How to Drive Organic Traffic in an AI World — Mike Simmons | How Focused SEO Can Quickly Boost New Stores, How to Use Keywords In Product Titles, Why a Long-term SEO Approach Works Best, How to Optimize Category Pages with Keywords (#337)

In this podcast episode, we explore how to drive organic traffic in an AI-driven world. 

Joining us is Mike Simmons, the owner of Plugin Useful. Mike shares his journey from software engineer to successful entrepreneur, leading a health tech company to significant growth before focusing on empowering Shopify entrepreneurs. 

Mike dives into the essentials of SEO, offering practical tips and insights on optimizing your store for better organic reach. Discover how to leverage AI and SEO to boost your traffic and grow your online business.

Topics discussed in this episode:  

• How AI has impacted SEO and the need to focus on fundamental best practices 
• Optimizing category pages with targeted keywords and informative content to drive organic traffic 
• Strategies for product page optimization, including using primary keywords in titles 
• Taking a long-term, compounding approach to SEO rather than expecting instant results 
• Why perfection isn't required, but pages should aim to be the best for the target keyword 
• How focused SEO work can lead to significant improvements even for stores starting from scratch 

Links & Resources 

Website: https://pluginuseful.com/ 
Shopify App Store: https://apps.shopify.com/plug-in-seo 

Get access to more free resources by visiting the show notes at
https://t.ly/hxO8l 

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Transcript

Welcome to the e commerce coffee break podcast in today's episode We discuss how to drive organic traffic to your online shop joining me on the show is mike simmons owner at plug in useful. com So let's dive right into it 

This is the e commerce coffee break A top rated shopify growth podcast dedicated to shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores Learn how to survive in the fast change E-Commerce World with your host Claus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google.

Welcome, welcome to the show. 

Hello and welcome to another episode of the e-Commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we wanna find out how you can drive organic traffic in a AI world, artificial intelligence taking over, and we wanna find out how you can use that to your advantage and bring the best traffic organic traffic.

to your store, to your website with me on the show today is Mike Simmons. He's the owner of plug in useful. com. Mike had a remarkable journey from software engineer to MBA to successful entrepreneur. And he spent the last decade leading a health tech company from zero to 21 million. I know revenue growing a team to 200 employees worldwide and raising 60 million in venture capital.

Now he's channeling that expertise into building a platform designed to empower entrepreneurs on Shopify. So we have a lot to cover, so let's dive right into it and let's welcome Mike to the show. Hi Mike, how are you today? 

I'm doing great. Thanks for having me on. 

Mike, we want to dive into the world of organic traffic.

And with that, we also talking about search engine optimization, because that's the key to organic traffic. Not always easy when you have a Shopify store, because it can be quite complex. And a lot of people do not have in depth knowledge about it. knowledge expertise when it comes to search engine optimization, starting from how has search engine optimization changed since AI came around the corner a year ago, one and a half years ago?

Yeah. Well, I think a search engine optimization obviously is a, it's a, it's always been a moving target. Uh, and in a lot of cases there's You know, we're dealing with a black box, right? The search engines don't advertise their algorithms. And so we through a process of trial and error, the industry sort of picks up on what works better than that and whatnot.

And, um, so there's what I think what that yields is a lot of like, um. Ideas about what works, but not a ton of like hard proof. Obviously recently the, um, a lot of the source code was, was leaked. And so we got a little bit more in depth and a lot of people said, Oh, I told you that was the thing. And. Then other people were like, well, this is, I've been doing this all my life, you know, all my professional career and it's not a thing.

So I'm going to stop doing that. But I think what ends up happening is that there's like a few really fundamental things that If you focus on, you will be able to make a difference. And even if the, um, even if there's a core update in Google or the algorithm of being changes or whatever, there, those are like making very specific.

Generally, what I've seen is that those those types of things are making small tweaks on the periphery and for people who have kind of figured out how to game the system for a while, some of those tweaks and make a big difference in their business. But if you just focus really on the fundamental, which in my in, in the case of our customers, that's all people have time for, um.

You can make a big difference. And like, and it's, uh, it's really encouraging for me. For me, what we see is like around 20 percent of our customers, um, will see over 10 X growth in their, uh, organic traffic. Within six months of installing our app. And the reason I think it's not higher is because, you know, we, we do ask people to do some work and not everybody does some work, but if you follow the recommendations, uh, you can make a big increase in, uh, the organic traffic that your, that your site gets.

