This is Kerry Murdock with Practical Ecommerce. Organic traffic from Google and other search engines remains critical to many merchants. It generates a steady stream of customers and prospects, and it also insulates them from over-relying on Amazon for sales. There is no greater authority on search engine optimization than Stephan Spencer.

He’s the co-author of The Art of SEO and the sole author of other leading digital marketing books. He founded the pioneering SEO firm of Netconcepts. He’s a worldwide speaker, consultant, and host of two popular podcasts. And he’s with us today. Well, Stephan, welcome.

Thanks for having me.

Stephan, we are here to talk. Barebones SEO is sort of our working title for this interview. We’re anxious to get your views on the situation for small—to mid-sized merchants. E-commerce is getting increasingly complicated for those companies, and managers and owners of those companies increasingly wear mini hats. Tell us what the bare minimum those managers and owners can do to maintain or improve organic search traffic.

Yeah. So, that’s a great question. It depends, Kerry, on what their internal resources are and how much time they have available. So, let’s say that there’s very little of their time available, but they have some other people they can assign work to, and then there are some options available. If they have a budget and they don’t have time and they don’t have internal staff time, they still have options available.

But I’m talking to so many prospects these days that they’re time-poor and budget-poor, and they feel like they need to be doing SEO, so they’re going to go with a low-cost option. And I’m like, well, that’s really the worst thing you can do because you’re better off doing nothing than potentially harming your SEO working with a low-quality SEO provider. So sometimes it’s as easy as just like don’t break anything. Don’t hire somebody who’s going to wreck your reputation in the eyes of Google. That’s the best situation, given your constraints. But if you have some time and you’re hungry for knowledge and want to learn it yourself, you could pick up my book, The Art of SEO.

It’s almost a thousand pages long, so it is a hefty read. But you could teach yourself some stuff and work through some of the ideas, maybe start with Chapter 7, which is all about content marketing. It’s not too technical because once you start getting into the technical stuff, your eyes will glaze over, and you’ll want to throw the book in the fire. It gets really frustrating. Like XML sitemaps and robots.txt and noindex versus disallow. And it’s like, “Ah, save me.” So if you only have internal resources and they’re willing to learn, give them the book or sign them up for a non-mine course.

I have an SEO course on how to audit your own website and do your own SEO audit. So you could sign up for that. There are other courses out there on SEO. You could just find them a course if that’s their preferred learning modality is to go through online training. Some people are big into reading, and some people aren’t. Yeah, I mean, it’s just tricky because if you don’t have an SEO manager or point person for SEO, it’s going to be very hard to scale your SEO. It’s just going to be very haphazard.

So, we’ve been publishing practical e-commerce since 2005. And over the years, my views on what you just said, Stephan, have evolved in this respect. And I wonder if it applies to e-commerce merchants as well. We are in the business of digital publishing like a merchant is in the business of digital retailing, perhaps.

They have to make it their business to understand the items that you just mentioned, such as SEO site maps, different tools and search consoles, etc. That is their business. It’s like a doctor saying, I don’t want to understand blood pressure or something like that. Am I getting too extreme in those views?

You know, we can each have our own opinions. My opinion is not quite as extreme as that. I see it more as like if your core competency is non-technical, if it’s more like creative, like you’re, I don’t know, a product inventor. One of my long-term clients I worked with Steve Spangler. You know Steve?

Yes, I’ve seen him speak.

Yeah, he’s awesome. He’s so creative. He’s not super technical, but he’s an inventor. He’s an Emmy award-winning TV person. He’s been on The Ellen Show almost two dozen times, and he’s really kind of a Renaissance man. I would never ask him to dig into the details of XML site maps or rewrite rules in your Apache config file or whatever. So you go with what your gift is and then delegate everything else. There are three Ds: delegate, defer, and delete.

Some things just don’t deserve to get done because they’re not important enough to the business. They don’t move the needle enough. For example, a “Best practice in SEO is to optimize your meta descriptions.” Well, that’s great if you have unlimited time, but in the reality of business for these e-commerce entrepreneurs, they’ve got 101 different things to do in about the same amount of time that they can do three. So meta descriptions should never see the light of day.

Because there’s just no time for that, it doesn’t actually move the needle enough. It doesn’t actually move your rankings at all. It’s not a ranking signal in Google. And the benefit that you get from it is just potentially a small improvement in click-through rate, but your rankings don’t improve. So, if you’re not getting to other more important stuff in your business or just an SEO, you’re neglecting the rest of your title tags, which are the most important on-page element.

