Think SEO is dead in the age of AI? Think again. While ChatGPT referral traffic surged 112% month-over-month across e-commerce sites, Google still commands 99% of search market share and processes 13.6 billion queries daily. Jeff Oxford, SEO expert and founder of 180 Marketing, reveals why smart brands are doubling down on search optimization—and how the strategies that work for Google are also positioning companies to dominate in AI search results. From his data analysis of 152 SEO campaigns showing consistent 75% traffic growth, to the "ranking factor leak" that exposed Google's true algorithm priorities, Jeff breaks down the exact 4-bucket framework that's still generating millions in revenue for e-commerce brands.

Key Topics & Lessons:

• The State of Search in 2025 - Why Google's 13.6 billion daily queries represent a 64% increase from 2024, how ChatGPT traffic grew 112% month-over-month (but still represents only 1-3% of total traffic), and why the "Google is dead" narrative is premature despite real AI disruption
• The 4-Bucket SEO Framework - Jeff's systematic approach covering Technical SEO (mostly handled by Shopify), Page Optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, headers), Content Strategy (200-300 words on category pages), and Link Building (the 0.3 correlation factor that still dominates rankings)
• What Really Moves the Needle - Data from 152 campaigns showing 20% growth at 3 months, 50% at 6 months, and 75% at 12 months, plus insights from Google's leaked ranking documents revealing click-through rate as a massive ranking factor
• The Great Blog Apocalypse of 2023 - Why standalone content sites lost 90% of their traffic while e-commerce stores with blogs thrived, how Google's "helpful content" update rewarded real businesses over affiliate spam, and Jeff's theory about Google My Business as a ranking signal
• AI SEO Optimization Strategy - How to reverse-engineer ChatGPT sources to identify link targets, why product roundups have a 0.45 correlation with AI citations (higher than traditional backlinks), and the overlap between traditional SEO and AI optimization
• The Future of Automated SEO - Jeff's experiment building a fully autonomous AI agency with zero human account managers, AI tools that can screenshot pages and generate optimized title tags, and how Gemini 2.5 Pro is changing the automation game

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Sponsored by OMG Commerce - go to (https://www.omgcommerce.com/contact) and request your FREE strategy session today!

—

Chapters: 

(00:00) The Relevance of SEO in the Age of AI

(12:38) The 4 Components of SEO

(16:19) What Is the Payoff for SEO?

(20:22) Breaking Down Technical SEO

(23:43) On-Page SEO and Meta Descriptions

(25:58) Content Optimization Strategies

(33:27) Link Building

(38:30) AI and SEO: The Future of Search

—

Connect With Brett: 

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/thebrettcurry/ 
• YouTube: https://www.youtube.com/@omgcommerce 
• Website: https://www.omgcommerce.com/ 

Relevant Links:

• Jeff’s LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/jeff-oxford
• 180 Marketing: https://www.180marketing.com/

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Past guests on eCommerce Evolution include Ezra Firestone, Steve Chou, Drew Sanocki, Jacques Spitzer, Jeremy Horowitz, Ryan Moran, Sean Frank, Andrew Youderian, Ryan McKenzie, Joseph Wilkins, Cody Wittick, Miki Agrawal, Justin Brooke, Nish Samantray, Kurt Elster, John Parkes, Chris Mercer, Rabah Rahil, Bear Handlon, Trevor Crump, Frederick Vallaeys, Preston Rutherford, Anthony Mink, Bill D’Allessandro, Bryan Porter and more

The tricky part is deciphering a good

backlink from a bad one. So

let's say you have two blogs.

Trying to determine which blog is going

to be helpful and which is going to be

harmful is extremely difficult.

Well, hello and welcome to another edition

of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast.

I'm your host, Brett

Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce.

And today we've got

Jeff Oxford on the show,

and we're talking about SEO search engine

optimization. Going to weave in

some ai, some AI optimization,

but you may be thinking what,

is anybody still searching?

Is anybody still talking about SEO

these days? Isn't everything ai?

And have we got some insights for you?

Because the good news is

if you're doing good SEO,

it's going to help with AI as well,

and I can stay with authority.

SEO is not dead. And so with that,

Jeff, welcome to the show, man.