And even if you're starting from zero. We have case study after case study that were, um, that shows that you can go from kind of zero to thousands of organic, uh, visits per month. And, um, if you follow the steps, so yeah, it's pretty exciting. 

Let's talk a little bit of what organic traffic actually is going to.

So if you have a store, you probably have your product detail pages and you have a mind to optimize these. You might or might not have a blog with content there. So what's the strategy to, um, create pages, websites that attract the right traffic? 

Yeah, that's a really, yeah, it's a really fun question, especially if you're thinking, um, yeah, I guess, you know, the, the really nice thing about, uh, SEO for eCommerce companies, which is our audience here tonight is like, you know, You don't have to think of like, there are, there are literally thousands of like thousands and thousands of blog posts about how to, uh, how to optimize a website.

And a lot of those things are like, not related to selling products. They're related to getting content to, you know, just, you know, getting clicks and eyeballs and whatever. Uh, and there's different strategies for different types of things. I think for e commerce, our, we've, we've, what we've tried to do in our app is to like really slim that down to like, what is going to make a difference for selling.

Stuff online because obviously that's the whole point. So, uh, so I think there's like, uh, maybe, yeah, a few things that we could talk about. Um, I think your big, the, the big, uh, pages are your categories page. So let's just say it's Shopify. They definitely call that categories and other platforms. It might be known as, you know, catalogs or something like that.

Like, it's just a listing of products that are grouped together with some kind of theme. And let's just say that as generic as possible. And then there's your product page. And then it's kind of ancillary content. So when, and that's going to be like blogs or about us or things like that, right, frequently asked questions, maybe falls into that category.

So I think that, and this is kind of, uh, whether you're using our app or not, like plug in, uh, plug in SEO for Shopify, uh, listeners. Our listeners in your audience that use Shopify plugin, SEO is going to make a lot of this stuff easier for you. But even if you're just kind of thinking about this, uh, on it, you know, maybe a different platform or thinking about this a little bit more generically, what you can think about is like, let's, let's start with the, let's start with the prop, the.

Categories page. So these, these groups of products with a certain, um, with a certain theme. Um, so the first thing that we see it off very often is like these pages are designed by people who are looking at this stuff every day and they know, let's just take an example of like a flower shop trying to, um, you know, get people to buy online.

So this flower shop owner. Is talking about flowers all day long. All they think about is flowers. And so when they go to create their categories, they just think about anniversaries, birthdays, sympathy, right. And these like one word descriptions that make sense. Two for this group of products, but they, they are way too generic for a good SEO page title.

Right? So what you want to, what you really want to do is to think about the keywords that are important to you. Like in this case, it might be like flower bouquets for anniversaries. That's what people are actually, something like that is what people are actually searching for that could have a chance of getting relevant search traffic to your site.

Anniversary is just way too generic. Like you're going to get a presence and what's good for the first anniversary, the 10th anniversary, like all this other stuff that's in this, in this noise. So that, that, that title is not doing any good for SEO. So I think that's kind of like. One really easy takeaway is like, make sure that your title has, you're thinking about keywords and search terms as you're, as you're creating the title of those category pages.

And then it's probably obvious, but just make sure like your slug. So that the part of the URL that, uh, as comes after the slash categories. Matches the same thing. So if it's just going to be like, um, you know, that's, that should just be, uh, this always try to be the same. So that's, that's the, the first thing.

The second thing is, uh, on that page, talk about the products a little bit. Most of the time we see category pages with no. Informational text at all. It's just a list of products, but this is a missed opportunity. You could still rank for that. I see a lot of well ranked products that are just kind of generic pages.

But if you want to rank above that and you have a relatively low domain authority, add some content to that page. So like 500 words, roughly that have some testimonials from your customers that talk a little bit about. Um, the, in this case, let's just use this flower, uh, example again, like who are the growers, what are these flowers generally use?

What's this kind of category used to communicate or, you know, what are they, what does this flower signify? Things like that, uh, could be a really good way and use, you know, use your H two headings so that the, the, it's easy to read for the user, but also easy to read for the, uh, for the robots that are scanning your site.

And, you know, it doesn't need to be you don't need to go crazy. It doesn't need to be 1500 word blog post on every category page, but explain to your users and your visitors what's going on here? What should they be thinking about when they're picking the appropriate flower for the occasion? And help them to understand, uh, that and what, what, uh, and that just helps you to, um, to show your expertise in this field, which is really what, um, Google is trying to, Reward you for right.

