On this bonus episode of Honest Ecommerce, we have Dale Bertrand. Dale is an SEO and ecommerce expert who leads training and consulting engagements with brands like Citizen Watch, Nestle, Booking.com. We talk about understanding search intent for SEO, writing high-quality content to rank, addressing low conversion pages, and so much more!
Dale Bertrand is an SEO and ecommerce expert who leads training and consulting engagements with brands like Citizen Watch, Nestle, XXX.
Nowadays, Dale spends his time researching the risks and opportunities posed by Google’s shift to generative AI search.
You can follow Dale on LinkedIn and check out his work @fireandspark.com.
In This Conversation We Discuss:
Resources:
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Dale Bertrand
As long as you're able to demonstrate that engagement with whatever type of content you're putting out there for SEO, then it'll get ranked and you'll get traffic for it.
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.
Today, I'm welcoming to the show one of my favorite people that I've met through just the Ecommerce industry, Dale Bertrand. He is the CEO over at Fire&Spark.
I believe this might be your second time back on the show. Fantastic guest. Welcome back, Dale.
Dale Bertrand
Well, thanks for having me. I didn't realize this was the second time. It's all a blur.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, it's been... I believe through bonus episodes and just the regular podcast, I think I've done like 400 pieces of content on the main feed. But I do remember when people have been on before.
Dale Bertrand
Wow. Yeah. You have a better memory than I do.
Chase Clymer
I wouldn't bet on that.
So quickly though, for people that don't know, can you just tell us what you guys are up to over at Fire&Spark so they can understand where your expertise is coming from?
Dale Bertrand
Oh, sure. Sure. So we run Fire&Spark. We're an SEO agency. We focus on SEO strategy. So we don't pretend to be world class at anything else. So we don't sell content. We don't write content. We don't do software development or visual design. It's really all about SEO strategy.
Chase Clymer
Gotcha. So what would a typical engagement look like for you? What's the type of client or where they are in size? And then what's a deliverable, I guess?
Dale Bertrand
Yeah. Well, we work with a bunch of different clients, like a lot of Ecommerce, but then also some digital health and startups, and then also some manufacturing clients. I would say about half of what we do is Ecommerce. And we end up working on retainers or a project. You know, some people are just getting started with SEO and they feel more comfortable with the project.
Some brands have an issue, like maybe losing a bunch of traffic in the last Google update. So they want a project to dive into it and figure out what's going on. We have some other projects where we do a roadmap and then hand that off to an internal team and they can execute for the rest of the year on the SEO.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely. Yeah, I was definitely going to ask with strategy... Well, first of all, that's just a fun part of what we do as consultants is the ideation and figuring out how to solve the problem.
So you're often building that roadmap that helps them get to the goal that they're going for and then you empower them to do it themselves, or, “Here are the pieces of the puzzle you need to find or hire to do this.”
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, every situation is different. A brand might come to us where they have a goal. I talked to a brand yesterday. They want to increase their organic traffic by 25% by the end of the year. So they want us to dig into what they've been doing, what's going on on their site, and what they should be doing for the rest of the year in order to hit that goal.
So we have a lot of projects like that.
Chase Clymer
Awesome.
Well, let's dive into some more nerdy or ecommerce specific things. So how does SEO strategy change when you focus on conversion and sales and not just ranking higher or getting a lot of traffic?
Dale Bertrand
This is one of my favorite topics because a lot of marketers who are focused on SEO, they're thinking about rankings and traffic. And if the goal of your SEO campaign is rankings and traffic, you might miss out on actually making sales. We want people to hit that buy button.
So really, one of the things I like to think about, talk to marketers about is instead of starting your SEO campaign with keyword research and a technical audit, I mean, that's something we did for a decade. Instead, we're starting with search intents.
And what that is, is like, what are people looking to do online? What are they searching for when you want them to come to your website and ultimately convert? And when you're focused on those search intents, which could be a problem to solve or a specific product that they're searching for that allows you to use those search intents that you've identified that you'll be targeting to filter the keywords.
When you start with keywords, what you miss is that a lot of keywords have multiple intents behind them, and there might be intents that just don't convert at the end of the day. So that's really one of the ways that if you're focused on actual customer acquisition and sales for your SEO, not just rankings and traffic, that you change the way that you're doing your research upfront for your SEO campaign.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think there's a lot of parallels that you can draw there between paid traffic. Any kind of buyer, I guess, is what they like to be called, that I talked to in the meta world, TikToks, whatever, Google as well. They are like, if someone's buying links, buying traffic campaigns, “That's kind of wasting money”. Would definitely want to optimize that traffic.