Instead, you’re messing around with meta descriptions that don’t move your rankings. That just doesn’t make any sense to me. So you need to be very outcome-focused and kind of brutal in terms of your decision-making about what I’m going to do and what I’m not going to do, what I’m going to defer, what I’m going to delete, what I’m going to delegate.

What if a merchant comes to you and says, I can do four hours a week, and I’ve got the budget for one really good premium tool? What would you tell them?

Well, I’d ask them what their objective is and what’s their outcome, because they need to be outcome-focused. Like, okay, you have a tool now. Maybe it’s Ahrefs, maybe it’s SEMrush, maybe it’s Majestic, maybe it’s Link Research Tools, maybe it’s Screaming Frog or Deepcrawl. All those are great tools.

And if there’s nobody manning the chair trying to figure out what the data-driven decision-making should be for your business, then that’s a waste of money. So you’re better off spending that money on a resource like a person versus a tool if there’s nobody who’s going to glean insights from that tool.

Well, is it an oversimplification to say most merchants would offer that the goal is more traffic, simply more traffic from organic search?

Yeah, but not all traffic is created equal. I could double your traffic, and it’s going to be garbage traffic, just like as a social media person, I do have a bunch of social media expertise. I co-authored Social E-Commerce.

Another O’Reilly book. So I could, like, 10x your likes on Facebook. I could actually buy likes legitimately from Facebook with ad campaigns. And that’s the worst thing that you could possibly do because now you have a bunch of garbage messing up the system. It’s just a bunch of low-quality, probably bot or fake accounts.

You know, Facebook accounts where people are being paid to like stuff, and they like everything, including your stuff, because they’re trying to hide their tracks, not leave a footprint, but some of the likes they’re liking are paid for. And so when you legitimately buy likes from Facebook with Facebook ads that are targeted to increasing your likes, now you’ve got a bunch of garbage in the system. So, you could do the same thing with SEO.

Add a bunch of garbage into the system, and now you’re in a worse situation than you were. You thought you were better off because you hired somebody yo,u used a tool, or you followed some advice in a blog post, and now, two years later, you’re figuring out that, wow, something went haywire. Maybe it was one of those things that I did following somebody’s advice that I didn’t really vet properly.

I was going to ask you about tools. You’ve alluded to tools already. I’ll go ahead and ask the question. There are so many terrific tools. You’ve explained them to me over the years, which has always been helpful. But that in and of itself is confusing in terms of, say, a merchant says I want more conversions. I want more conversions from, say, organic search. And there are all these wonderful tools. So, I think you mentioned Majestic, Ahref, Moz, and Link Research Tools. How does a merchant and a merchant can’t? It probably doesn’t. A mid-sized merchant likely doesn’t have the time or the money to use all of them.

Right. No, nor should they because that’s creating a lot of busy work for themselves.

So how do they choose? How do they choose which one or which one or two is best for them?

Again, it comes back to the outcome that they’re after, so if it’s not just more traffic, it’s like if I want to if I have a smart goal. Specific measurable attainable, real achievable, I think is realistic and time-bound. Then I’ve got a goal or an outcome like I want to increase my organic Google traffic over the next, let’s say, four months by 500 percent. I’m just making that up like it might be doable or might not be.

But that’s very specific. It’s measurable. I know if I’ve crossed that finish line. So now I’ve got a goal that I can say, well, what are the tools that will help me get there? And you first have to kind of identify, what is your Achilles heel in terms of your SEO? Suppose your link authority or link equity is really lousy. In that case, you need to be focusing your tool investments on things for Link Analysis and Link Building if, on the other hand, it’s more of an internal linking structure issue and how you pass link equity internally around your site.

Maybe you’ve got fast navigation, and it’s not properly configured for SEO and so forth. Then, there’s a whole other different set of tools, like DeepCrawl, Screaming Frog, Botify, or something like that. So I guess I could group these tools into topic areas or areas of functionality and then assume that the person who’s listening here knows what they are trying to achieve, whether it’s more link equity for their site or if it’s removing a lot of duplicate content that’s coming up the works for them or whatever, then they can choose the right tool for the job.

Let’s start by crawling the site because I already mentioned a few tools. Let’s just round that out. If you have a very small budget, then Screaming Frog is a great option. It’s actually free for up to 500 URLs if you have a very small website. Let’s say you have a couple of hundred products and a handful of articles or blog posts and so forth. That’s under the 500 URL, and you can use Screaming Frog for free.

