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Today on the podcast, we are talking about how to find your future buyers. And you're going to do it using SEO. So we'll talk about what's changed and how you can make those changes work for you. This is a good one. Every store owner needs this, so I'll see you on the inside. Come listen.

Welcome to the E Commerce Roadmap, the podcast for store owners who are growing their sales without spending a fortune on ads. Each week, you'll learn actionable strategies and tips that will fast track the growth and profitability of your e commerce business. So buckle up and join your host, Susan Bradley, as we dive into the work that will grow your sales this year.

Hey, welcome back. So today I am talking with Sarah Stenshorn. She's our program manager inside of my Inner Circle program, and she is also an expert on SEO for product based businesses. And in fact, she has taught hundreds of people how to build SEO, an SEO funnel for their businesses, specifically for them. And she's done that in our course. It's called SEO for E Commerce. Now, building this funnel is so important because when you implement it, implement Sarah's training, you'll start to get high, converting traffic to your store. These are the people that are most likely to become buyers down the road. And the beauty of all of this is that it doesn't cost you anything. And so I'm going to start the episode catching up with Sarah. We're going to chat about what's working for SEO right now, and we're going to include how AI search results can actually bring you sales if you follow the plan. And then we're going to walk you through the steps that you need to take to build your own SEO funnel for your store. And then I'll wrap it up with some information on how you can get your copy of our course, the SEO for E Commerce course. So let's just get started. I want you to come and meet Sarah. Sarah, thank you so much for joining me on this episode. You are the goat of SEO for E Commerce, certainly in our world. And I just couldn't do this without you. So thank you. And I know our members. Thank you. And before we dive in and talk about the SEO funnel, which is just so brilliant, I would love it if you would just give us a refresh because this is, I think, the third time that we have made your course available to people who are in our audience and our members. And really, I think that with so many things that people have to do, they need a refresh on why this is Important and what's possible if you do it and managing your expectations about how long it takes. So if I could just ask you right off the bat, just for anyone who's an E commerce store owner who's not really techy, what is SEO really?

So SEO, it stands for Search Engine Optimization. Basically all it is updating your site so that it's easier for the search engines and now also AI to find your site, which makes it easier for potential customers to find your site as well. And so if you think about when you go to Google and you type in Google, you're looking for something. Those sites that appear towards the top, they're probably doing something right with their SEO because that's why they're showing up there. And as we know as consumers, we tend to click on those top results. So the better we can make our own SEO, the more likely we are to end up in those top results and get more visits.

So I'm going to say to you that there was a time before I really saw what's possible. There was a time where I would have said there are a lot of stores that maybe can't benefit from SEO. And I've actually really changed my thoughts around that. But I think a lot of people are wondering like, is this really going to help me? Is it really going to help me, especially with AI in the world of SEO? What do you think?

Yeah, so that's actually a two part question. So first, I absolutely believe SEO can help any business. I don't think it matters what you sell or who you are. We all have an ideal customer, an ideal audience that we're trying to attract. And naturally we're the experts in our business. We have experience, we have perspective that other people don't. And by sharing that, it helps to bring people in, not only with visits through being found in the search engine, but once we get them on the site, we're really speaking to those customers and like a one on one conversation almost. And so the SEO does two things. It brings the people in, but having real solid SEO also is going to contribute to having better content on your site altogether. And the second part, as far as the AI is yes, it's out there. And we've all seen, I think if you're using Google, you know that now there's an AI summary at the top. And I keep hearing people that are really afraid to even delve into SEO now because they feel like it's no longer relevant and that's just not the case. And first of all, Google is Not going away. And those results at the top of Google, even though they're an AI summary, they're still sites. There are sites that have done their SEO really well, and that's why Google featured them. And as far as, like, something like ChatGPT, who can now pull in sites. If you're doing SEO right the way that I teach it in the course, there's nothing special you need to do. You're going to show up there as well, and you just want to think of it as an extra channel to be pulling people in.

You are a perfect example of this, right? Because you sell jewelry, your own business, your business is having a phenomenal year, your best year ever. And you've worked on this, your SEO for your jewelry business for years and years. And so what is your experience? Has anything changed since AI got to the top of the listings with Google? Has anything changed for you?

It's gotten better because I get sales from ChatGPT now, and I have not done anything different. I have not changed a single thing. But I get sales directly from ChatGPT.

Amazing. So you don't really need to do anything special to show up in those AI searches. Just do. Just follow the program and get your keywords and implement your SEO. So let's talk about this for a minute. Let's talk about blogging, because what you've indicated is what works has changed for us. And so can you tell us a little bit about that?

