On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Josh Piepmeier. Josh is the Founder and CEO of Meriwether Digital, where he helps ecommerce brands generate new revenue with SEO. We talk about maximizing SEO investment in modern Ecommerce, the value of unique perspectives in content, utilizing keyword tools for keyword ideation, and so much more!
Josh is the Founder and CEO of Meriwether - the SEO agency that generates new revenue for ecommerce brands. Learn more at meriwether.digital.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
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Josh Piepmeier
AI right now is producing a lot of really short term gains. But we've actually seen some of those short term wins then come crashing down as Google updates things.
Chase Clymer
Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game.
On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating real results.
I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.
Let's get on with the show.
Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. I'm your host, Chase Clymer.
And today, we're welcoming the show Josh Piepmeier. He's the founder and CEO of Meriwether Digital, where he helps Ecommerce brands generate new revenue with SEO.
Welcome to the show, Josh.
Josh Piepmeier
Thanks for having me, Chase. Excited to be part of it.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Let's dive in here. Just right off the top, I guess.
My first question for you: is Ecommerce even a vertical where it's worth investing in SEO?
Josh Piepmeier
Yeah. And that's a good question. I get that question from a lot of brands, actually. And it's funny because I get that question even from brands who have tried investing in SEO.
So they get to the same level, they get to the same place. They have Facebook going, they've sort of figured it out a little bit. They've gotten to the point where they've sort of saturated it. They're getting that 2X ROIs, things like that, maybe a little bit less.
And so they're saying, okay, let's diversify a little bit. And so they've tried SEO, maybe even, you know, invested for a year or two, and they're not seeing a lot of return in this.
So they're even getting to that same exact question of like, ‘Is it even worth it to keep going with this?’ And the problem is, the answer is yes, but there's a big caveat, right?
And it's all about it's worth it if you have a really narrowly sort of revenue focused strategy. And it's very easy to get off track with that.
And so one of the biggest pain points around this is tracking, which we'll get into like attribution, seeing what actual kind of net new customers you're bringing in from SEO.
And so if you have the right strategy, yes, but it's also very easy to waste a lot of money on this channel so you just kind of have to be careful how you go about it.
Chase Clymer
Like everything in Ecommerce and consulting and anything strategic, the answer is always, it depends.
But you believe that SEO is a worthwhile avenue for the modern Ecommerce brand?
Josh Piepmeier
Yes. In the vast majority of cases, yes.
In fact, in a lot of cases, it's almost irresponsible to get to that level of Facebook ad spend where you're really crushing it, you're spending maybe six figures a month on ad spend and then you're not investing in SEO. You're not doing SEO.
If you look at what happens with things like Google trends, like Google trends for mushroom coffee right now, for example, is off the charts, right? The interest has peaked over the last few months and that's all driven by Facebook ads, right?
We see Everyday Dose, we see Ryze, we see MUD\WTR– those guys are all on Facebook, sort of driving all that interest generating all that demand. And they are not necessarily in the SERP when you type in mushroom coffee, it's other brands.
So some of those other brands are actually capitalizing on the demand that's generated by somebody else. I've actually had customers do that, where there's sort of a small brand, sort of scrappy six figures, something like that.
That's not my ideal client now but in the past, I've worked with these kinds of brands and they're like, ‘Look, mushroom coffee is hot. Let's take advantage of this and capture some of that existing demand that other people are driving for ourselves.’
And then they add six, seven figures of revenue just from SEO because somebody else is driving the ads.
Yes, it works. And almost if you're doing Facebook ads and you're not doing SEO, it's like you're filling a bucket and there's a big hole in the bottom. So you got to do both.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. So what you're saying is when you're spending a lot, you got a large spend on there, and it's working for you, it usually means it's a saturated market to where Facebook can be profitable because there's other people competing on that term, which means that there are then people probably searching for that term on Google.
And if you're not coming up there, you're leaving money on the table.
Josh Piepmeier
Exactly. Yeah.
And there's a whole variety of things we can get into around how to do that, etc. But that's the basic idea 100%. You got it.
Chase Clymer
All right.
Well, walk me through baby steps here.
I'm a brand. The investment that we've made into SEO thus far is that we feel proud of our product pages and the extra content we put on there. We don't really do any blogging, we haven't really figured out how to make that make sense for our brand.