Just because you get a lot of visitors doesn't mean they're buying anything.
Dale Bertrand
Oh, yeah. I mean, that makes a lot of sense. I think we often talk about web traffic. Like, where am I going to get my traffic? Where am I buying traffic? What campaigns am I running for traffic? And then forget that it has to actually convert in order to be valuable to you.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, you know what? This is really top of mind. Because this week, I'm talking with a prospect and their conversion rate is in the toilet.
I'm like, “This is weird.” And then I break... I look into it a little bit more. They're getting a lot of traffic. Lo and behold, this is bot traffic now, some of it. And so we're trying to figure out how to get out of this bot's radar.
But yeah, they're getting 20,000 visits a week from some sort of bot thing. And all that's doing is tanking their conversion rate, skewing all their metrics wrong. And it's a high bounce rate. There's zero conversions from this instance of traffic. So it's like, not all traffic is good traffic.
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, some traffic is low quality, in the toilet, garbage traffic. When you think about it... Because people come to me too. And they're asking about conversion, “So, hey, Dale, can you help me? Can you look at our CRO? Or what can you guys do to help us with conversion on the site?” And the way they're thinking about it is they're asking me to help them convert the traffic they have.
And of course, I want to know where the traffic is coming from and get an idea how high quality the traffic is. But sometimes, the real answer is to get better traffic.
And on the SEO side, when you're targeting organic traffic, generating organic traffic, the intent behind the searches that you're targeting or the intent behind the searches that are sending traffic to your website is what really matters.
I talk to people about one example. People are going online looking for information about how to clean their ski boots. And you might think that if you sell ski boots on an Ecommerce site as “Oh yeah, I want those people to come to my site because they ski.”
But imagine instead people that are searching online with the intent of trying to figure out how to size their new ski boots so that they get ski boots to the right size. Those are two very different intents.
One intent is actually a high intent purchase intent on size for new boots before they make a purchase. But then the first intent that I mentioned around cleaning your boots, they already have ski boots, they're not going to buy anything on your website.
It's low quality traffic, even though they're in the right demographic. And that's what really kills us. Because we think as marketers about our audience as a demographic. We want to sell skiers because we sell ski boots.
But the problem is when you're doing search marketing, it's all about intent. What is the intent behind that search? And if that intent is to buy the product or service that you sell, that's high quality traffic for you.
Chase Clymer
Yeah, I think that's just a great specification to call out.
So I want to ask you a different question now.This is probably what every merchant out there thinks about when they hear about content and SEO strategy for an eCommerce store: you got to work on your blog.
Is it just work on the blog? Or where else should I be working on it? What are the alternative places that I could create content that is going to rank for SEO to actually convert these visitors into buyers?
Dale Bertrand
Well, there's a lot there. There's two parts to my answer. The first one is that blogging has been linked to SEO forever. When we think about SEO strategy, some people, especially if you have a content background, you're thinking about blogging strategy.
You know what topics I'm going to write about, what keywords I'm going to target with my blogs. And for a lot of people, it is their SEO strategy. The problem is that it can definitely lead you in the wrong direction. If you end up writing to me about content that's already on the web, then Google doesn't need that content. It's not going to rank. It's not going to get traffic.
09:59 And then the other thing is, if you think about it, the best SEO traffic, I'm sorry, the best SEO content should really target those high intent searches and it should build the trust and authority for your brand, like with your customers and with Google, and it needs to convert that traffic. So that's really the trifecta when it comes to SEO content.
We found the blog articles are, they're part of the mix, but they're not the best format to really hit that trifecta. We've been doing a lot on the Ecommerce sites that we work with. We've been doing a lot with Q&A content, comparison content, niche buying guides, which work really well. You can build a lot of them, get really, really niche and specific with them.
And then also niche collections on the site. I was talking to an ecommerce brand yesterday about restructuring their category pages so that...
Chase Clymer
Oh, that's a good one for CRO as well.
Dale Bertrand
Oh, yeah. So that the categories match up with the way your customers are searching, and the way that they think about your products.
And another thing that's helping a bunch is we want category pages to be useful enough that they actually rank in Google. That's how we get that mid funnel search traffic. The trick there is to think of your category pages as buying guides. Like what information would you need to help somebody buy a product within that category? What questions would they ask and put that on the category page. Now all of a sudden your category pages are ranking because they're not just a product grid anymore.