Yeah, sure. With blogging, this has changed because of AI, and it is still every bit as valuable as it used to be. The difference is that when we sit down now to write a blog post, if we're using AI to help us write that blog post, we really need to be asking ourselves, is this unique? Is this valuable? Is this something that my competitor can come to ChatGPT and spit out the same article? Years ago, we used to be able to churn out a mass quantity of articles and that would actually help us get found. That's not the case anymore because everybody can do that. And so now what's really important with your blogging is a, that we are looking at SEO as a marketing funnel, as a sales funnel. We're not just looking at as just a single thing. It needs to be part of a bigger picture. And second, it sounds cliche, but we really need to understand our ideal customer. And we hear that with every course we take. Right, Is know your ideal customer. But it really is important because we each have our, like I said, our own experience, our own perspective, and we know our customers better than anyone. And so once you dial that in, you can really speak to that customer. And one of the things that changed overall is that keywords haven't gone anywhere. Keywords are still important. You still need to research, you still need to use them. But topical relevance has really become what's important. And all that means is that Google's more concerned that we're topically relevant and staying on topic on our site that is speaking to our ideal customer. And that's more important than the individual keywords even anymore. And so as long as you're doing those things within your blogging, then you can still succeed with an E commerce blog.

Okay, I love what you just said because that actually makes it easier for most of us, the people who. Because most of the people that we work with and ourselves, our businesses are usually born of a passion or a hobby or something that we are already genuinely interested in. And we have, we have a lot to say about it. We have unique, maybe even unique terms or little things that we would talk about that an AI would never like a ChatGPT would never discover that. And so it actually makes it easier for people like us to blog. Would you agree?

I do agree. Yeah. And again, I just want to. You don't want to get rid of keywords? Keywords are always going to be there. But yes, if you're speaking to your ideal customer and you're keeping that person on your site and engaged, you're going to, no matter what your keywords are, you can succeed with this. Yeah, that's perfect.

And you do a really good job in the funnel, which. Guys, we're going to get to that in a minute. This recording that Sarah and I have about the how the SEO funnel works, you do a great job of explaining the levels of this funnel and what you need to tell your customer, what your customer's thinking and doing and how they're feeling, even when they're at every stage. And that allows you to address it. So literally, you could do a blog for top of Funnel. You could do a blog for and like bottom of Funnel, could you Not a hundred percent.

Yeah. And you don't always have to worry about keywords. Even I don't. I hear a lot of people stress about, I don't know what to blog about because I don't know what keywords or they worry about where am I going to put the keywords in the blogging. It doesn't matter so much. Yes, you want to use keywords that you find through your keyword research. But I want people to write blogs that make sense for their audience. Be helpful first. And worry about Google second. Or ChatGPT second.

Be helpful first. You got it.

Yep.

Or entertaining.

Or entertaining.

Or solve a, solve a problem. That's really good. Okay, let's talk. Let's just go back to the people who might, you know, me in the past who might say, eh, nobody's really searching for this product, so I don't know whether it makes any sense. Let's go back to some of people who have already taken your course. Let's go back to some of them and the kinds of results we're seeing those people have because, like, jewelry is a tough cat category for sure. And you've had amazing success with high quality organic traffic from SEO for your jewelry store. I know we have another client who's done really well and she has a bead store, like beaded jewelry store. She's done really well. Again, that's not something that you would typically say is great for SEO. What are some of the other results that you've seen?

Yeah, so we have someone who is a photographer and so she has a blog as well as her store for photography. And I know that she has had an amazing shift in the results that she's had. She's moved onto the first page for several things. I haven't caught up with her recently, but I know that she was continually seeing growth month over month with that. You mentioned a jewelry person. We have another jewelry person who, she said it did take a couple months or a few months to get going, but once it did, she started to see results month over month. So yeah, it doesn't really matter what your niche is. If you're consistent with it, you can succeed with it.

Yeah, you don't have to say, oh, it'll never work for me. There is, I guess, the other thing that I would love for you to just share before we go dive into the funnel, just share a little bit about the difference in quality of that search traffic, how much more they are likely to become a customer than somebody that sees us on Facebook, for example, or on social media somewhere.

Yeah, for sure. And keep in mind, there is a funnel. So your top of funnel is no different on your blog than it is on Facebook. You're bringing in that top of funnel traffic. Right. But the difference is that we can really speak directly to the person a little bit easier on our site than we can in an ad that somebody might see for five seconds. You have to capture their attention so quickly on Facebook and for A lot of people, it's just easier for them to go to your site to see all the things, to read the things and know that you're speaking to them and make a real connection. Whereas it's very difficult to do that with ads. Now, the ads can certainly bring them to your site so that they're then engaged, but once you've got them on the site, you can bring them back again and again without needing another ad.