And we're just trying to put some cool stuff on the collection pages that speak a bit more to it. But we don't really have a strategy behind SEO. What should we do?
Josh Piepmeier
Well, okay. So the first thing you have to figure out is where you compare to other people in your space. And so one of the main things you got to look at is, what does your backlink profile look like?
And when we talk about a backlink, just in very simple terms, it's like if another site links back to you, okay, that's called a backlink.
And those kind of counts as votes of authority in Google's eyes. So if you have a bunch of people voting for you, saying, ‘Hey, you have a really good product,’ then Google's gonna trust you more and they're gonna show up.
And so if you don't have any of those kinds of backlinks, then Google's not gonna trust you. And so even if you put a bunch of content on your collections pages, nothing's gonna happen.
So a great tool for this is a tool called Ahrefs, okay, A-H-R-E-F-S.com. I have no affiliation with them, it's just sort of the core tool that I use.
And you can just use a tool within there called Site Explorer, look at maybe one of the top people that's ranking for your target terms. So if you're selling mushroom coffee, you can enter the first five people that are ranking for that term and see how many backlinks they have and then compare that to your site.
From there, that gives you a really good idea of how to start your campaign.
And I'll pause there because we're already getting really into the weeds. And we could turn this into a three-hour podcast if we wanted to. But that's a good starting point to see.
Is your brand strong? And then you build your strategy from there. Questions?
Chase Clymer
Let's pretend that I look at my backlink profile and it doesn't make me happy because this has never been a priority for my business. So, Am I screwed?
Josh Piepmeier
No. Okay. And so this is where things get interesting.
Based on the conversation up till now, kind of what you'd think is, ‘Cool. I don't have backlinks, I'm going to go build a bunch,’ right? That’s kind of intuitively what you would think.
Chase Clymer
Sure. Yeah.
Josh Piepmeier
Yeah. So, you know, you do have to do some of that. However, the problem is, in most industries–the top people in your industry– are already ahead on backlinks.
They've been doing that game for years. They've been playing that game for four years, right? That's kind of been the SEO game for like the last 10 years. That's what everybody's been doing.
So if you wanna play that game, you're gonna have to spend a lot. And I'm talking about a single backlink is $300 to $500.
So if you wanna build, you know, the top people ranking for any given term at any given time, maybe have a thousand backlinks pointing to their site, we're talking six figure investment, right?
The new way that I kind of go about it, that we've seen success with our clients is using content instead. And so that's where the blog comes in.
And so there's this concept called topical authority. And now I don't even really like that concept because in SEO circles, they sort of think that means that you just blog about whatever comes to mind on a certain topic.
Like you just say, hey, I'm trying to rank for mushroom coffee and so I'm going to blog about anything that comes to mind on that.’
But if you go into Ahrefs again and you look at you plug in the top person that's ranking for that term –so you type mushroom coffee into Google– you see who's ranking number one, you pull that URL out and you put it in Ahrefs, they're gonna give you a list of keywords that that page is ranking for.
Some of those keywords are gonna be ranking number one for but there's gonna be a bunch of different topics that it's ranking maybe position 15 for.
So then if you write content on all of those topics that it's not ranking that well for, you boost the topical authority of your page– of that collections page –and you'll start to rank better for the shopping terms.
Okay. So this all might sound kind of crazy on a podcast, right? Or like on a call, like if you don't have it in front of you, but if you just go to Ahrefs and you plug in that URL, and then you just look at the keywords, you'll start to see very quickly that all of these content ideas are in front of you.
And these are the keywords that Google is telling you, h’Hey, we think these are related to the topic you're trying to rank for.’
So I'll pause there again. But this concept of topical authority and building, ‘Hey, you're the go-to resource and your space is really, really powerful.’
And so I think that's a really good strategy for a lot of, especially, challenger brands.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think that something I would like to know, and this may be more of my consultant hat than me pretending to be a brand owner on this call, so does SEO work better for certain types of Ecommerce businesses?
Say, we've been using the mushroom coffee example a lot now. But it's a little bit harder, I think, to differentiate for a lifestyle brand in a competitive niche like t-shirts and apparel versus something a little more specific like a mushroom coffee. What are your thoughts on that?
Josh Piepmeier
Yeah. So the strategy changes.
And so when you're trying to rank for something a little bit more basic, I don't know if basic is the right word, maybe… commoditized isn't the right word either. But something that's just sort of simple.