And how's it going? It's going great,

Brett. Thanks for having me. Yeah, dude,

it was awesome.

Connecting at Steve Chu and Tony Airbox,

event Seller Summit Fort Lauderdale,

one of my favorite events.

And I think you've spoken there

multiple times as well, correct?

You're kind of a.

Radio. Yeah, this is my

third time speaking there.

Nice, nice. And you talked about SEO.

I sat in on your talk. I loved it.

What a lot of people don't know is

that actually at the very beginning,

so OMG is now 15 years old.

The first service we offered Jeff,

SEO, really SEO for local companies.

It was just something we knew, something

we liked. I was a search engine nerd,

and so a business partner loved it as

well. And so that's what we did. Yep.

Search engine optimization. That led to

Google search, led to Google Shopping.

I had a video background that led to

YouTube, but in the beginning, SEO baby.

Okay, so we can go deep in

the trenches. It sounds like.

The We can totally nerd out for sure. Now,

I have not been in the SEO

game in detail recently,

but I still keep up. I can

still talk shop for sure.

But why SEO as a topic now?

And was that just something that Steve,

the VIN organizer was interested in,

or were there a lot of requests

for it? Why SEO as a topic?

So I guess a little behind the scenes of

what happened with that is he was also,

he was asking me about AI

optimization chat, GPT optimization.

And this is after we

already got SEO O in there,

but we're kind of at a

possible paradigm shift of how

people are searching. If

we just look at right now,

June, 2025 as a data point,

we just freeze this chat.

Google is still the 800 pound gorilla.

It still has 99 some ridiculous

amount of market share.

Chad GD maybe has one to 2% maybe

of the search.

So this snapshot in time SEO is still just

kicking butt, making

companies millions of dollars.

But the trend is what gets

people talking about chat.

Yes, it's 1%, maybe one to 2% now,

but a year or two ago it was 0.1%.

And I mean, I can actually

drop some stats for you.

So being an e-commerce SEO company,

we have access to a lot of

Google Analytics accounts,

and I had my VA a few last week.

He went through all of

our analytics accounts.

He looked at how much

referrals our clients,

our e-commerce clients got from

chat GBT in April versus May to

see what's the.

Fluctuation. Okay, great

comparison. Love that.

112% Increase in referral

traffic from month to month.

Yeah, from month to month. Wow.

Yeah. And I can even

Now, did he also look at,

and not to get too far ahead of you here,

but did he also look at what percentage

of overall traffic came from chat?

Jt? Not impressive. We're talking

like most clients, it was one to 2%.

But there are some e-commerce

stores that we're seeing

where chat GT is up to like 20%.

Whoa, that's significant.

Of course, it depends on your niche.

It depends on how much

content marketing you've done,

how much blogging you've done,

how much do you have enough

stuff to get cited and chat GPT?

But just if we're just looking at the

e-commerce world and averages from this

dataset, yeah, it was about a little

over a hundred percent month over month.

And then average across,

this was about just shy of 300

visits a month from chat GBT.

Interesting. And how does that

compare to Google, Google Organic and.

Google paid, or did you do

that comparison? Luckily,

I have those stats here.

I mean, Google's, I don't have

the month over month for Google,

but because it's probably

pretty steady, I would assume

similar data point would be

I went over this to my

talk, but we took a sample,

like 80 e-commerce sites that we

have Google Analytics access to,

and also have Google search console

access to. And across these,

you want to see what's the highest

performing channel on Google Analytics.

And number one outside of direct,

which just means it's not attributed,

but number one was non-brand organic

search, followed by paid search,

followed by organic shopping. So

yeah, it's one of those things where,

yes, if we freeze this point in time,

SEO is still the number

one top performing channel,

even non-branded SEO or

non-branded search traffic.

But the tides are shifting a bit.

I was just on a call with a client

earlier today who sells refurbished

computers, and we were looking at

some of their AI referral stats,

and they've already,

this year have had 23 in from chat GBT. So

everyone should be paying

attention to the trend

I live in here in Bend, Oregon,

where we have the last blockbuster.

And if you're, you still

have a blockbuster,

we have the last blockbuster on earth.

