E-Commerce SEO: Converting Product Pages with Freddie Chatt

In this episode of The Simple and Smart SEO Show, I sit down with e-commerce SEO expert Freddie Chatt. Freddie shares valuable insights from his journey into SEO, emphasizing key strategies for e-commerce success, including optimizing collection pages, managing conversion rates, and strategic link building. 

Key Takeaways

• Collection Pages Drive Commercial Traffic: Freddie explains that optimizing collection pages is crucial for e-commerce sites.
• Navigating Seasonality in E-Commerce: Freddie discusses how planning inventory and budgeting based on seasonality allows businesses to capitalize on peak sales periods effectively.
• Product-Led Link Building: Using gift guides and product-specific outreach as link-building strategies can secure high-quality backlinks from reputable publications.
• Optimizing Conversion Rates by Page Type: Freddie suggests tracking conversion rates for specific page types.
• Leveraging Keyword Clustering Tools for SEO: Freddie recommends tools like Keyword Insights to streamline keyword clustering.

Listener Action Items

1. Evaluate Collection Page SEO: If you run an e-commerce site, assess the SEO on your collection pages, making sure they include targeted keywords for your products.
2. Use Keyword Clustering Tools: Try a keyword clustering tool like Keyword Insights to organize your keywords by intent, minimizing risk of keyword cannibalization.
3. Plan Seasonally: For seasonal businesses, consider Freddie’s approach of adjusting budgets, running sales, and optimizing site performance during off-peak times.
4. Focus on Link Building Opportunities: Seek out niche-specific gift guides and reach out to the authors to feature your products, potentially boosting your site's domain authority.

Guest and Resource Links

• Freddie Chatt on LinkedIn: Freddie Chatt LinkedIn
• Freddie’s E-commerce SEO Boot Camp: Freddie’s E-commerce Course
• Ahrefs
• Keyword Insights

Chapters

• 0:00 I think for the vast majority of e commerce stores, brand owners,
• 0:50 Introduction and Welcome
• 1:20 Freddie's Journey into SEO
• 2:13 Building an In-House SEO Team
• 4:26 Freddie's Transition to Freelancing
• 4:44 Launching a Cricket Equipment Store
• 5:38 Competing with Established Brands
• 6:49 Different Types of E-Commerce SEO
• 8:37 Choosing the Right Vendor
• 9:56 Handling Product Quality Issues
• 11:46 Tech Stack for E-Commerce
• 13:02 Building an Email List
• 14:58 Blogging and Content Strategy
• 16:17 Optimizing Collection Pages
• 19:09 Emerging Trends in E-Commerce SEO
• 22:17 Conversion Rates in E-Commerce
• 26:20 Keyword Strategy for Product Listings
• 28:42 Favorite Tools for E-Commerce
• 29:39 Product Page Optimization
• 31:47 Link Building Strategies
• 35:10 Seasonality and Business Management

Transcript

[00:00:00] Freddie Chatt: Yes. I think for the vast majority of e commerce stores, brand owners, and everything like the collection pages are always going Biggest like opportunity for commercial traffic. 

[00:00:11] Blogs are normally quite good for volume of traffic. 

[00:00:14] But it's like a low chance that you're probably going to be used the people arriving to they're probably not going to be ready to buy. 

[00:00:20] They're probably more informational searches and not in that right mindset.

[00:00:23] Whereas collection pages I can target the relevant Kind of like keywords that people are looking for your actual product that you sell.

[00:00:31] Crystal Waddell: Welcome to the third season of the Simple and Smart SEO Show. The podcast dedicated to empathy driven, brand building SEO. 

[00:00:39] I'm your host, Crystal Waddell. I leverage my obsession with user experience to help business owners just like you optimize your website with confidence. 

[00:00:47] Thank you so much for being here.

[00:00:48] Let's jump into another great

[00:00:50] episode. 

Introduction and Welcome

[00:00:50] Crystal Waddell: All right, Freddie, let's do this.

[00:00:52] Welcome back to the simple and smart SEO show podcast. I am here with Freddie Chatt, who is an e commerce expert. 

[00:00:59] And just a really Kind, helpful guy. 

[00:01:04] That I met through a mutual friend, Andy Holland, who's been on the podcast before. 

[00:01:09] But Freddie is here to talk all things e commerce SEO.

[00:01:13] So Freddie chat, welcome to the simple and smart SEO show. Thank you for being here. 

[00:01:18] Freddie Chatt: Thanks for having me. Excited to be here. 

[00:01:20] Crystal Waddell: Yeah. 

Freddie's Journey into SEO

[00:01:20] Crystal Waddell: So we were chatting just a little bit before we got started about like your history With SEO and like how you got into the industry. So I was just wondering if you could do like a quick recap of like your SEO experience. 

[00:01:33] And then tell us a little bit about, what you do now that's SEO related.

[00:01:39] Freddie Chatt: Absolutely. Yes. So I fell into SEO as I feel like most people do. Back in 2012. So we've been doing it for 12 years now. 

[00:01:46] And so I dropped out of university, lucky to get a job as a kind of marketing assistant at a local e comm store here in the UK. 

[00:01:55] They sold kind of luxury homeware, home decor, furniture, lighting, and all sorts of things like that.

[00:02:01] And they knew they should be doing SEO, but they weren't exactly sure what to do. So they got me in who also didn't know what to do. 

[00:02:06] But fortunately also had a consultant on hand to give me some direction and show me the ropes and things like that. 

Building an In-House SEO Team

[00:02:13] Freddie Chatt: And over the course of the next, I was there for five, six, seven years in total. 

[00:02:19] We grew it from almost nothing to about 10 million pounds in annual revenue just from from seo. 