Tell us briefly what Screaming Frog does just for listeners who aren’t familiar with it.

Yeah, so it’s one of the tools that will crawl your site, just like Googlebot crawls your site. So you would have this tool crawl through all of the pages of your site that it can find through links. So it’s just going to explore every single link that it discovers on your site. And it’s going to look at the HTTP headers. In other words, it’s going to see if there’s a redirect present or not. It’s going to look to see if a 404 error came up, a 410 error or a 500 server error. It’ll show those. It’ll show what the title tags and meta descriptions are. If there are meta robots tags like a noindex or nofollow, it’s going to show all that stuff, and you can export that into Excel, and you can mine through that for missed opportunities and misconfigurations.

So that’s a pretty cool tool, and it’s great if you have technical issues that you haven’t identified or maybe you have a lot of duplicate content and these duplicate titles would be pretty obvious to you. Looking at a Screaming Frog report. That’s kind of the tip of the iceberg. I mean, there’s so much more that you could be delving into besides just crawl reports. There are other tools that do a great job crawling your site.

And Screaming Frog is more of a desktop version of a tool, kind of like Microsoft Word or something like that. It runs on your computer versus in the cloud. So if you have a very large-scale website, then you’re probably better off using something like DeepCrawl or Botify, and those have more capabilities as well as more scalability than a desktop program, but you also pay quite a lot more for it.

So that’s the crawling side of things. If you want to look at, let’s say, your rankings, you can go into the Search Analytics reports and Google Search Console for free and dig around there. But you’re probably going to want a lot more capability than just seeing the keywords that you’re already ranking for and getting traffic for, you know, the Google Search Console. So, I would recommend a rankings tracker. So, that means you have to have a list of keywords that you care about and that you feed into the tool. So you could use, for example, Rank Ranger, which is one of my favorites. Stat Search Analytics is also one of my favorites for rank checking. It can also track your featured snippets. Well, both of those can do that. In other words, if you’re in position zero, above the organic listings with an instant answer, essentially.

So that’s called a featured snippet. That should be tracked, as well as your position in the regular search results. So RankRanger or StatSearchAnalytics, as well as Authority Labs, are inexpensive. Option Moz has a rankings tracker. I haven’t used that for a very long time. I’d say my favorites would be Rank Ranger and Stat, so in order to get along the list of keywords, like a little portfolio of keywords that you want to track now, you’re talking about using keyword research tools.

Google has a “free” tool, but it only works if you’re paying for an AdWords account. So that’s the AdWords Keyword Planner. But there is just so many problems with that tool, like traffic buckets and grouping keywords together and not giving you averages and things like that. There’s just a lot of issues. So, that is not an ideal tool for various reasons, as I alluded to. Thus, you need a paid tool for keyword research to do a good job of your keyword research. So, Moz Keyword Explorer is a fantastic tool. It also gives you estimates on the difficulty to get on page one for that keyword. It estimates the amount of screen real estate that’s available for organic listings versus other types of SERP features and search engine results page features like featured snippets, knowledge panels, and so forth and so on.

So then it can figure into the equation difficulty, opportunity and other things as well as the search volume and give you a prioritization of whether you should be focusing on this keyword or not and to what degree. So that’s a pretty awesome tool. There’s also, let’s see, what am I using for keyword research? A lot of little point solutions, like if I’m trying to figure out question-based keywords to create a frequently asked questions page or trying to create a list of featured snippet-type keywords that I want to target where the keyword fires up a featured snippet or displays a featured snippet and I want to go after ranking in that featured snippet position.

I’ll use a tool like Answer the Public, which is free, AnswerThePublic.com. I’ll use RankRanger keyword finder and choose the option. There’s a little tick box that says refine the results or restrict the results only to question-based keywords. So, you’re doing keyword research, and you’re coming up with all sorts of questions. So, Answer the Public does a similar sort of thing but at a smaller scale because it’s pulling only from Google Suggest.

So, as you type the auto-complete suggestions that you get from Google, it’s called Google Suggest. And AnswerThePublic.com is pulling from Google Suggest. So, it’s not giving you a ton of ideas. It’s giving you some ideas. But you need more tools to kind of round out the keyword portfolio so that you end up with thousands of keywords, not just dozens, maybe even tens of thousands of keywords. The more keywords you have in your portfolio that are good keywords to target, relevant, attainable, and popular, the better off you’re going to be.