And that's, that's sort of the idea. So I think that's like on the category page, like do those couple of things and you're going to have much better results. Um, on the product pages, I would say like, uh, some of the same stuff is true. Keywords in your products. We've, I've seen like where people just use like the skew, like the, the, the code number for, uh, for the product title.

I think it, it might work if you're, if you're selling bicycle parts or car parts, and you need like this very specific, uh, number in there, but most of the time what we would expect is. Something that is for most products, you would expect something that is uses these primary keywords like flower bouquet, and then describes it in some creative way.

But even if, you know, we see this a lot on jewelry sites, for example, where the, the, Artist is super creative and they want to name the piece as something beautiful and creative, but nobody's searching for that creative idea. What they're searching for is an earring or a necklace. And if you don't put that in your, um, in your keyword, or sorry, if you don't put that keyword in your title.

You're not going to connect the dots to what people are searching for. And that's really the key. So same idea, put your keywords in your titles, have the slug match it, and then develop, spend a little more time developing content on those pages. 

Hey, Claus here. Just a quick one. If you like the content of this episode, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter Shopify merchant in just 7 minutes per week.

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com. And now back to the show. I think you just gave very valuable tips away there. Now, I think the biggest problem that somebody who comes new to the topic of SEO is you don't know what you don't know. So, and I know that you provide with plugin SEO, it also a audit feature. So basically the tool tells you what you need to work on.

Just talk me through it. How does that work? 

Yeah. So we've, um, we've Kind of listed out, uh, and we, we actually recently redid this, um, after the, the, all the source code was leaked. We kind of took that into account and said, like, what are these checks really matter? And what and what matters more and less?

And basically we look at. Probably, you know, 30 to 60 elements of a page, depending on the type of page that we're looking at. And we are kind of interrogating that page about these types of things. Are there keywords? If there are, how many are there? Are they keywords in different parts of the page? Do these different parts of the page that are important exist and things like that.

So we are looking at, uh, very specific elements of every single page. Okay. Um, and giving you kind of a pass warning or critical grade. So, and then try to prioritize that for our users. So look, if you just have an hour, uh, to work on this part of your business this week, what is the first thing that you should focus on?

Well, we have like an action item. We give our user an action item list for their, their pages that says like, do these things first, right? Because yeah, if we think about like, who's. Who's using our app and trying to learn this stuff. What you see is like, it's these wonderful entrepreneurs who are trying to figure out how to manufacture their products and get them to, you know, import them and, and store and warehouse them and then, you know, pay shipping tax on it or whatever.

And. All of those things are the responsibility of the, of the entrepreneur, even before they make their first sale. And there's so much to focus on when it comes to SEO. We want to make it as easy as possible for them. And, uh, that's, that's what the, yeah, the app is really. design tours. 

Okay. You mentioned before that you see amazing results.

Once people have implemented everything that you tell them to do. So now give me an example of, uh, you don't need to name the brand of a client that, um, how long does it take them from scratch to get up and running and to optimize their store? 

Yeah. Great. Um, so like some of this stuff depends on how many pages the store has, um, because there's probably work to do on every page.

So if you have. 100 products versus 3000 products. Obviously that's, that's going to take you a bit of time, but what's really nice, uh, what's really interesting is I think like getting set up probably is, you know, 20 or 30 minutes of work within the app and that will get you to the point where you've got some, uh, you've kind of thought a little bit about the keywords that you want to optimize your, your content for, and you've done Uh, you've connected, uh, some external sources like Google search console and your, uh, you've kicked off the scan.

Now, the scan is going to run for a bit and that's, uh, and then, you know, that's going to once that's finished. When you come back in to the app, it's going to have this prioritized list of things to work on, uh, for you. And that can take, you know, I think the idea here is like, there's no, there's no, uh, it doesn't, These pages don't have to be perfect.

Like even if we rank the score at like, or we rank a page at like, you know, 50 points out of a hundred, the, the, the objective isn't necessarily getting to a hundred, but you should think about like, really the, the thing that you should think about on every page is, is it the best page that, um, that I could make.

For a customer searching for X, Y, Z. Right. And that's, that's really the, the idea. So it doesn't have to be like, you don't have to get every page to a hundred to see good results, but you know, if you can get into the seventies and eighties, even that's really good, you know? So I think it, it should, you know, the initial setup is like 20 minutes to a half hour, and then going through the checklist of, uh, the things for your page is going to take a little bit of time.