[00:02:26] And we did it all pretty much internally. We built out the internal seo team We had awesome other teams that we worked with internally from pr, copy, development team and stuff like that.

[00:02:37] So we were super lucky to have such a kind of like strong internal team that kind of really backed seo.

[00:02:42] That's what it really takes to make successful work. 

[00:02:45] Any business to have a true belief in it. And yes, I was really lucky there to do a whole cross section of SEO tasks and tactics from international SEO, domain migrations, content led projects.

[00:03:00] We ran a campaign that became an annual thing. 

[00:03:02] Which basically a blogger awards for interior design bloggers and interior designers. 

[00:03:07] One of them once called the oscars of the interior design blogging world. So that was One of the particular highlight which is what's epic to do.

[00:03:14] Crystal Waddell: I think it's so neat that you were on the inside of a large company, a large e commerce company when you got your start with SEO. 

[00:03:22] Because it's like, yeah, you may not have known a lot when you started. But you pretty much learned everything that you needed to know by the time you're finished.

[00:03:30] There's a piece of me that's a little bit envious because I started out just as, the solopreneur that I still am. 

[00:03:37] You've gotten to see what it's like to work inside a big company.

[00:03:39] And, you know that it's a little bit different than regular SEO, right? I guess that's my point. 

[00:03:44] Is e commerce different and how is it different than like regular SEO?

[00:03:48] Freddie Chatt: Yes, so like the general principles are the Exactly the same. 

[00:03:51] Like generally is content and links. 

[00:03:53] But the almost like the principles and how you have different types of pages. You've got product pages. 

[00:03:59] Category pages whereas like kind of service level business have landing pages and different types of pages. 

[00:04:04] And it's how they like fit together.

[00:04:07] Ecom platforms naturally build out your kind of like the structure of the site. 

[00:04:11] You've got filters on those category pages and things that can mess about with it. And bits and pieces like that. 

[00:04:16] So yeah, so there's definitely some there's definitely kind of unique tactics and ways to implement the general approaches that you do. 

[00:04:23] But the overall, overriding premise is still the same

Freddie's Transition to Freelancing

[00:04:26] Crystal Waddell: Okay, so take us through like you leaving that company and creating your own thing. 

[00:04:33] Freddie Chatt: Yes it was December 2019, so just before the pandemic. So. Not realizing that at the time. 

[00:04:38] But also being quite lucky to be Specialized in an e commerce seo. I went freelance. 

Launching a Cricket Equipment Store

[00:04:44] Freddie Chatt: Like did some consulting for a variety of kind of other ecom brands. 

[00:04:48] A couple of SAAS businesses. 

[00:04:50] But mainly e commerce brands. 

[00:04:52] And yeah, i've basically been freelancing and consulting ever since. 

[00:04:55] So for the past like almost five years now. And in that time I also set up my own ecom store, here in the uk selling kind of cricket bats cricket equipment. 

[00:05:05] i've been played cricket for most of my life.

[00:05:08] There's a big opportunity Online where it's a lot of the Specific kind of cricket brands weren't tapping into SEO in itself. 

[00:05:16] But also a few of the like other channel, like online digital channels. Whereas there was like a handful of retailers that were doing like, most of the, getting most of the traffic, but they weren't that authority.

[00:05:27] They didn't seem to necessarily know exactly what they were doing. It's more the fact that they were there first. So yeah, so I launched that with a friend and that's been kinda like we've been growing that slowly on the side for the last few years as well.

Competing with Established Brands

[00:05:38] Crystal Waddell: The question that pops into my mind is like, how do you chase the big dog?

[00:05:44] The one that got there first. 

[00:05:45] And how do you find those opportunities where it's oh, they're not doing this as well. Because what if like their ad spend is. Outrageous. And you can just tell that they're generating all these leads from ads. 

[00:05:55] But their SEO is like non existent.

[00:05:57] Can you compete with that? 

[00:05:59] Freddie Chatt: Absolutely. Obviously it depends massively on each market, each niche. 

[00:06:04] Like specifically on who your competitors are, but. There's always normally some room for got opportunities for you To take some traffic off them or target stuff that they're not targeting what I found and both internally i'm working and consulting with some Large cover ecom brands since. 

[00:06:21] Is that they're much slower to move on like new newer initiatives and newer opportunities.

[00:06:27] So as a small brand, you can be often be a lot more agile and nimble in terms of trying new things. 

[00:06:34] Testing different like content ideas. Or link building tactics or whatever it is. To try and pick up things where they haven't. 

[00:06:41] That's definitely an advantage of being smaller than bigger that you end up needing to go through multiple levels of sign off just to create a blog post, for example.

Different Types of E-Commerce SEO

[00:06:49] Crystal Waddell: So there's a lot of different types of e commerce sites. And, some people are familiar with like print on demand, drop shipping. I happen to be my own manufacturer, so I make and sell giant numbers, like I make in letters. I make that, and I don't have any numbers right here, of course, because, oh wait, I do.

[00:07:07] For graduations. Yeah, we're already ready through 2028.

[00:07:10] What's the approach for SEO, like between those three types of e-commerce companies? And maybe there's more, you can let me know. But like specifically drop shipping, print on demand and like a self manufacturer, is there a different approach to SEO when it comes to the different types of e commerce businesses? 

[00:07:28] Freddie Chatt: Generally not, I'd say like on the whole, they're the same. You're trying to, at the end of the day, you're trying to get in front of the customers that want to buy your product.

[00:07:36] So whatever they are searching for to end up finding your product. 

[00:07:40] Whether you're making it yourself, whether you're drop shipping, print on demand like selling other people's brand and stuff. 