So that’s keyword research. And now, let’s get into the link-building side of things. So, link analysis is figuring out whether you have toxic links and whether your link profile looks natural and not engineered. So you’re going to use tools like, hopefully, you can afford link research tools because that’s a fantastic tool set. There are two dozen different tools inside that tool set. So, Majestic is also fantastic. Ahrefs is fantastic. Yeah, there are just some really great tools for link analysis.

You said something there: toxic links. Looking at toxic links. Tell us briefly what you’re referring to.

Yeah, so you could be the victim of negative SEO. A negative SEO attack is where a competitor, somebody who wants to push you down the search results, is buying links on your behalf or building toxic, low-quality links on your behalf, the kinds of links that Google does not want to see that are pointing to your site, like spammy websites, porn sites. Sites that are infected with malware and viruses and those sorts of sites linking to you are not a good thing.

That can bring your rankings down, and you had nothing to do with the creation of those links, as a competitor did. And not your traditional competitors. Usually, the traditional competitors are not that slimy. But let’s say that it’s just somebody who’s an affiliate who doesn’t have much experience morals, and they just really want to crush you so that they can take your slot in the search results so they get you in trouble with Google by buying a whole bunch of really low-quality links. So that’s what I’m referring to about toxic links.

Everybody needs to check the degree of how many toxic links there are, what percentages, and all that they have. A great tool for that is Link Detox, which is part of the Link Research Tools tool set. That helps you triage which links are toxic, suspicious, innocuous, and toxic. You can reach out to the webmasters of those sites and say, “Please remove my link.” For the remainder, you can do a disavow, meaning that you’re putting a list together of all the sites that are really scummy and linking to you, and you submit that to Google through Google Search Console.

Then, you just do this on a regular basis, checking to see how much toxicity you have in your link profile and the link graph. So that’s link analysis. And then what about link building? Well, you need to outreach to get links. You also need to outreach, in fact, to get links removed if they’re low-quality links. Google wants to see that you have put in some effort in cleaning up the scummy links, even if you had nothing to do with it, even if it was a dodgy competitor who hates you.

Wants to ruin you. They don’t know that it was a competitor or that it was you. They just kind of Google assumes that you probably were involved. So you’re going to end up with a penalty, whether it’s algorithmic or manual. Who knows? But it’s not something you want to just leave alone and hope for the best. You need to take proactive action, use a tool to help you do the outreach and ask for those links to be removed. So, building the disavow file can be handled by link detox, but the outreach to webmasters and saying, “Hey, remove my link please,” is going to require an outreach tool, like, for example, PitchBox. I’m a big fan of PitchBox.

So also for outreaching to acquire high-quality links, links that are high quality, high authority sites, bloggers who are respected in the field, etc. Pitchbox is great for that. So yeah, there’s a lot of different tools. I’m probably overwhelming people. I didn’t even get to the competitive intelligence type tools like SimilarWeb, SEMrush, and SearchMetrics, although these are more than just competitive intelligence tools. They really are very extensive. With SEMrush and Search Metrics, you can track your keywords, your competitors’ keywords, featured snippets and so forth without supplying a keyword list.

Of course, there might be keywords that you want to track that aren’t on its list. That’s why I have a separate rankings tracker like RankRanger or Stat in place for my clients. But yeah, you want to do competitive intelligence and competitive analysis and see what the competitors are ranking for. If you’re, I don’t know, onlineshoes.com and you’re getting your hat handed to you by Zappos, then you want to look at all the keywords that Zappos is ranking for, what positions they are, what the estimated traffic volumes are for each of those keywords, and go after the low-hanging fruit, the stuff that is relevant, attainable and popular and just try and take some of that back from Zappos or whoever the competitor is, and that’s something that these tools like SEMrush and Searchmetrics are fantastic at.

That’s all terrific information. There’s just so much. Let me switch gears just for a second and talk about you for a minute. By any definition, Stephan, you’re a worldwide SEO authority. You’re the founder of one of the truly pioneering SEO firms, which you subsequently sold Net Concepts. Tell us what you’re up to now, what your practice revolves around, and what you do these days.

Yeah. First of all, thank you for asking. I’m writing books. I run two Podcasts. I host my marketing-related podcast, Marketing Speak, and another podcast that has nothing to do with SEO, even though it sounds like it’s called Get Yourself Optimized, and it’s all about biohacking and lifehacking. I’ve had Tim Ferriss on, Dave Asprey, David Allen, and some really, really big names, awesome people. So I’m doing that stuff. I’m working with clients. I have a small kind of boutique firm at this point.