But we also give tools to, to do that so that you can, like, you can make changes in our app that will apply across every single page on your Shopify store. And that's it. That's a huge time saver. And then, you know, the, there's some things that you have to do individually, product by product or category by category.

But there's really, you can make a lot of progress probably in a, in, you know, two or three hours of focus work. 

Okay. Give me a bit of an idea. You mentioned before it takes some time. Um, I think you mentioned six months or something to see really results and people might be under the impression that I've changed my page and tomorrow I will be number one on Google, uh, which usually does not, not happen.

Exceptions to the rule might apply, but usually it doesn't. Um, what's your, what's your experience, um, as a, or being a marathon on, um, the timeline when people see really coming, um, organic traffic coming in. 

Yeah. Yeah. I think we see that this is very achievable in a few months. And, um, and what we, what we also see is like.

Over a longer period of time, you can compound this effort. And so, you know, you can go from zero to 500 clicks in six months, but. You could also go from 500 clicks to 6, 000 clicks over the next 12 months after that, you know, and so it's like, you ought to always keep, you want to keep working on the things to make them better and better.

I kind of think about this like investing. It's like, there are, you know, if you think about like day traders versus long term value investors, the there's ways to make money in the stock market today. And that is not what long term investors think about. It's kind of, but instead they think they think about like long term, uh, long term growth, those businesses and stuff like this in, in, in SEO or in, in, in traffic world, as we're investing in, like, what are we going to do to get customers to our site?

It's, there's also these, the same kind of long term game and short term game that we can think about. So your, your short term game is. Like if you spend enough money on meta and Google and being as it for advertising, like you will get traffic to your site. We can design a good campaign that will bring us traffic.

Uh, but you're spending that money today. It's a purchase, right? You might get, uh, you might get, uh, some customers from it. Hopefully you do, and so you get something for your purchase, but it's a purchase with, um, with SEO and investing in all of these small fixes over time for organic traffic. It's going to have a lot much more long term effect, but over that, over that time, the time that you, the effort that you put in, the time that you put in and the.

You know, it's usually less expensive, uh, but, uh, but you pay for it and you may be time versus money, but like in, in, um, in that, uh, your, your, your results compound and it, so it takes longer, but the value. Ultimately is I think usually going to be greater, at least equal to spending a lot of money on, uh, on ads.

So maybe a strategy for, for an e commerce brand is some mix of both, but I don't think you should ever say like, we don't do SEO at all. We don't need it. We just like, cause that longterm strategy, ultimately you're going to want to have. People who visit your site and buy things that you didn't actually explicitly pay for them to come in through advertising.

Like you don't want to be kind of addicted to that advertising stream only. And so, you know, you're, you've got to be doing something on the SEO side to find, to ultimately have this reward. 

Yeah, that makes absolute sense. And I think another thing is also that organic traffic usually is better quality traffic.

The conversion rates from organic traffic are usually higher than from paid traffic, because with paid traffic, you're sort of in the hands of Meta or Google. And If the algorithm has a hiccup, which happens frequently, um, you might just get traffic that you pay for and it's the quality is just not good.

So you have a lot of loss on that side. Now tell me, um, Plugin SEO has thousands of positive reviews there. So you have thousands of clients, um, but who's your perfect customer? We should start with Plugin SEO. 

So, and so first of all, our app is like very specific to Shopify. Uh, it's deeply integrated in Shopify.

So it doesn't, you know, it's not for every single, um, e commerce platform. So our, the first kind of, uh, perfect customer trait is Shopify user. Uh, the second thing is that we have, you know, really good tools for, uh, brands of every size. So if you've got. A half a dozen products all the way up to thousands of products.

Our app will, uh, will work just as well across that whole spectrum. So, and then I think what we also pride ourselves in is like taking good care of customers who really don't know anything about SEO and it's, they're very new. So we have a toolkit that's powerful enough for somebody who's really familiar with SEO to like leverage and.

Make a bunch of progress for, for those brands, but we're also really to take care, we, we are aiming to take care of the people who, you know, that busy entrepreneur, who's got a thousand things on their plate and maybe a couple of hours to spend on marketing this week. And we want to give them some high value actions to take for that limited amount of time.

So really, um, Really, the, the, uh, the perfect customer is somebody who is more about motive, right? Somebody who wants to improve and sees the value in improving their, their search engine optimization. And from there, you know, we can take care of you no matter if you're just getting started or if you're an expert, if you have a small store or if you have a large store, uh, we've pretty much got covered.