[00:07:46] Like you're fundamentally, you're just trying to You're trying to get your piece of the market, get in front of those the customers that essentially have the problem that your product solves.

[00:07:55] Yeah, the general premise of finding their pain points, finding what they're searching for and like making it as easy as possible for them to find your store remain the same. Across the different types of e commerce stores. 

[00:08:06] Crystal Waddell: One of the reasons why I ask is because I have an e commerce store and then I have my SEO squad where I meet with business owners once a week. 

[00:08:13] Every Wednesday we talk about websites.

[00:08:15] And then I'm also helping my brother launch a new business and it's a lawn service in Kansas, but he is into robot lawnmowers. 

[00:08:25] And I'm like, this is a whole different area for me because, obviously we're going to have to procure the lawnmowers. 

[00:08:31] And, choosing the right product is really important. So now we're trying to source the product for vendors.

Choosing the Right Vendor

[00:08:37] Crystal Waddell: So I'm just curious, like, how did you choose, your vendor for your cricket bats and the equipment? 

[00:08:44] Freddie Chatt: Yeah, absolutely. So for us, so the vast majority of cricket bats in the world that are sold each year are made in India. 

[00:08:51] India have their own version of Alibaba, Aliexpress type thing called India Mart.

[00:08:55] So most of the manufacturers in India are on that. 

[00:08:59] Our process was we went through there, found a range of people that seem to sell the product that, that we wanted. Ours is a relatively simple, like not lots of customization. So it's relatively straightforward to make, for them essentially, as a manufacturer of cricket bats. 

[00:09:16] And other equipment. We got about, I think we had five. 

[00:09:19] So we spent a few hundred pounds on getting samples sent over. 

[00:09:22] So we started with just a cricket bat. And so we got about five or six bats sent over. We went and tested them all out to see which ones felt the best for us. 

[00:09:32] And we like then chose the one that we liked the best from there. 

[00:09:36] And we Interestingly enough, we then temporarily moved away from that supplier because we found another one slightly cheaper. But then we had Product quality issues.

[00:09:45] And then we're back with the original supplier, which we probably should never have left in the first place. 

[00:09:50] But we've now been with them for the last two years and it's like going really well at working with them. 

[00:09:55] Crystal Waddell: Okay. 

Handling Product Quality Issues

[00:09:56] Crystal Waddell: So tell me about what was that like when you changed suppliers and you noticed a drop off in product quality.

[00:10:02] What was that like from a customer service perspective? And what was it that made you say, we have to go back even though it costs a little more? 

[00:10:09] Freddie Chatt: Yeah, it was extremely stressful because we're like, cricket's a very seasonal sport, so it's just played in the summer.

[00:10:16] I'd say basically we make most of our money between kind of April and August.

[00:10:20] We get most of our stock in at the start of the year. And then that's pretty much what we work through. 

[00:10:24] So for the year of that, we had the alternative supplier, like kind of things started off well, they like things are selling more than we were last year, which was fantastic.

[00:10:35] But then we started getting the issues coming in of like kind of the product quality issues that breaking.

[00:10:41] Issues with the bat handles. Which are like, very obviously a manufacturing issue. 

[00:10:46] And we have we have a warranty of one year. So any issues we've replaced the bat. 

[00:10:51] So, on the whole, most of The customers were like still happy.

[00:10:56] They contacted us. There was an issue We certainly that there was a handful of people that then it happened again, too and obviously then they were less happy. 

[00:11:02] We refunded, and so. 

[00:11:04] We didn't lose much in sense of a lot of unhappy customers. But I feel it definitely probably damaged the brand slightly in terms of people's trust and belief in us, but like we've been building that back up, ever since. 

[00:11:19] Crystal Waddell: That is super cool.

[00:11:20] Good for you guys to be able to bounce back from that. And, I'm curious because again, because I'm a handmade slash manufacturer. 

[00:11:28] I don't have to, or choose to keep stock. Like I do have the same name of collage and wood as an Amazon store. 

[00:11:37] And I've learned that FBA for me is the most effective way to sell on Amazon. Shout out to Jonas Sickler who was on the show earlier this year. 

Tech Stack for E-Commerce

[00:11:46] Crystal Waddell: When it comes to measuring all the moving parts of e commerce, like what kind of tech stack do you guys use to make this happen? 

[00:11:54] Freddie Chatt: Yes. 

[00:11:55] Currently we're on a WooCommerce. 

[00:11:57] But I'm in the process of moving over this winter when it's all kind of quiet season. I'm moving us over to Shopify.

[00:12:02] So the tech stacks going to slightly change.

[00:12:05] But so the vast majority of my clients from the seo side have all done Shopify. 

[00:12:09] So it was like I know it really well from an seo perspective. I know really well from like just a usability perspective. 

[00:12:16] In the past i've always built websites on wordpress.

[00:12:19] So I knew how to Build sites on wordpress. Which is why it that's where it started and on wordpress and woocommerce. 

[00:12:25] But I think it takes a lot more in terms of the maintenance to like update plugins and security stuff and hosting. 

[00:12:31] And all those other things which I don't want to have to worry about I want to simplify that whole scenario. 

[00:12:38] And so I can just focus on Marketing and then and selling more cricket bats, basically. 

[00:12:43] So yeah, so it's going to be a Shopify.

[00:12:45] I use Klaviyo for email marketing. And we've got just over 10 000 people on our email list now and so yeah, they're pretty much like That's pretty much the two tools I use to run it on the MySpot. 

[00:13:00] Crystal Waddell: Okay, these follow up questions are so easy. 

Building an Email List

[00:13:02] Crystal Waddell: I'm like, okay, so tell us how you built your email list to 10, 000 subscribers.

[00:13:07] Freddie Chatt: So the biggest way that we've done so far is by doing giveaways. 