We were just talking about that.

So my oldest kids are 23 and 20,

and so they still remember

when they were little,

we still would go to the video

store. There weren't a ton of 'em.

It wasn't super popular, saw

red box and stuff like that.

But there was something magical about

walking the aisles of a blockbuster.

Maybe they didn't have

what you were looking for,

but that was all part of the fun.

So we were reminiscing and

missing the video store days.

Yeah, come to Bend, you can get a T-shirt

and take a look, see what they have.

So okay, there's quick

dive diversion here,

but how's business at

the last Blockbuster?

Do people come from nostalgia

to buy? Gees, a tourist.

Attraction now? It's kind what? It's,

yeah, it's all about the nostalgia.

You can get some merchandise and they

still have the big blockbuster sign

outside front and they put

little marquee letters on it.

Super fun.

So I guess the question is,

will Google and SEO one day

go the way of Blockbuster

far off in the future? We don't

know, but I think we could say, Jeff,

the demise of Google

right now is potentially.

Overhyped. What? Say you about that.

I mean, no matter how this plays out,

Google's going to be fine.

Google has a corporation,

they've got the infrastructure,

they have all the best AI

researchers in the world.

Their new Gemini 2.5 Pro

model is just killer.

It's insane. They've been play with a lot.

Yeah, they've really caught

up to the AI race quickly.

So props to them.

The big question though is what about

search these 10 blue links that we have on

page one? Are we still going

to be searching that way?

And there's a big question mark there.

Google's now testing their

AI mode where it changes the

homepage of Google instead

of having a search box,

it's now a conversation box more similar

to chat GPT right now that's just

in testing. So we don't know what's

going to come out of that test.

Is Google going to be like, oh,

wow, the engagement's way higher,

people are staying on our site longer,

we're going to make this the default,

or are they going to be like,

ah, people don't trust it yet,

there's still some hallucinations.

We're still the best experience

and they're going to stick

to how it's now? It's

a big question mark,

but the one part of it that no one really

talks about that's so key is just the

processing cost to serve a query.

So if you go into Google and you type in,

let's just say what are

the best gaming laptops?

What Google can process that

quickly, it pulls from their index,

it has temp links. Great.

If you're on AI mode's,

it'll pull five to seven queries.

It will then have to pull in all this

processing abilities from the LLM to

process the results and then serve it up.

So their cost per query is

going to go up a lot. Now,

Google are the kings of infrastructure

and servers and data centers,

and so they'll be able to get

these costs down over time.

But if their cost per query

goes way up and their ads,

the revenue per query goes

down because there's less ads,

it starts to not make

financial sense for them.

So even if the user experience

is perfect and way better,

I'm sure they're going to be balancing

out the financial viability of moving to

a more of an AI focused search result.

Yeah, it's a really good call out.

And we got to remember that It's

like 80 90% of Google's revenue is

from search ads or query-based ads,

and you could argue that a larger

percentage of their profits come.

From this. Oh, okay. Profits. Yeah,

profits are probably way more than that.

Yeah. Yeah, which is super interesting.

And so a couple sets

that I was looking at,

because I was curious

about this too, right?

An executive at Apple recently

said, Hey, for the first time ever,

we saw fewer searches,

fewer Google searches on

Safari was the caveat.

Google, however, released some data.

They did not comment

on Safari specifically,

which would lead you to believe that was

probably true. But they did say, Hey,

we're seeing increased search

volume across all platforms,

including Apple users. And so what's

interesting, I looked at this.

If you look at daily

search queries on Google,

8.3 billion a day in

13.6 billion a day in 2025.

So that is a massive leap. And just

from the financials just to say, Hey,

Google's going to be able to keep

the lights on for a little bit.

Earnings are up 12% year

over year. They had a beat.

So their projections or their guidance

they gave to Wall Street, they beat it.

So things are good from that regard

from standpoint and what Google has

said, and I was at Google Marketing

Live, what Google has said is that, Hey,

the AI mode, that's part of what's

driving this increase in searches.

But your point is spot on where

it's heard different estimates,

but it's a multiple higher

to in terms of compute costs.

To.