Yeah, for sure. And that direct traffic, when they come back time and time again, that's always way up there. If you're sorting, if you're filtering for conversion rates, that's always very high on the conversion rates. That's great. Thank you so much. I am so glad that I listened to you and because really I spend a lot of time thinking if you're not selling something that somebody is actively searching, like a lot of people are actively searching for, I don't know if the time is worth it. But you've proven time and time again, both with yourself and clients, other people who've purchased your course, that it does work for everyone.

It does. The key is like anything else, you've gotta be consistent. But if you're consistent and you put in the work. Yes, you can be so good.

Thank you so much.

You're so welcome.

Kind of genius. What is an SEO funnel? Share that with me.

Yeah, absolutely. So I think most of us in the inner circle especially understand what a sales funnel is, right? We have the sales funnel where we've got our cold, warm and hot traffic. I think what most people don't realize is you can apply, apply that same method of thinking to SEO. And so SEO is a way of bringing your customers down a similar funnel to get them to purchase.

And it's free. That's it. It's not free. Right. Because it requires work on your part and you're going to walk us through the process today. But it's not quite as spin the wheel as advertising feel. Emboyan. Right.

Your plus it's in time, not money.

Yeah. And it's the same as a sales funnel, right? It's you've got your top of funnel, your middle of your funnel and your bottom of your funnel and different work that you do on each stage of that funnel. So can we just start with the top of funnel? Tell us what the top of the funnel is in an SEO funnel.

Yeah, absolutely. So at the top of the funnel, similar to your ads funnel, where you've got that cold traffic that doesn't know your brand, these people are in the awareness stage. They might not know anything about you. They've never heard about you before. And the funny thing is, they may not even know that they need your product at that point. They're looking for a solution, but they don't know what that solution necessarily is. So they're asking a lot of general questions. They're thinking about different options. And so at this stage with SEO, we really want to focus on broader content that answers those really big questions customers might have. Simple ones.

What is.

So an example would be if we're selling thermal printers. I know I gave the example on the handout I did for you. So they might be asking, what is a thermal printer? They may not even know what that is. So those are the kinds of questions we're answering at that stage.

Okay, so really broad questions that are just like. Like the curious questions.

Exactly, exactly.

Oh, super cool. So then we're going to talk about the work, but that's the first stage. And then if we talk about the people who are in the middle of the funnel, who are they? What is that? Yep.

So the middle of the funnel equates exactly like it does on the ads level. These are warm traffic people. These are people that have already senior brand. And in fact, at this point, they may even know that they need what you're selling, but they're still deciding on what option is best. And at this point, they're also not sure who they necessarily want to buy from. So they may be looking at you plus multiple competitors. So in this stage of the funnel, this is your opportunity to get a little more product specific, to help them decide what product is best, so that you can come across as the authority and so that you're gaining that no trust factor. Right. Product comparisons are great at this stage, Reviews are great at this stage, things like that, to help them make an informed decision.

So cool. And then if we head on down to the bottom of the funnel and of course this audience gets smaller all the way down, just like the sales funnel. Who are those? What's happening there?

Yeah, absolutely. So these are our hot traffic. Right. These are the people that you've already made that decision to purchase. They're absolutely going to purchase. They just haven't quite had that final push to necessarily buy from you specifically. So your job at this point is to make sure that they know they're making the right decision by buying from you. These are the things that like customer reviews, help with how to guides, writing great product descriptions and product specifications, basically answering all of those questions that they might have lingering that make them not sure whether or not they want to buy. You're giving that final push, closing the loop for them. You got it? Yep.

Yeah. Oh, so cool. Okay, so when I think of SEO and I'm not, this is not my strong point as we all know. So I am deferring to you on so much of this because you are, you really do know your stuff. But when I think of SEO, I think sometimes we have to figure out if this is for me or not, if the investment in time is worth the potential upside. So what I would love to know from you though is who do you think this is for? Who should be starting to build an SEO funnel?

Yeah, I do think that any E commerce owner, all E commerce owners, should really think about SEO because it's well worth the investment in time because it touches not just the content on your site, but can also affect things like your Google Ads. But really I think this is perfect especially for our E commerce owners that want to build that content based funnel without ads because this is just an investment of your time versus your money. And when we're starting out, a lot of us have more time than we do money. So this is perfect for that person. Does work well for any product based business. But what I've seen in clients that I've talked to is especially brands that offer DIY or things that lend themselves to writing content around how to's, they can really expand on bringing our traffic in just by writing some content focused around that. So it's great for DIY brands and for any kind of product based business.