Chase Clymer
No, that's fantastic.
And once you started bringing up things that had parallels to CRO, which is where we definitely have some specialty, I wanted to ask, when you're auditing websites–this is something we do and I want to know if you've thought about this or if it's in your playbook–which is we want to see which pages are getting a lot of traffic, but aren't getting add to cards or conversions.
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, 100%. And a lot of times what we find for those pages is that the organic traffic and the keywords that are driving that organic traffic have a number of intents behind that's just not the right traffic. It's somebody who's searching for information, not a purchase.
We had a client we worked with that had a product that was related to Taylor Swift. It was something, you know, a book about writing a song like Taylor Swift. And they were getting a lot of traffic to that page. But everybody landing on that page, when you looked at the keywords driving traffic to that page, they were all looking for information about Taylor Swift's upcoming tour dates. It's just totally the wrong traffic.
So a lot of times that's what's happening.
So in that case, when we have a page that's getting a bunch of traffic but it's not converting, we'll look at the keywords driving traffic, identify a small number of those keywords that are high intent, that are purchase intent keywords, and then we're doing our CRO by optimizing for that traffic and really ignoring the rest.
Because the rest of it's not going to convert if it's way off topic.
Chase Clymer
I can completely agree. So we did a lot of blogging at the agency actually, for the first couple of years before the podcast became our main content. We had a blog that ranked. But not for anything that had anything to do with our agency, really. It made sense in the grand scheme of things of the things we were writing about.
But in a vacuum, and what it hit for just... That traffic wasn't useful at all for selling our agency services. So we actually just gave it back to our writer. We're like, put this on your blog.
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, it makes sense. There's not much you can do with it.
We've also found that sites, like Ecom sites, a lot of SEO has to do with building your authority with Google so that you have the ability to rank your pages and your pages rank better.
And it used to be that your brand, your website, your domain had authority and we would look that up in SEMrush, trying to understand what our domain authority is. But now the way it works is that you'll have authority for specific topics.
So one of the things I like to do as an analyst starting to work with a new site is understand, “Does Google think this brand has authority? And then if you publish content that's aligned with that, that's relevant to the topics where Google has really assigned that authority to you, then that content will rank.
Whether it's a blog or any of the other alternative content formats that I mentioned.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
I have another question that's piggybacking off of that. Finding a page that gets a lot of traffic and no conversions.
Have you ever worked with clients too… Well, I guess it's not ‘have you ever’ because you guys aren't a dev shop. But what we will do in some of those instances is we will, especially on Shopify stores, if you do have a blog that's working, you're getting a lot of traffic, they aren't monetizing those articles in a correct way.
They're not putting add to cart buttons within the copy or within the actual blog. And heck, sometimes they're not even hyperlinking to the product that they're talking about. So sometimes it's just that easy.
It's like, “Hey, you're getting the traffic and there is the intent, but you're not making it simple for the customer to even buy the thing right now.”
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, that's absolutely critical.
With blog articles, it's always possible that there just... It is something like, “How do I clean my ski boots?” And that's just... That makes it hard. It's not product focused. So you put a big buy button in there.
Chase Clymer
Unless you're selling niche ski cleaning products, and then you're gonna win.
Dale Bertrand
Yeah. So that's why when you're thinking about SEO for actual sales, not just for rankings, that's why you'll start with, “What search intents am I going after?” But then you're thinking about, “Well, what type of content?”
So if you're building those niche buying guides or building out like niche collection pages, something like that, you have more opportunity to have product photos with a buy button under it, because it's a format that lends itself to conversion.
And that's one of the reasons why these other types of content, the other one I mentioned is comparison content, where you might be comparing two products that you sell, or you might be comparing your product to a competitor's product, or different ways to solve whatever problem your customers might be having.
But those are content formats that lend themselves more to conversion than a blog article.
And Chase, I think you really nailed it. It's just not obvious in a blog article sometimes where to put those conversion points.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. And especially, we do a lot of work on Shopify specifically. These days, like online store 2.0 is where we're building these things out.
And what we find works is if you do have content that's working and you're not making it easier to buy, you can build out add-to-cart buttons there that fire the side cart so it doesn't... They don't even leave the blog because they might be interested in reading the rest of the blog. So they don't want to take it away.
But if they can add it to the cart, and then the side cart fires and it's there, they can finish… You basically sold this product by the content, and then they move on with their journey. That is the best experience if you can build it out.
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, absolutely.