[00:13:12] Giveaways seem to be able to sometimes can work, sometimes can't depend on what you sell. 

[00:13:16] Like for us Cricket's a relatively like niche sport. So if You're not going to enter to win a giveaway to win a cricket bat if you don't play cricket. So That we know that almost everyone enters the giveaway.

[00:13:27] It's going to probably like give quite a good return on investment. 

[00:13:31] So we've actually done some Facebook ads to the giveaway. 

[00:13:35] And then track that and it's like we can have a positive like kind of return on investment. Through Running ads to a giveaway to then getting them to convert at some point over the cover the next couple of months. 

[00:13:46] So the biggest one the biggest way so far has been through giveaways.

[00:13:50] We've also done some partner giveaways.

[00:13:53] So we've teamed up with other, a couple of other brands who don't sell competing products. So we don't sell cricket shoes, but there's some brands out there that sell cricket shoes. So we teamed up with them. 

[00:14:03] They gave away like kind of five pairs of shoes.

[00:14:05] We gave away five bats and then it gives an extra incentive people to enter. So pretty much probably the, yeah, I'm trying to think probably 80, 90 percent of that email list is probably through giveaways. 

[00:14:16] Crystal Waddell: That is such a unique and clever way to use giveaways. So I had done giveaways for a little bit. 

[00:14:23] But it just seemed like it was taking a lot of my time and I don't think I found the right, like market fit for the giveaways.

[00:14:30] So it reminds me of when I was first trying to start my email list. 

[00:14:35] It was like, I was trying to give away like credit and just, 50 percent off. 

[00:14:41] 90 percent off if you join my email list. It was like, nobody wants that. 

[00:14:46] So I didn't know what I was doing wrong. Then I just realized I was like, you people, you have to give people like something they can use right now, like something that they're interested in.

[00:14:55] And that is just so smart that you guys did that with the bats. 

Blogging and Content Strategy

[00:14:58] Crystal Waddell: So that's definitely give me a whole bunch of ideas. 

[00:15:00] One thing I wanted to ask you about do you blog?

[00:15:02] Freddie Chatt: Yes. Yeah, we've got I think that's 70 posts on there at the moment. 

[00:15:06] Crystal Waddell: Okay when you blog on wordpress, it looks so much better. 

[00:15:10] When you move to Shopify, are you going to utilize Shopify's blog? And do you have any ideas for making Shopify's blog a little more attractive?

[00:15:19] Freddie Chatt: I don't. No. 

[00:15:20] I think there are some apps out there that can. That do make it a little bit more engaging. Or gives you the ability to add a few more interesting things in there for it. I've never have like really used them too much, but it's something that I'm going to.

[00:15:34] Explore in the, in kinda the next few months as I start to kind move the site over and move with the content over. 

[00:15:39] We'll have to loop back on that one and if I find anything, I can share it. 

[00:15:43] Crystal Waddell: The big one that I know about is called Page Fly. 

[00:15:45] And I do have a few free pages from Page Fly, but.

[00:15:50] One bad thing is: when you update your theme, sometimes all of your stuff can break in page fly. And then they also give you something in your theme that says, do not delete. 

[00:16:02] Yeah. Don't delete that. 

[00:16:03] I will also say I've made a little bit of a shift after reading your LinkedIn posts. It was a combination of you and one of our squad members, Sarah.

[00:16:13] We use surfer inside the squad to optimize things.

Optimizing Collection Pages

[00:16:17] Crystal Waddell: And you were talking about optimizing collection pages. 

[00:16:21] And we were looking at like the surfer insights and, okay, these are the pages that need to be made. 

[00:16:26] And it was like, wow, this could really align with a collection page. 

[00:16:30] And so we started really applying that to collection pages. 

[00:16:34] So just on that note do you have any other like foundational SEO strategies for e commerce businesses that are just starting out or want to level up their website?

[00:16:45] Freddie Chatt: Yes. I think for the vast majority of e commerce stores, brand owners, and everything like the collection pages are always going Biggest like opportunity for commercial traffic. 

[00:16:56] Blogs are normally quite good for volume of traffic. 

[00:17:00] But it's like a low chance that you're probably going to be used the people arriving to they're probably not going to be ready to buy. 

[00:17:05] They're probably more informational searches. And not in that right mindset.

[00:17:09] Whereas collection pages I can target the relevant Kind of like keywords that people are looking for your actual product that you sell.

[00:17:17] And the I had a really good example of working with a brand a couple years ago that sold that they sell jewelry. All sorts of jewelry. 

[00:17:25] But their main premise was that they were like waterproof. 

[00:17:29] And they had their site was put out as pretty standard like necklaces, earrings, bracelets. 

[00:17:34] Everything like that but They've done no seo essentially. 

[00:17:37] So they had the collections for their products. 

[00:17:40] But so they, what they had done is they mentioned on the site and the product pages that they, it was waterproof and everything like that.

[00:17:46] What they didn't do is on those particular collection pages, actually tell Google that's what this page was about. 

[00:17:54] So to Google, they were looking at that page and just thinking it was necklaces. 

[00:17:57] But I like add in waterproof. Into your page title. Into the category, their collection name. 

[00:18:05] And into having a short description.

[00:18:07] Just doing those few things the fact that google already generally knew they were about waterproof jewelry, but not Those specifically optimized pages. 

[00:18:15] And like, it was a relatively small brand from the SEO perspective. 

[00:18:19] But within a month of making those changes across the few collections pages that they had. Traffic increased about 2000 visits a month just from those small changes.

[00:18:31] So I think that's like when you're getting started, just working out what your customers are searching for and making sure you've got a page that solves that specific query. 