You look at a t-shirt and you either want it or you don't, except if maybe a true classic advertisement comes up on Facebook and they play some funny games.
Then, product selection becomes a much bigger differentiator.
So you want to rank a collections page. Well, it turns into who has the biggest collection of products, and then it becomes a little bit more about backlinks, right?
Because if you go into a store and they only have one product... Let's say you were just going to go into your local clothes store and they only have one product on the shelf.
Are you really going to go back there again? Are you going to shop there? Would you? Probably not, right?
So then in that same case, like online, people with bigger product catalogs win more.
Even then, I think you would be surprised at the opportunity with that topical authority angle. Even things like where to buy the best t-shirts or best t-shirts for tall, skinny people or for broad shoulders or things like that, people are searching for all those terms and so there's still opportunities.
And so I think that the distinction on ‘Hey, is SEO right for me?’ isn't really about the product type as much as it is the demand.
Like, are people even searching for your stuff? Have you generated demand in your space? Is there demand to be captured?
Chase Clymer
All right. That all makes sense to me. Let's get a little bit more ahead. Let's get ahead of ourselves, right?
So how would I even know that an investment that I'm making in SEO is working?
Josh Piepmeier
That's actually a really good question. And quite frankly, we probably should have started there.
Chase Clymer
Okay.
Josh Piepmeier
Right? Because look, there's two parts to this, right? You want your collections page to rank or your product page to rank for whatever XYZ keyword, but that's gonna be a little bit more of a medium to long-term play.
In the short to medium term, there's a lot of opportunities to sort of capture people who are exploring options at the bottom of the marketing funnel, to get marketing nerdy with it.
So what content is actually going to convert? People who are searching for the best product for this or best product for that, that shows that they're trying to find something to purchase and they're ready to sort of actually buy.
They have their wallet out there ready to go, right?
And so I have a whole list of topics that I know convert, and we'll get into the exact conversion models here in a second.
And I'm happy to give that away to your listeners. That's not the main thing.
The main thing we'll talk about in terms of a giveaway is sort of the tracking thing, but I'll give away sort of the template.
I have literally a blueprint of when I onboard a new strategist into my company, I say, ‘Look at this, this is the first thing you look at. These are the keywords that actually convert, and there's a whole list of blog topics in there, more informational topics that actually will convert people into customers, okay?’
So again, we kind of got sidetracked a little bit.
Chase Clymer
It's very easy on this show.
Josh Piepmeier
Yeah, so anyway, but does that answer the question? Well, so we kind of got to circle back to the question, right?
Okay, let's talk about reports.
In GA4, GA4 has made things a little bit more difficult.
Chase Clymer
I've heard that.
Josh Piepmeier
Yep, yep. They took away, or they hid some of the specific page by page options that you have, right?
CFOs, CMOs that I talked to, they hate this, right? But there's two reports that you gotta look at in GA4.
One is the model comparison tool, which is now hidden under the reports tab in GA4. So if you pull up the little left-hand drawer on your screen and it says reports, click that, go to model comparison, and then you set that up, that will show you and you can actually filter by Only Show Organic Traffic. That'll show you which specific pages on your site are converting traffic to actual sales.
And then you can take that same URL that's converting and you can enter it into the search console. And then in the Search Console, you can see which keywords it's ranking for.
And so using those two things combined together, you can say, okay, this page is converting, but all the traffic going through it is people searching for my brand name.
So that isn't really attributed to my SEO efforts. That's attributed to an influencer campaign or Facebook, or we went viral on TikTok or whatever.
And that happens all the time because most SEO people, they just look at organic revenue as a whole and they're like, woohoo, organic revenue is up this month. But that's just because they went viral on TikTok, right?
So you would want to look at GA4, look at the model comparison tool. And then in the Search Console, you can pull out which keywords they're actually ranking for.
And so the report that I'm going to talk about or that I'm going to give away takes reports from both of those tools and combines them into one in a little dashboard.
So you can see, okay, which of my pages is converting? Are they converting brand or non-brand traffic all in one sort of page?
Chase Clymer
Gotcha. And yeah, we'll talk about that in a little bit. But I got a million questions for you going down this SEO rabbit hole.
So obviously, if we're looking at reports, we have a campaign going that we know that's driving traffic.