Okay. No, that sounds good. Is there any kind of homework that a merchant needs to do before they can get started? 

No, no, we, we kind of walking through it right, right off the bat. And I mean, we'd started this conversation talking a little bit about AI and integration there. And, you know, let's say for example, like.

You could do some keyword research before coming to our, to our app. And, um, and instead of using our tools to like, help you come up with ideas for, for keywords, uh, you could kind of do that externally with chat, GBT or whatever your favorite SEO, you know, keyword research tools are, but we, we kind of have good functionality from like having done nothing before, you know, to helping like it.

expert level research done in advance, but we don't certainly require that at all. We'll walk you through it. 

Okay. Oh, perfect. Tell me a little bit about the pricing structure. How does that work 

today? We have three tiers of, uh, of pricing. So the lowest tier is for small shops, It's like 30 bucks a month.

The medium shop is up to 2000 products and category pages. So that's, uh, 50 bucks a month. And then unlimited is, uh, 80 bucks a month. And so it's, you know, it's very, it's a very low cost, um, solution there. And then if, if, if a customer really wants some expert help, Okay. And implementing this. So we'll, you know, doing some specialized keyword research and, uh, doing a lot of the fixing for them, we offer a one time service to get them started.

It's also priced very low, uh, at 500 bucks, uh, for one time thing to just get you out of the, out of the gate and we'll make some, we'll, we'll do. Custom keyword research will do a lot of the fixing and then really make some specific recommendations about, you know, product naming. And a lot of things that like, I don't necessarily want to go in and change your product names.

So I'll just make those as recommendations. And, but try to educate people on the importance of, uh, those types of things, like I was explaining earlier, it's a do it yourself, mostly, mostly our customer base is do it yourself kind of people, but if people want some help, we, we have, I mean, I think we'd break even on that service.

It's not like we're making a bunch of money, but it really helps our customers. And so for us, that's, that's important. You know, we want to see more customers seeing this, like. 10 X plus, uh, increase in their organic traffic. And every time we get one of those, we, you know, that's how we ring the bell here.

We like, that's what we celebrate. 

Yeah, no, I like, I like the approach of having sort of a white glove service that it helps you to get started. And I think that's a good investment specifically if you don't have any background in SEO, it can be just very, very overwhelming and very technical. And you have, you have somebody basically showing you and, and.

Talking you through the process on how it works, um, that definitely makes the starting process much, much smoother. And I think the results will just show much quicker over time. Where can people find out more about you guys? 

Our website is pluginuseful. com. And if you're in the Shopify app store, you can search for plugin SEO.

Uh, that's the easiest way to get, uh, to find us. 

Cool. Okay. Before we come to the end of the coffee break today, is there one final thought that you want to leave our listeners with? 

There are literally hundreds of different things that you can focus on when it comes to SEO, you know, and people will sell expensive services to get back links.

And there's so many different aspects of, of SEO that you could spend money on. The thing that I would encourage people to do is like. Really focus on the fundamentals. And even as you, you're going to read about and hear about everything that's changing the core updates, the AI that this that if you have well structured pages with good, helpful content, and it's easy for it's the pages are laid out well, for your customers, you're going to have.

A good result. Um, if you just pay a little bit of attention to these things, I'm talking about like keywords and content style and things like that. Um, and don't, don't get, don't overwhelm yourself by trying to chase all of these. Operate like there are SEO opportunities all over the place, but don't need to chase everything.

Just focus on the fundamentals and you're going to have, uh, you're going to see some traction. In your, in your business. And, you know, hopefully you'll find some tools like ours that will, uh, help you accelerate that process a little bit and stay focused, but yeah, it's easy, easy to get overwhelmed in the world of SEO.

And so just like take a step back, focus on the fundamentals and, um, you know, don't, don't go crazy and you'll, you'll have a better time. 

Yeah, I couldn't agree more. I think the fundamentals are, and I think Google will love you for what you just said. They will not go away. Once you have the fundamentals right, Google will be 80 percent happy with what you do and everything else that happens and changes.

Leave that to the experts and focus on the people. Core basics. Perfect. I will put the links in the show notes, so then you will be just one click away. I hope a lot of people will try out your, um, your app and, um, hopefully see results very, very quickly. And Mike, that was a masterclass on how to optimize your Shopify store on SEO.

And thanks so much for that. 

You're welcome. Really, really great to, uh, meet you finally and, uh, be, have a chance to be a guest in your podcast. 

Thanks so much. Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you.

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com. Thanks again, and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.