There's another part of this where we want to make sure that you have more calls to action than just a buy button.
And if you think about it, people at the bottom of the funnel who might know what product they're searching for, we would expect them to land on a product page and learn a little something about the product and hopefully hit the buy button.
But then the rest of the traffic is either like mid-funnel or top of funnel, where they would be landing on a category page on your site or some of the other maybe a blog article or other types of content. These might be folks that are not ready to hit that buy button. It really depends on what you sell. If it's really more of an impulse purchase or more of a considered purchase at a higher price point.
But if you've got folks landing on your website who might not be ready to buy, then we need to think of alternative conversions. Does it make sense to just try to capture their email address, offer them an offer in exchange for the email address? Maybe you've got a high ticket item where you'd be happy to get them on the phone.
But just thinking about what those alternative conversions are for folks who are not ready to hit that buy button.
Chase Clymer
That is crucial. If they're not going to buy, you want their phone number, you want their email, you want to build that trust. Get them from the no to the like to the trust, so then they'll convert.
And yeah, it's honestly... Getting the email address still works in 2024. If they're not going to buy it that day, try to get their email address and then your Welcome Series better be fantastic.
And I know I've got episodes out where we're talking about writing the Welcome Series. So you have now filled up your to-do list for 2024. You're going to start an SEO strategy based on what Dale's been sharing today. Then you're going to rewrite your welcome series based on another episode.
Alright, so you mentioned SEMrush. And I lovingly know everyone that listens to the show is a nerd like me.
What are some of your favorite tools that you guys have been using or like things you've been exploring with in the last year or so to help you out with your work?
Dale Bertrand
I'll answer this question a little differently. We've been building our own tools. So there are a number of analyses that we've been doing for a long time.
One of them is, how do you know what the intent is behind a keyword? So when somebody types a keyword like skis into Google, what are they really searching for?
And the way that we've always figured that out is we would type that keyword into Google, see what's showing up on the Google search results page because Google knows what the intent is and what they're really searching for and Google showing you a variety of results.
And so we've got some tools that will do that type of analysis automatically. I've been working with automations like Zapier and make.com for a long time, but now that we have AI tools, we can also do some natural language processing, understanding what's cool, or… Sorry, the automation can use AI to understand what's on the search results page and then what is what the actual search intent is.
So things like that, we've been putting together automations to do things and looking at AI tools to help with analyses like data analyses.
I'll give you one like if you have access to a ChatGPT Plus account, you can use the advanced data analytics. We had a client that sold wool products that are usually used for wool insulation, and they lost 80% of their traffic, that's why they came to us. They wanted us to figure it out.
And that's a situation where you can export some data from the Search Console. And then if you ask the right questions in ChatGPT, it can help you figure out, well, here's the type of keywords that they lost traffic for, and then there's this other type of keyword that they didn't lose traffic for.
Now, it used to take me a couple hours and a cup of coffee sitting in front of a spreadsheet to look at a thousand keywords to figure that sort of thing out. But what the AI was able to figure out in this particular case was that they lost a whole bunch of traffic for van life keywords. That's people who are buying wool to insulate their van because they live out of their van versus the home insulation keywords where they're actually still doing very well.
It's nice to have that sort of thing automated. I expect tools like SEMrush to catch up and start doing things like that. I'm actually in talks in Boston with the SEMrush guys here trying to help them understand the tools that I want them to build into their product.
But for now, there's just so much that you can do with no code, automation tools like that or with a ChatGPT Plus account.
Chase Clymer
Yeah. Well, now we have to pivot to... You brought up AI, and I feel like I'm not gonna have a podcast this year where I don't talk about AI because it's just everywhere.
Generative AI for SEO, is it the lazy man's content? How do you see this playing out over the next kind of years with Google?
How are they positioned on generative AI and just content in general? What are your thoughts?
Dale Bertrand
There's a lot of angles on it. Because there's like, how are we using generative AI, and then there's also how Google is using generative AI.
But for us doing SEO, I think in the short term, there's a lot of opportunity to use generative AI to help us with the SEO tasks that we're doing now. Things like generating meta titles and meta descriptions and writing copy and building out pages and doing programmatic SEO with no code, which is one of the things we think about. Like that's a great short term opportunity.
But the question is, what does the future hold? And a lot of that depends on two things: How many of the SG features, the generative AI features that Google's working on, how many of those features get pulled over into their default Google classic experience? And when do they do that?