What is the thought process behind creating an SEO campaign that's profitable versus just clicks. It's almost the same argument like when you're doing Facebook ads, you don't want clicks, you want conversions.
Can you do the same thing with SEO?
Josh Piepmeier
Absolutely. So it starts with... It starts from two angles.
You just have to identify topics that are going to be searched by people who are actually at the bottom of the buying funnel, like we talked about, and so you just have to optimize your entire campaign around those keywords. You want to start ranking for those kinds of keywords from day one.
Essentially, as you target keywords that are what we call longer tail, right, which just mean longer and more descriptive, they usually are easier to rank for.
For example, if you want to rank for, I don't know, in your case, like, ‘best Shopify design agency for migrations from Magento’, not that many agencies are probably even targeting that term.
If you were just to type in ‘design agency’, a lot more agencies are interested in ranking for that, right? So that's gonna be very competitive.
So from day one, you kind of gotta start ranking for some of those high intent, but longer tail and less competitive keywords. You start to stack those up, which simultaneously starts generating some revenue early on.
And then it also builds your topical authority, which helps you rank for some of the shorter tail. Design firm, mushroom coffee type keywords later on.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that makes sense to me.
So you want to start to snipe some of the easier ones.
Josh Piepmeier
Exactly.
Chase Clymer
And then when you start to rank for those, you'll get more clout to then start to maybe get into the territory, get on the page for these more difficult ones.
Josh Piepmeier
Exactly. And you can generate whole lists of keywords that are... Especially if you use this template, you can create a list of 500 keywords that you could target that are relatively long tail and not too difficult, depending on your industry.
Then that's when you use the process of typing in, of analyzing the keywords of the pages that are already ranking. Like we talked about earlier, hey, you take the URL, you plug it into Ahrefs, you look at the keywords.
If you combine those two approaches, that gives you a really nice distinct set of keywords that can really start off your SEO campaign on the right foot and will be competitive and generate real revenue from day one.
New people, new customers.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Have you ever seen that meme on Reddit where it's like someone's like, all right, well, first, you're going to draw the eye and then you're going to draw the other eye and then you draw the whole owl.
That's how I feel like talking about SEO is. The concepts are pretty straightforward. You're either going to get a backlink or you're going to have good content.
But from there, it gets a little crazy.
So you talked about ideating on the specific long-tail search terms and I'm assuming this is like what you guys do all the time for your clients.
How the heck do I even get started there? What should I do?
Josh Piepmeier
So I mean, you can literally take the blueprint that I'll give you guys and then just use that as a starting point. So I literally, it'll say in the blueprint, best X for Y, and it'll explain what that means.
And so then you can literally just go into Ahrefs. So basically, Ahrefs as a tool is your starting point. They have something called a Keywords Explorer. In there, you just have to enter essentially the thing that you wanna rank for.
What are you selling? Design services, web design services, web design agency, in very simple terms, what do you even sell?
Throw that in Ahrefs and it'll give you a bunch of keyword ideas. And that's the start. That's where you get a list and you can literally just type each of the keywords that you want to rank for into Google, see what kinds of pages are ranking, and then optimize the same page on your website around that.
So for example, if you were to type in ‘web design agency’ and a bunch of people's home pages are ranking, then you know that you need to optimize your homepage around that. If it's a bunch of blog articles that are ranking right now, you know that you've got to write a blog article.
So what's already in the SERP is your guide. So like literally you just take a keyword, plug it into Ahrefs, okay? It's going to give you a whole list of these topics. You can prioritize them like we talked about earlier.
And then you just have to look at the SERP and see what's ranking and then try to mimic those people.
I will say that one other tool that works really well here is something called Surfer SEO. Again, I have no affiliation with them. They literally will tell you exactly what words to include on your page to optimize it for SEO.
So you say, hey, I want to rank for ‘web design agency’. You plug ‘web design agency’ into Surfer SEO and it'll say, ‘Cool, beep-bop. To optimize for this term, you have to have these 12 other terms on your page many times.’
And you just gotta do it. So then it's just following instructions, color by number.
Chase Clymer
That's amazing. And obviously, it gets a little more interesting when you're doing it on a product page or a collection page for Ecommerce, you have a lot more freedom with writing a blog article.
Josh Piepmeier
Right. True.
Chase Clymer
Now obviously, we have to talk about it like AI. Can I just throw this in the ChatGPT and edit it and call it a day, or is it more?