Okay, so you shouldn't just rule it out before you suddenly got it would work for you. And so what are the real key reasons why is this really important for everybody to at least consider adding this as part of their overall strategy to grow their business. What's really important about this?

Yep, I think at the end of the day we see it over and over again with small businesses in the inner circle. We see ad accounts get suspended every single day. We see Facebook accounts that have been hacked that they can't get back into. I had my own Google Ads account suspended a year ago. That was a terrifying experience because it was 90% of my traffic. And I think by putting in a strategy for SEO, you are building a moat around your business that if all else fails, you have this and certainly the rankings change in Google day to day and they come out with content updates that can affect your SEO. But at the end of the day the content is yours and it's solid. And this is an evergreen strategy, not something you have to continue changing every week or every month or every year in order to stay on top. So it really insulates you from having those things, if they do happen, losing all of your traffic.

And even if they don't happen, they work in concert with that anyway.

A hundred percent. Yep.

I'm thinking if you're. And we'll talk about this more later, my wheels are always turning is, wow, this is really just part of a content strategy that, you know, if you're creating some content that attracts your. Right, your ideal customer answers that broader question, or if you're creating some content that answers like, closes the loops, like the bottom of the funne, you can also use that in your social media ads and drive traffic to that to those articles too. There's no reason you couldn't do that.

Yeah, and that's a great point because I'm not saying don't run ads because I think ads will always be a large part of my business. But by doing the work with this content, once you get those people onto your site with your ads, you are establishing authority. And if you have better content than your competitors, you are far more likely to close that sale than they are.

Yeah, for sure. That's why direct traffic converts so well.

Got it. Yeah.

So good. Okay, so let's talk about how you do it, because it all sounds like good in practice, but most of us don't have a clue where to start. So let's talk about that. Where do we start? Sure.

So the first place I encourage everyone to start is with your products and collection pages. And that's because clearly those are the pages that are going to be selling to your customer. So to start, you're just going to do some keyword research. And all we're looking for is to determine the best phrases to use for each of those pages. You want to use a tool. Ubersuggest.com is one that I recommend a lot to people. It's a really cost effective way to do keyword research. But if you don't have the money for that, you can use a free tool like the Google Ads Keyword Planner to make it easier for you. What you're looking for are phrases that actually get searched by customers. So many of us just use the first thing that comes to mind. And that can be a real mistake because the first thing that comes to mind to us may be something that people aren't actually looking for. So that's why we use a keyword tool. In order to make sure that those phrases we're using are actually getting some traffic. Then once you've done that, you just want to make a plan to optimize your homepage, your collections and your product pages. You want to include your chosen keyword phrase in your title description and image alt text at a minimum. And I know in the inner circle we have a great training that Tina did that does explain how to do all of these things. And so then after that, you want to brainstorm a list of topics and keyword phrases that you can create more create content around about your products. And that's where we start with the blogging content.

Okay, let's wrap this episode up. Now, what I really love about the course, SEO for E Commerce is that you get to learn how to find the keywords that you can actually rank for. So you're going to learn that and then you're going to build your own SEO funnel. And we show you how to do this step by step, one thing at a time. And as you're doing the work, you are set up to track your results, which is so incredibly important because you need to see your progress every week. SEO is not a quick win. SEO is a long term lasting solution to getting high quality traffic and so we want you to track that progress every single week. Now, you'll have support for a full two months when you purchase a course because we want to avoid you getting stuck. So Sarah is the one who supports the course and she will answer all of your questions within the course. There's also a couple of live sessions that you can join or watch the replay so that you can speak to her face to face. So if you are ready to implement this in your business, you can find the link right here in the show notes for this episode. Now, the program is not open all the time and so if you do click through and you find that we're not open, we do have a wait list. So if you go and you can't join right now, you can drop your email on the waitlist and we will send you an invitation when we run it again. This is the work that you will do that will pay you back for years to come. So I don't want you to skip it. That's it for this week. I want to thank you for listening and I will see you again next week. Hey, if your sales are slower than you want them to be and you're not sure what to do next to reach your sales goals, I want you to head on over to the show notes and grab a link to get your cost copy of my new course, Conversion School. It's absolutely free and inside the lessons you will learn our step by step process to grow your sales without spending a fortune on risky ad strategies and without discounting your products. The strategy that you will learn in Conversion School works for e commerce stores of all stages. You'll use your store's data, so if you're starting out, you'll learn how to how to get consistent sales every day. And if you're an established store looking to really scale your sales, you'll use your data to learn how to achieve significant sales growth every month, month over month. So head on over to the Show Notes, grab the link and get your copy now.