[00:18:40] And you can have a Look in google who else is ranking for that term. 

[00:18:42] And see whether do you think there's an opportunity for you. 

[00:18:45] If it's if there's only really high Authority competitors that are ranking you might need to try and go a bit long like longer tail like we did in that instance. 

[00:18:54] We went for waterproof necklaces rather than necklaces because Trying to rank the necklaces isn't here on impossible unless you're like tiffany

[00:19:00] Crystal Waddell: Wow. That is such a great example. I think I remember either you talking about that in your course or on LinkedIn. So yeah, that sounded familiar. 

Emerging Trends in E-Commerce SEO

[00:19:09] Crystal Waddell: What about like trends in SEO and e commerce SEO specifically. 

[00:19:14] How do you think it's changing now, like 2024 to 2025?

[00:19:19] Because little context. 

[00:19:21] When I first got into SEO, I was coming in from this blogger world, like I, it was an early adopter of Jarvis before they changed their name to Jasper. 

[00:19:31] And then I jumped into Surfer SEO. And so I'm getting all this amazing affiliate marketing, blogging advice, but.

[00:19:38] As I applied it to my store, I realized, Oh. 

[00:19:41] Doing this to the collection pages and the product pages is going to have a lot more of an impact than just the blogs. 

[00:19:48] That top of funnel traffic. What is going on right now in e commerce SEO and like, where should people focus?

[00:19:54] Freddie Chatt: Yes. So there's two like emerging things. So I think that in general, focusing on your collection pages and stuff like that would still remain super important. And probably still the most important thing. 

[00:20:06] There's two areas that are pretty fresh and new in terms of what they may impact e commerce SEO.

[00:20:12] Yeah, so the first is like google's free shopping listings.

[00:20:17] So they used to be all be free. 

[00:20:19] Then they all become paid kind of google, google shopping. 

[00:20:22] And now there's like a hybrid. 

[00:20:24] There's still the paid but there's also a lot of free opportunities out there that are increasing. So we're seeing more organic product grids on commercial terms that appear. 

[00:20:35] Not necessarily at the top of the SERP. 

[00:20:37] About a few results down. 

[00:20:39] There's not in much of the way of kind of documentation or insights into what you can do to optimize specifically to appear there at the moment.

[00:20:48] But it's something that I'm keeping a close eye on in terms of what like trying to do experiments and see what we can see that does impact that. 

[00:20:55] Fundamentally Google, it takes from Google shopping feed. So which most people have set up for Google shopping campaigns anyway. 

[00:21:01] But by just having that feed into Google Merchant Center, even if you're not running Google shopping campaigns. 

[00:21:07] Like that should also pick up some a little bit of a low hanging fruit traffic potentially in there. 

[00:21:13] And then over time then we should find out more about what we can do to Improve visibility around that.

[00:21:18] So that's like One of the key things specifically around ecom. 

[00:21:22] And the other is the cover ever evolving ai input within google search and outside of google search. 

[00:21:29] So whether the users are asking chat GPT for what's the best cricket that to buy? Or are they still going to google and things like that?

[00:21:38] So and again, this is all still very new in terms of What you can do to optimize to appear in chat GPT and google ai. 

[00:21:48] But it's something that is Increasingly more visible in terms of people are getting more and more traffic from ai tools. 

[00:21:56] Google's rolling out their ai to them in serps for more and more countries. 

[00:22:01] So again, I don't really have much insight into what you can do. But it's more something to keep an eye on. 

[00:22:05] And definitely try and keep on top of any latest kind of updates and stuff around those elements.

[00:22:11] Crystal Waddell: Yeah thank you for that. And one other thing I wanted to ask is randomly thrown in here, popped into my head. 

Conversion Rates in E-Commerce

[00:22:17] Crystal Waddell: Could we talk about conversion rates for a secomd? And I don't want to put you on the spot, okay? 

[00:22:23] So let's talk in generalities here of things you've seen. 

[00:22:28] And, just in your experience working with, a variety of e commerce brands, cause you've been doing this for five years.

[00:22:34] I don't want the industry standard answer here. I want a real answer of what you've seen in terms of ecommerce conversion rates. Particularly of Shopify stores 

[00:22:48] Freddie Chatt: in terms of what they are or what? Yes, I've seen anything from half a percent as and that was a pretty standard for this store to some stores that seem to be able to achieve seven, 8%.

[00:23:00] Like consistently. 

[00:23:02] One of the things that I would say in which we had in the past when I was in house. 

[00:23:06] Is we, for one year did a big push on like blog content and growing the blog. And we used it to grow the email list and things like that. 

[00:23:14] So by Doing lots of like blog posts and rolling lots of those out that are more informational like that. 

[00:23:20] Does appear to have been a negative impact on your conversion rate, even though it's not like that person would ever Convert in the first place.

[00:23:27] You're just attracting you almost like building visibility. 

[00:23:29] So. One of the things that I try and do is look at almost the conversion rate of someone who sees a product page or something like that. 

[00:23:36] They probably have a slightly more buying mindset.

[00:23:38] So it's a more. accurate representation. 

[00:23:41] But yeah, in general, like I've seen conversion rates all over the place, but ours personally hovers around 1%. But yeah, and it's about 1. 8 for people that view the product page. 

[00:23:52] Crystal Waddell: Okay. So I love that takeaway right there. I think it's going to be so important for myself, any other e commerce store owner who's listening and has a Shopify store. 

[00:24:02] To look at the conversion rate for specific pages versus your overall site.

[00:24:08] Because if you do have a lot of content, like you said, you're going to have a lot of just, random people. Like for me, I built a site all around senior night. 

[00:24:17] And I want to be a resource for people who are celebrating sports senior nights, either in high school or college.