Generate those AI mode results

than it is just a normal

query. And so Google's going to have

to figure that out. I think they will.

I think they'll be able to incorporate

ads in a pretty unique and pretty clever

way. And so listen,

I think there's some existential

threats facing Google.

There's also the antitrust

lawsuit and things like that.

And so the future is not super clear,

but I do think Google's going to

be able to figure it out. And yeah,

you mentioned AI scientists in 2015,

that's when Google bought Deep Mind,

which is one of the leading AI

research companies on the planet.

Some of those top researchers, top

scientists are still at Google.

I think they've got the

best team. And so yeah,

I think they'll be able to figure it

out. But it is interesting, right?

It is an interesting season right now.

And so any other points on that,

on Google's demise or what the future

is going to hold for them before we get

into some tactical stuff?

Yeah, I think that pretty much covers.

I mean at this point it's no longer an

infrastructure issue with data centers

and servers. It's no longer

a software issue with LLMs.

They have all that. It's really

just a user experience UI issue.

How do they take this all and

give the right user experience?

So we'll see what comes up with AI mode.

It'll be interesting. It'll be really.

Interesting to watch. For sure,

for sure. So came in super good.

I'm excited about it.

Why don't we do this before we

talk about SEO and AI optimization?

They do go hand in hand.

Let's back up a little bit and talk

about what are the components of SEO.

So I know in the early days we would

always talk, Hey, there's technical SEO,

and there's onsite SEO, and

then there's offsite, SEO.

How would you define though SEO now

and what are the big components of.

It?

I have what I call the four buckets

or four components of SEO you already

mentioned. Some of 'em, technical,

SEO number one can Google crawl.

Your website is your insight

indexable. This is site maps.

This is robots tech structured data,

basically making sure Google

can crawl all your pages,

can index all your pages and you don't

have any issues that's going to slow down

or hurt your ranking. So that's technical.

SEO number two is page optimization.

This is making sure of your keyword and

the title tags, the meta descriptions,

the header tags, also

having it in your content,

just making sure your pages are

properly targeting the right keywords.

Number three is going to be

content. This is e-commerce.

So do your category pages

and collection pages.

Have a description that describes

your products and provides a good user

experience. Do your products

have good descriptions?

Do you have blog posts targeting relevant

keywords? So that's number three.

And then the last one,

which for most people listening to this

is probably the most important. I mean,

if you're a large brand

at very high authority,

you probably don't need to focus much on

link building, but most people who are

doing seven figures to low eight figures,

the biggest benefit is probably going

to be link building that's getting other

websites to mention you and link and

have a hyperlink back to your site.

And it's so interesting, and

I remember several years ago,

Google's been trying to downplay

backlinks and even say they don't work and

stuff, but I think a lot of the people

that have been doing SEOA long time like

yourself, like me, were like, well,

that's kind of what Google was built on.

The original innovation that Google had.

It was a project called bankrupt

just to get super nerdy.

And the whole idea was Larry Page

and Serge Bren were like, Hey,

what if we could look at the entire

internet, but based on the links?

And then wouldn't that be

a vote of confidence if a

lot of people are linking to

this page or this site,

that is what gives it authority

or makes it trustworthy.

They created page rank anyway, so

super interesting. So it's like, yeah,

I don't think they're going

to get away from that, right?

That's still got to be the best signal.

Probably Google's just getting better

at weeding out spammy paid for junkie

links, although that's

maybe debatable as well.

Yeah, and I mean,

there's a study done recently as

just earlier this year in January,

and they looked at, this is coming from

hfs. They looked at something crazy.

It was like, I think it

was a million keywords.

So that's a million search results.

And they did all this statistical analysis

to see what ranking factors correlate

or which factors correlate with rankings

and the number of backlinks to a

page. So if we stick with

the whole gaming laptops,

I'm a recovering gamer, so if

we stick with gaming laptops,

and I have my Jeff's laptops.com

website and I have my

gaming laptops page,

the number of links to that collection

page is one of the highest correlated

ranking factors for those

stats Nerds listening,

it was about 0.3 out with one

being perfectly correlated,

but in perspective,

most ranking factors in SEO

have a correlation of 0.05

or 0.1. So to have 0.3 is

substantial. It's very,

very high correlation.