How much work do I have to do here? How much human involvement has to be there? I'm a founder. I'm busy. I'm already wearing a dozen hats.
Josh Piepmeier
Yes. Okay. So that's a really good point.
AI is…we're at this really interesting place right now where AI is producing a lot of really short-term gains. But we've actually seen some of those short-term wins then come crashing down as Google updates things.
So this is not fear-mongering some future state of ‘You use AI now and then you're going to get hit later’, it's like people have used AI and then they were hit.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. ChatGPT has been out for over a year. People have produced hundreds of thousands, maybe millions of articles using it already.
Josh Piepmeier
100%. So there's two points here. Having a unique perspective is actually more valuable now than it ever was because Google really doesn't know what great content even is. They like to say that they do, but they just have to measure it based on interaction factors, right?
Like they just got to say, ‘Cool, this person stuck on the page for a while. They clicked on this page and then they didn't go anywhere else so then it must have fulfilled their need,’ blah, blah, blah.
So just getting that actual engagement on your site is super important.
The second part about this is that now creating content at scale, like mediocre content at scale, is essentially a commodity. Everybody can do it. It's just literally pressing a button, content comes out the other side.
And so it's no longer even about who can create the most content, it's about how you put the content together in a cohesive way that shows you're the authority.
Like, if you go down to your local coffee shop, do you expect them, the barista there, to have an encyclopedic knowledge about every single coffee ever? Probably not. But you expect them to have a really nicely curated selection of gourmet coffees and they've tried all of them and they have an opinion on all of them and they can tell you the flavor profile and it has hazelnut and all this other stuff.
So what does that look like on a website? So I'd say if we want to bring this back to the real world.
Publish once a week at a minimum, up to twice a week if you have a content person on your team or something like that. When I say publish, I mean either a blog post or optimize an existing page on your site. Do that once a week and you're gonna be in a very, very good spot.
Like if I had a client that came to me that said, ‘Hey, we've done this, but we aren't seeing the exact results that we want,’ by the way, that's happened. It's very easy for me to get results for them.
Then it turns into a question of, do you hire an SEO agency for two years or for a year to get your results? Or do you hire them as a consultant for two months and then all of a sudden you're getting results, right?
And by the way, if anybody in your audience actually does this, where they go publish once a week for six months or a year, and they don't get results and they come to me, I'll help them for free.
I'm serious because nobody actually has the dedication to follow through and that's the main thing.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, that's amazing. And you talked about how you were gonna share this keyword planner. Was that kind of the correct term there?
Josh Piepmeier
So I'm kind of freestyling here a little bit, to be honest with you. There's two things I'm gonna share.
So the original thing I'm going to share is like that attribution report. That you can find at trafficlighttracking.com.
Included with that is a little bonus additional thing I'm throwing in just on the show today is a template that explains the top 10 most profitable types of content you should be creating for your website. And literally a breakdown of exactly what each of them are and how to find them for your brand.
Chase Clymer
That's awesome. And you said trafficlighttracking.com. We're going to link to it in the show notes for the people. But just traffic light, like a stoplight out there.
Josh Piepmeier
Yeah, it'll actually break down, like, a URL that is mostly bringing in brand revenue. That's going to be a red because it's not bringing in that new revenue. Green is any URL that's bringing in revenue and conversions and is 75% or more non-brand traffic.
So that's why it's called Traffic Light because you're literally going to see a report in front of you, green is good, red is bad, and you're off to the races.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. See, you're making it simple for people like me that we just ask questions and pretend to be smart.
Josh, I can't tell you how thankful I am for you coming on the show. You held nothing back really.
If someone was listening to this and they're curious to learn more, not only about the free offer–that stuff is just free–I'm sure you put your email and you get it. There's no paywall or anything.
Josh Piepmeier
Exactly.
Chase Clymer
But if they want to take it a step further, and they're like, ‘Look, we've tried SEO and we just can't figure it out,’ And you seem to know what you're talking about. What should they do?
Josh Piepmeier
Search for Meriwether SEO. You can literally spell that anyway as long as you put SEO at the end, meriwether.digital will come up.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. And we'll obviously link to that the correct way in the show notes. Josh, thank you so much for coming on today.
Josh Piepmeier
100%. Yeah. Thanks, Chase. Appreciate it. It was fun.
Chase Clymer
We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes.
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