[00:24:24] So I definitely want to bring them in as they're like, what is senior night? You know what I mean? And what do you wear to senior night? All of those types of things. 

[00:24:32] But I'm hoping that the same person who is wondering what they're supposed to wear to their kid's senior night or what they're supposed to do, and be responsible for on senior night. 

[00:24:41] Is also the same person who is going to be shopping for a senior night gift.

[00:24:45] And so for me, it's a natural progression. But I do get a lot of people who come in for that. What is query? Versus gift for football player. Which is more of a product page or collection page. 

[00:25:00] I'm definitely taking that away and definitely going to make it a point to share with the squad to really take a look at those product pages specifically.

[00:25:08] And is there a way that you do that in or in your analytics or. Is it just a manual thing? 

[00:25:13] Freddie Chatt: So yes, in old universal analytics. I had a segment that I could just apply. 

[00:25:18] In ga4, I think I had built some Look at dashboards that use that data and just and filter it through that. 

[00:25:25] But you just you can just add a filter within ga4 for basically "has viewed." That includes like forward slash products, which basically means they've seen a product page on that journey.

[00:25:36] And then that will but yeah, that will just show people that are in that bracket of people. So you can track that number over time rather than come at the overall one. 

[00:25:45] Crystal Waddell: Now, I'm not sure if you'll know this, but is that the same idea as creating an audience in GA4? 

[00:25:52] Freddie Chatt: I think it's separate. It's just, okay.

[00:25:54] It's just filtering the view that you're looking at. 

[00:25:56] Crystal Waddell: Okay.

[00:25:57] I'm going to make that part of my follow up Friday work for this particular episode. 

[00:26:01] Because that is something that I can combine with a GA4 project that I'm working on. So that is outstanding. 

[00:26:08] Thank you so much for that.

[00:26:09] Because sometimes it's just there's so much data available. 

[00:26:12] How do you find the data that's actually important? And going to help you grow your business? Because there's just so much to look at. 

[00:26:19] Absolutely. Okay. 

Keyword Strategy for Product Listings

[00:26:20] Crystal Waddell: You talked a little bit about long tail keywords.

[00:26:23] Here's my problem with e commerce. It's okay, you've got your products. And then you got your categories. 

[00:26:28] And then you've got your blog posts. That hopefully will relate to your categories and your products. And they all relate to each other in some way.

[00:26:35] So it's like, how do you avoid like duplicate content. And, cannibalizing pages that are similar, But hopefully have different search intent or intended function. 

[00:26:47] Freddie Chatt: Yeah, so I actually, I use a tool called Keyword Insights to help with this. So they started off as like a keyword clustering tool.

[00:26:55] So you chucked in like the keywords and they told you which ones, in the search results Return the same result. 

[00:27:00] So basically For like kind of 50 keywords, you might only need to create five pages because they all rank for the same thing. 

[00:27:06] So my kind of like super quick way of Setting almost like a keyword targeting plan is to pull together a batch of keywords.

[00:27:16] So normally what I do is I've put in a seed keyword. So for me, I put in cricket bat into a keyword research tool. 

[00:27:23] Set it to what they called it, like matching. Matches term. So basically it pulls out all the long tail all the keywords in their database that have the word cricket bat.

[00:27:31] So it for us it was there's like kind of sorts things called like longhand, or cricket bats, junior cricket bats. So there's lots of different terms in there. And then you can export that.

[00:27:41] Put it into keyword insights.

[00:27:42] And what they do is they classify each one by intent. So they'll tell you whether it's like kind of a collection page, product page that ranks, or if it's like more of a blog post that ranks. 

[00:27:53] And then what that does is that immediately gives you an output of almost like a total list of pages you can target. You can create content for.

[00:28:01] Whether that should be on a collection page, product page or as a blog post.

[00:28:05] And then. You basically run through that list and be like, sometimes there's things that you don't sell, or it doesn't make sense, you can just remove them. 

[00:28:12] But then that gives you a really good insight into all the different pages you could create. And for some brands that I've done similar work for, it's made them realize that there's actually new products that they could launch into these new categories where they don't currently service.

[00:28:26] So that's probably the best way. I know it uses a couple of tools which are paid. But you can often get free trials or Sign up for a month and get a load of data out. 

[00:28:34] But that will then give you that insight into all those different kind of like kind of content opportunities whether it's from a collection perspective or cover more blog posts.

[00:28:42] Crystal Waddell: Okay. 

Favorite Tools for E-Commerce

[00:28:42] Crystal Waddell: Let's talk about your favorite tools to run an e-commerce site. You just mentioned the keywords one, which I already forgot, but it's good thing we have recorded. 

[00:28:51] I use surfer, I have Shopify, I use tinypng.

[00:28:56] There's like a long list of different. Websites and tools and stuff that we go through and go to. So I was just curious kind of what's in your list of go to tools? 

[00:29:05] Freddie Chatt: Yeah, so my main, from the SEO side, I use Ahrefs is the main tool that I use for like key research and link link build analysis and things like that.

[00:29:14] Keyword insights. Takes that data and makes it like a lot more usable for me and for clients. So they're like the two tools I use mostly from kinda like the, on the SEO side. 

[00:29:24] And then I think I mentioned earlier, I'm moving to Shopify, so I'm excited to, to play around with all the different apps and stuff that I can find in there.

[00:29:32] And then, yeah, as I mentioned, Klaviyo or all my emails.

[00:29:35] Crystal Waddell: Okay, so what about product page optimization? 

Product Page Optimization

[00:29:39] Crystal Waddell: What makes a product page SEO friendly? And how can you make it drive both traffic and conversions? 

[00:29:48] Freddie Chatt: Yes. So in, in some cases your product pages, don't, won't drive that much traffic. 