Because that could have the effect of giving people answers without them having to go to your website if you're writing on topics, and then also just less real estate for the Google search results.
But then the other piece of it is how consumer search behavior changes. Are people using Google to find products? Now, right now they are, and we haven't seen any indication that that's changing, but we wanna monitor that. There could be a time where more people are using YouTube, Amazon search, TikTok, all of that.
We know that people are using alternative search engines for product searches but it hasn't really put a dent in Google organic traffic because Google's growing too at the same time.
But are people using ChatGPT for product searches or perplexity.ai? Right now, it's really not a thing. Even though I think Microsoft might tell you otherwise, Google's still sending as much traffic as they ever have. But we want to be on top of it for when that search behavior does change.
Chase Clymer
I can tell you right now people are asking these AIs for service and product recommendations. We had a lead from ChatGPT.
Dale Bertrand
Wow.
Chase Clymer
But I believe it was because I was a very early adopter of the paid program and I used it to help me ideate and rewrite a lot of the content. Every year, I ask myself, what can we do less of? And what do we want to do more of, to try to niche down a bit more?
Talking to ChatGPT about this stuff to help me ideate the things that I'm thinking in my head. So I did this right when I think 3.5 came out. And then I must have just got into the matrix with that stuff.
And so when people would ask, what are the best ecommerce agencies, it was us and two other people for the longest time within ChatGPT, which I loved.
But you got to go back to intent as well.
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, I mean, there's a lot there. I mean, we're talking about old school SEO and then this evolving emerging field of Generative Engine Optimization. So SEO and GEO is what we're talking about.
Chase Clymer
Oh, I didn't even know. Yeah. That's going to be a whole other job category, how to gamify results within these weird AIs.
Dale Bertrand
Yeah, I want to be really careful because a lot of us are thinking about it and we're testing how do you get more visibility in chat bots like ChatGPT and then also perplexity, which is a generative AI search engine.
Where we sit right now, they're just not sending a ton of traffic. So it's not like a huge opportunity, but we want to be ready if it ever does become a huge opportunity.
There are some brands that have more exposure than others. We've been doing a bunch of SG risk analysis for brands, like if a brand comes to us and they want to know, “If Google were to switch over tomorrow to the SGE generative search engine, how would our traffic be affected?”
So we're able to do some searches in a number of different generative AI search engines to see how they're appearing now, but then also take a look at the type of keywords that are converting traffic or high quality traffic to your site now. Are they the type of keywords that Google might stop sending traffic for because Google just gives you the answer to that sort of thing. So we call that a R.R.S.G.E. risk analysis.
I mean if anybody listening to this is interested in that, I mean we usually charge like three grand, but I can give away a couple for free if anybody wants to contact me.
But that's definitely of interest to a lot of brands just in case it does play out that way.
Chase Clymer
Oh that's amazing. Dale.
We're a little over and I want to be cognizant of your time. But quickly before we go, is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience?
Dale Bertrand
Well, there's so much going on. I think the last thing I'll say that is a hot topic in the SEO space is Google's helpful content update and everything that Google's doing to clean up their index. They're trying to remove spammy AI-generated content. And they're trying to make sure that all the content that they're ranking and sending clicks to is like high quality content.
And then for, so for those of us who are generating any type of SEO content, what it boils down to is it has to actually be helpful, not just like SEO optimized. There have to be real people out there that are seeking it out that would be helped by it. And what Google's looking at critically, they're looking at engagement metrics with that content.
So are people clicking on it in the search engines? Are they staying on the site and looking at other resources? Or are they just bouncing off your site? So as long as you're able to demonstrate that engagement with whatever type of content you're putting out there for SEO, then it'll get ranked and you'll get traffic for it.
It's that SEO traffic that isn't actually helpful so people bounce off it or people don't click on it in the first place that Google is wiping out of its index.
Chase Clymer
Absolutely.
Now, Dale, if I'm listening to this show and I'm picking up what you're putting down, how do I get a hold of you? Where do I go?
Dale Bertrand
Oh, so I'm happy to give my email. I'm Dale, D-A-L-E. Sometimes I forget how to spell it. dale@fireandspark.com. And then also hit me up on LinkedIn. I connect with a bunch of people there.
And you can check out our website, fireandspark.com.
Chase Clymer
Awesome. Make sure to link to all that stuff in the show notes, Dale. You're a wealth of knowledge. I'm sure I'll have you back later this year.
Thank you so much for coming on the show today.
Dale Bertrand
All right. Thanks for having me.
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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