I’ve built a huge agency in three different countries with 65 employees all over again. So I’ve got a small team, and I get more hands-on with my clients than I used to with my agency because I just couldn’t get involved with the client work when I had 65 mouths to feed. So yeah, I work with a small number of clients. I also do some coaching.

SEO and just kind of business coaching and kind of looking for interesting problems to solve. That’s kind of how Net Concepts got to be really big. I had some interesting problems to solve with some clients. I was working on Kohl’s and Northern Tool and Kohl’s department store’s website and had all these roadblocks that I was trying to get around, and I’m like, okay, how is this going to work?

If I can’t get the rewrite rules and all this sort of stuff in place, all the technical roadblocks with their servers and everything, I just want to fix these issues. Then, I ended up inventing a proxy-based SEO technology. We charged on a cost-per-click basis, and it ended up being the majority of our agency’s revenue. We had clients like Nordstrom and Zappos running it.

It was amazing. And that all stemmed from solving a real-world client problem. That’s why I really want to stay hands-on and work on these client problems instead of being up in a Citadel and watching teams of account managers, consultants and analysts working on all the client accounts.

We are getting close to being out of our allotted time of half an hour. But there’s one.

the key question I wanted to squeeze in and ask your views. The question is this as it relates to e-commerce, SEO for e-commerce. The dominance of Amazon is certainly disrupting a lot of big portion of the U.S. economy, including e-commerce independent e-commerce merchants. I’ve read the statistic, but I’m not sure where it came from. The statistic says more product searches start on Google. I’m sorry, on Amazon these days than Google. If that’s true, is the importance of SEO lessening for e-commerce merchants? And they should focus on Amazon search.

So basically, you’re asking, should people be doing SEO for Google, SEO for Amazon or for both? Would that be a good paraphrase? That’s much better than what I just said. Okay. Well, I think the common sense answer would be to optimize for both. Right. So, Amazon is a great starting point for consumers. It’s just that if you’re putting all your eggs in one basket in terms of the Amazon basket, you’re just asking Amazon to devour them eventually. I like Amazon. I think they’re a real boon to the economy, a boon to the consumer and everything. Amazing.

And think of them as the black widow spider, not the male black widow. You’re the male black widow. The female black widow is amazon.com. So you create this great product, you get it sourced out of China, and you respond to the customer feedback and everything, and you’re just crushing it on Amazon. Amazon notices your success and is like, wow, that’s really great.

We should create an Amazon basics version of this product, and let’s cut out the middleman, and let’s just sell this directly.

And so now you, as the merchant, the FBA merchant, are out of business essentially because you relied solely on Amazon income. Big, big, big mistake. So it’s great to consider Amazon as part of the ecosystem, and I need to figure out what the signals are that Amazon’s internal site search engine, A9, uses. That’s great. Figure that out, you know, tweak those things, optimize so that your Amazon products are outranking everybody else’s and then you take the buy box, and then you get higher BSR best-seller rank and all that sort of stuff. And ignore Google at your peril.

Is anything else on your mind today, Stephan? Tell us the URLs, for example. You mentioned your consulting practice, and you’ve got two interesting podcasts. Tell us how listeners can access all of those.

Yeah, for sure. If you want to learn more about SEO, I highly recommend going to stephenspenser.com for things like archived webinars and presentations that I’ve given at different conferences, as well as lots and lots of stuff. There are checklists, worksheets, white papers, and tons of articles I’ve written for places all over, including Practical Commerce over the years, Search Engine Land, and so forth. So that’s all at StephanSpencer.com. If you’re into podcasts, definitely subscribe to MarketingSpeak.com, which is the website that podcasts. And, of course, the podcast is available on iTunes and everywhere else.

But the website also has transcripts of every episode, checklists of actions to take from every episode, and show notes. Yeah, it’s just an amazing kind of mini-university education there in online marketing covering everything from SEO and Facebook advertising, conversion optimization, analytics, and all the stuff that you carry covered in practical commerce. And if you’re into biohacking and living over 100 years old and having lots of energy and vitality or being way more productive in a flow state than you’ve ever been before, then go to my Get Yourself Optimized podcast, and the website for that is GetYpurselfOptimized.com.

Okay. Well, I’ve been visiting with Stephan Spencer, a true worldwide SEO authority and internet marketing authority. His website, as he mentioned for his consulting practice, is stephanspenser.com. And Stephan, thank you so much for your time today, sir.

You are quite welcome. Thank you, Kerry, for the opportunity.

Thank you.