[00:29:54] And it's more collection pages focus on. But oftentimes if you get, really specific like product types within your products.

[00:30:01] I work with a lighting brand at the moment, so they sell like wall lights. 

[00:30:05] But then they've got really specific within that collection. 

[00:30:08] They've got wall light and stuff like that. But they've only got one product. 

[00:30:11] So it makes sense to optimize the product page rather than a collection page that only has one product.

[00:30:16] So in terms of kind of optimizing product pages, it's generally the essentials that you like would probably perceived to have on there. 

[00:30:23] Like a decent description like a longer form description is always, there's always more helpful. 

[00:30:29] Like a great product imagery is from a conversion perspective is fantastic, but also great for SEO.

[00:30:34] Making sure the keyword that you're targeting is in the page title. 

[00:30:37] If you can get the keyword that you're trying to target in the product name. 

[00:30:41] It's like some people, it aligns quite well that the keywords they target are the product names.

[00:30:46] Some people like to call their products more unique things. So it's slightly harder. 

[00:30:50] So yeah, so they're the main things to get on that, that, that product page. 

[00:30:54] And then making sure like you'll have links from the collection pages that they're in, but also trying to get internal links through from blog posts that you write. 

[00:31:03] And various things like that into these pages will only help them even more to rank.

[00:31:08] Crystal Waddell: Is there a rule of a minimum or maximum number of products that should be in a collection? 

[00:31:14] Freddie Chatt: So I there isn't I don't think google's ever said anything from their side. 

[00:31:18] i've I worked with like kind of collection pages category pages that have got 2 000 products in. 

[00:31:25] We had created lots of sub collections beneath that. 

[00:31:27] But yeah, and that and they rank really well, so there's no detrimental effect like effect that way.

[00:31:33] In terms of kind of the lower end, like I generally normally think three is probably the absolute lowest, but you probably want probably five or more. 

[00:31:40] Again, it probably depends slightly on what you're selling, whether it makes sense that you have should have more or get away with less.

Link Building Strategies

[00:31:47] Crystal Waddell: And then what about link building because you said content and links, you know. That's just like the game of seo.

[00:31:53] Like what ideas? Can you give us to build links for our e commerce stores? 

[00:31:59] Freddie Chatt: Yeah, so there's a couple of Ideas that I use for a lot of brands that I work with. 

[00:32:03] One of them is like product led link building through gift guides. 

[00:32:07] So Like almost every major publication out there, it's like kind of creates gift guides every year for different occasions for different topics and everything like that.

[00:32:17] And getting into these some of them whilst they, they focus a lot on affiliates themselves. 

[00:32:23] But there's still a lot of opportunity for brands to, to get involved. So the process that I run through with clients to, to do this is look back at who wrote gift guides In the last year. 

[00:32:36] And then basically reach out to the people who wrote them and be like saw you wrote one gift guide last year.

[00:32:42] Are you gonna update it for this year? We'd love to like potentially get involved. 

[00:32:47] Like if you can offer to send them like a product sample.

[00:32:49] Or a free kind of like product so they can have a check it out. 

[00:32:52] Then you can end up getting some really good high quality links, from that way. 

[00:32:57] In the past i've done this and got in like refinery 29 vogue in australia.

[00:33:02] And like a whole kind of batch of really high places that I would never have like possibly thought was was possible.

[00:33:09] But yeah, so that's one of my favorite tactics for people that If you sell something that's quite giftable. Getting in those sorts of gift guides at the various times in the year.

[00:33:18] I think I did a , blog post or linkedin post on this recently. 

[00:33:22] And I checked back in ahrefs in their content explorer and there was over 19 000 gift guides written in their kind of like specific database like across the last Last 12 months. 

[00:33:33] So there's a lot of opportunities out there for some are really specific in niches like that. 

[00:33:36] We like have star wars toys and things like that. 

[00:33:40] So it's like quite not everyone can then reach out to that person.

[00:33:43] But there's lots of really relevant ones that you can find and that feature similar products to what you sell.

[00:33:47] Crystal Waddell: I guess just a couple more questions, because I thought voice search was going to die.

[00:33:53] And it seems like voice and Large language models are merging in a way. 

[00:33:58] And how they do that So do you have any ideas for optimizing for voice search? 

[00:34:03] Freddie Chatt: Yeah, like I agree that like it seemed to die. And I feel like it's now linked back into the ai side, like you say. 

[00:34:11] i'd say carry on doing the general things that you do to try and rank in Google and another search engine.

[00:34:17] I think like I worked out earlier this summer when I was playing around with if I could get my brand to appear in Chat GPT and stuff like that. 

[00:34:24] And at the time, basically if you search for What the best, so we sell affordable cricket bats. So it was like, what's the best budget cricket bat.

[00:34:31] And you could see it. All it did was go to Bing's look, look at the top few results. And then basically bring it gets its results from that.

[00:34:39] It almost implies that you should people should potentially pay more attention to Bing in terms of Your rankings there. 

[00:34:46] And it's what you could do to optimize into chat gpt that way but like I say like they seem to change things all the time and things are moving so fast It's hard to keep up in terms of how exactly it all works. 

[00:34:58] Crystal Waddell: Wow.

[00:34:59] Now that's a nugget right there because most of the time it's all about Google and what it would look like to try to optimize specifically for Bing. 

[00:35:07] But that is super. Insightful. 

Seasonality and Business Management

[00:35:10] Crystal Waddell: So what about you? You said you guys have seasonality. So how do you handle seasonality as a business?

[00:35:16] Because I have multiple seasons, so I'm like, I don't really do big Christmas, but I do big football and big soccer. 

