things like go to the results page, see what your competitors are doing, do keyword research, investigate the questions that relate to the topics. Like if you go to, let's say, ask the people and you sit a free tool that I mentioned before and you see all of the questions related to the one question you put in, you can really start getting a sense of what's the profile of this person, what's the pain points of this person that I'm trying to target, and then take it from there.

Great. So we have one more question here, and that's from Alan and he wants to know we're getting a decent amount of traffic, but I feel like nothing is converting or people are not adding products to the cart.

So that speaks to SEOs. Love talking about ranking and traffic and none of those things actually matter. What matters is dollars in your wallet or whatever currency you're selling in. That tells me off the bat without looking at the site, because I can't say without looking at the site, but most probably you're getting the wrong traffic. You're ranking well, you're showing in the organic results for people who are you're not really speaking to. They get to your page and you're not. The product doesn't speak to them for whatever reason. That's what I mean. Like if you have a million people coming to your site and none of them are interested in buying your product, is it really worth having a million people come to your site versus hey, I can have a hundred people come to my site and all of them are interested in buying my product. So it might mean refining your content, offering and trying to target the people who will actually buy, like your target audience or finding your conception of your target audience.

That's great advice. So yeah, I would definitely dig in deeper there, I think try and talk, if you can, to some of the people coming to the site. Maybe add like a live chat to your website so you can engage a little bit with the people who are visiting and then try and understand like what's off there, like what's not meeting their expectation once they're getting there.

Yeah, look, there could be there could very well be a UX issue, people. This happens all the time because we make the site, we think it's very intuitive. But I've heard examples of this time and time again where when the user actually goes to the site and they try to buy something, there's a hitch that you didn't really realize was there because to you it all makes sense.

Right? So we do have other courses. Go check out the ecom school about how to like optimize your product pages and optimize your store for conversion. That is definitely a whole different conversation. But I think Marty gave you two great directions. So either you're bringing the wrong people to the site or people get to the site and something on the site is not working. So. So try and figure out which of those two issues you're suffering from for sure. Okay, great. So I think, Marty, that's it for now.

So actually the last question is a great segue into this because you can bring traffic to your site, but it might not speak to what you're actually doing. And this speaks to some ways that you might be misusing all the knowledge that I've shared so far around user intent because it's a little bit, again, more complicated than we've already made it. So I'm sorry to add more complication to it, but I'll explain it really easy to understand way. And it's all about understanding what site identity is and why it matters so much. So first off, what is site identity? So site identity is pretty much like it sounds. It's when users, or Google, in this case we're talking about search engines come to your site. It's their ability to understand what your purpose is. What is your site about? Who are you? What are you trying to do? What are you trying to accomplish with this site? Think about it like this. Imagine you walk into a doctor's office and you show up. You go to the reception area, you ask, can I see the doctor? And the receptionist says, absolutely. Would you like to see the doctor about your health problem or do you want to buy a new car? Like what? You sell new cars, you're a doctor, you would be very confused, like, what's going on here? Am I in the right place? Not only that, you might start to question how authoritative or how good of a doctor are you if you have to sell cars on the side? So when you don't have a strong topical focus, it confuses search engines, just like it confuses people. It tells them, well, I don't really know what your site is about. I'm not really sure what you're doing here. How am I supposed to rank you? And even if I kind of understand, you know, you're doing this and you're doing that, those two things don't align. Why are you doing that? Do you not understand? Are you not really understanding what you're supposed to be doing? Maybe your site's not really trustworthy. And if I'm again, I'm a search engine, why would I rank you? And if you don't think Google is doing that sort of complex thinking, it most definitely is. I and other SEO.