[00:35:23] And then big baseball and big basketball or whatever. But if you just have one or two months, like, how do you manage that? As a business owner?

[00:35:32] From your website to your budget.

[00:35:35] Freddie Chatt: Yeah. So it is pretty tricky. Like we with our products inventory, where we basically place an order at the end of the season. Ready for next season. 

[00:35:44] So in terms of cash flow, it works. Okay. So that we get all our cash in through the sales over the summer. 

[00:35:50] And then at the end of the summer, we put that money into the stock for the next season.

[00:35:54] So then basically we don't, I don't, we don't spend too much on ads anyway, but all our ads get turned off over the winter when no one's playing. 

[00:36:01] We're currently running a warehouse sale to try and like clear through some excess stock. We'll do like Black Friday sales. So we'll do almost like do slightly more promotions outside of season. 

[00:36:10] And like some things, even though it's out of season, like there is still some giftable elements around like the holidays and Christmas and stuff like that.

[00:36:18] There's a few things like that we do after at the end of the season. And then from january it's like slowly starts ramping up through the year. 

[00:36:26] We just slowly start ramping up activity. We spend a lot of the winter time almost like trying to improve the site ready for next year. 

[00:36:33] Or like just cleaning things up that we haven't got round to, 'cause it's been so busy over the over the peak period.

[00:36:39] Crystal Waddell: Man, I could talk to you all day because everything you say just leads me to more questions and thoughts. 

[00:36:45] And it's interesting talking to someone who deals in e commerce. Because even though I manufacture My own product, I'm like, I should do exactly what you're doing. 

[00:36:55] At the end of April, that's when we should invest it into next year's stock. Based on the previous year's numbers. 

[00:37:02] And we could go ahead and get a lot of that cut and paid for, at that time.

[00:37:07] And then, that just, I don't know, from a management perspective, it just really streamlines it, versus just trying to. Catch up and stay caught up throughout the year. I'm like, Oh my gosh, how could I have thought about that before?

[00:37:19] Okay. Last question, because I have a thousand more. I'm looking away because I have more on my list. 

[00:37:25] But if I let you leave without talking about UX and SEO alignment. 

[00:37:30] I would do a disservice to myself and our audience. So how do you think that user experience impacts SEO?

[00:37:38] And what kind of best practices do you recommend to align those two things?

[00:37:43] Freddie Chatt: Yeah, absolutely. So like I think it's super important. 

[00:37:47] People don't realize how much bad ux can negatively affect or like hold you back.

[00:37:52] I think like within ecom SEO, particularly trying to optimize for SEO, people go too far in certain directions.

[00:38:00] So like the general premise of more words on the page means better rankings and things like that. 

[00:38:07] On particularly collection pages, people would then put like a thousand word block of text at the bottom of the page. Underneath the product grid and hope that helps. 

[00:38:14] And the thing is in the past it's worked to some degree of the time but from a user experience if they ever find that they're probably just Like thinking what is this?

[00:38:23] This is just so weird. 

[00:38:25] Crystal Waddell: That's totally CVS. 

[00:38:26] Freddie Chatt: Wayfair used to do it, but they do it. They do a bit clever now as well. And yeah, so it's like it worked but there's things you can do to You can still have that thousand word of text and I found a site recently that Do it quite nicely in the sense that underneath the product grid.

[00:38:40] They've got like a layout of image one side text the other side. And then it like rotates and so it just allows them to add some more content to that page. 

[00:38:48] That is helpful content like it answers questions around what people might be searching for around the products they sell. 

[00:38:55] So It's a way to get it that looks a bit nicer. That doesn't make users confused and bounce around. And wonder where they're going.

[00:39:02] So I like that's like just one specific example.

[00:39:05] Doesn't matter if you've got the traffic and they get lost and get confused.

[00:39:09] Crystal Waddell: You have to follow freddy on linkedin because he drops these Just Little tips like almost every day. 

[00:39:16] But you could just go back and make a class like slash course for yourself out of his LinkedIn post. 

[00:39:23] Because he's like, Oh, do this and like your life's going to improve 100 times.

[00:39:28] It really is true. He doesn't say that, but that's what it feels like.

[00:39:31] Freddie, tell people how they can find you and like how they can work with you and make sure that you tell us about your course.

[00:39:37] Because I'll drop a link to that in the show notes. 

[00:39:39] Freddie Chatt: Yeah, beautiful. 

[00:39:40] So yes, I mainly hang out on LinkedIn. Just search Freddy Chatt. 

[00:39:43] I think I'm the only Freddie Chatt on there or something. So it should be quite easy to find. Hopefully. Other than that, you can sign up to my email list freddy chat.

[00:39:51] com. And there's a free e commerce SEO checklist who sign up from the homepage as well. So that'd be useful. 

[00:39:57] And then, yes, I've got a really affordable. It's only 150. Ecom course which basically guides you through the process to from zero to ten thousand pounds or ten thousand dollars a month. 

[00:40:09] From seo for your store and everything that I did for my store to get it to that point. 

[00:40:15] And yeah, so that's at the e commerce seo boot camp So just google that and it should be near the top 

[00:40:21] Crystal Waddell: And of course I'll make it simple for him.

[00:40:23] I'll put the links in the show notes. So hopefully that will all go well. But Freddie, Oh my gosh, we've got to do this again at some point. Maybe in 2025. 

[00:40:31] It's been a pleasure to just, learn from you for so many months. And then now get to meet you virtually. So thank you so much for coming on the show.

[00:40:40] Freddie Chatt: That's right. Thank you so much for having me. It's been great to finally get here. 

[00:40:43] Crystal Waddell: Awesome. All right guys, I will catch you next time and thanks for joining us. 

[00:40:48] ​