You're going to have to have,

if you don't have back lanes, it's

going to be really hard to rank. Well.

It's like three to six x more

valuable than other ranking factors.

So to put that into context, that's

great. And maybe, okay, so we've,

we've got those four buckets of SEO,

let's break those down in a minute.

But maybe to back up just a

little bit before we do that,

what's the payoff here? Why do we

do this? If we invest time in this,

hopefully we've convinced you that the

demise of Google's a little bit down the

road at least, so you should invest

in it. But if we get this right,

what's in it for us? What could the

payoff be? What are the results you see?

I know it varies from category

to category, site to site,

but what could we see

here if we do this right?

Yeah, I mean, that's the question everyone

should ask before you invest in SEO.

And it's going to depend

on some, a few things.

It'll depend on are people searching or

even searching your keywords in Google,

or do you have a product that's new to

the market that people haven't heard of

where maybe you're better off doing

Facebook ads or YouTube ads? So firstly,

is the search interest there, how

competitive is it? If someone said, Hey.

I want to just real quick on that, Jeff,

I think that's a super important point.

One.

Of the ways we like to describe that is

does your product and does your category

depend more on demand generation where

you need to go out there and convince

people to start looking for your product?

They're not maybe thinking about it,

but if they saw it, they'd be interested.

Or is it more about demand capture.

Where.

You are capturing existing demand?

And so a couple of examples there.

On the demand capture side, we've done

quite a bit in the automotive space,

in auto parts and things like

that, especially on paid search.

And that's one of those things where

it's like, yeah, if I need brake pads,

well, first of all, I'm going to go to

a dealership, but if I need brake pads,

they're squeaking and there's an event,

and so then I just go search and I buy

brake pads. But if it's something like,

Hey, some new apparel that

I've never worn before,

or maybe the chiefs just made the

Super Bowl and so now there's something

popping up in my feed and I want to

buy it. That's demand generation.

And so understanding where your product,

your company sits on that continuum is

going to also determine how much is it

going to pay off to invest in SEO.

Yeah, 100%.

So we talked a little bit

earlier about dissecting a

bunch of e-commerce analytics accounts,

non-branded organic search's traffic.

So that means people going to

Google searching for a keyword,

but not having your brand name in there.

They're not searching OMG commerce,

they're searching YouTube ad

services, something like that.

So that was the highest

performing revenue wise.

So we know the potentials there,

but as far as what can you

expect as far as increases go,

I have some data there.

I looked at 152 SEO campaigns

over the past few years to see

on average, what was the increase after

three months, six months, nine months,

and 12 months, three months on average,

we saw about a 20% increase.

Six months was about 50%,

nine months was 65,

and a year was 75%. So.

That's just.

Ballpark. And it.

Changes increase in non.

Organic brand organic traffic. Correct.

Nice.

Yeah. So

if you're a massive brand and you're

getting hundreds of thousands of

visits a month, that 50 to 75%,

it's going to pay for itself

a thousand times over.

If you're a smaller startup and you're

only getting maybe a thousand visits a

month,

a 50 to 75% increase might

not be as substantial.

So a lot of this depends on for

SEO to be worth it. Obviously,

the more traffic you have now,

the more organic search revenue

you have now the better.

Think of it as like a multiplier.

If you're starting out,

it's going to be at least a year before

you really start getting good momentum.

But the potentials there.

If you do it and you're an industry

where people are searching your products,

it's not too competitive.

And the last caveat I'll give is that

your prices aren't too expensive.

I mentioned this briefly,

but if you have a premium product

that costs three x to four x,

so people get on Amazon,

you're going to have a much higher bounce

rate and Google's just not going to

rank you as high as your competitors.

Right, right. Yeah, totally, totally

makes sense. Okay, super helpful.

So then let's kind of break

down those buckets then.

Let's go through each one and kind

of talk about some of the tactics or

approaches that we should consider two to.

Fill that bucket. Sure. Bucket

number one, technical SEO.

If you're on Shopify, you probably don't

have to spend too much time on this.

Shopify is a very SEO friendly platform.

I'm sure most people

listen to this right now.

If I had to guess more half are

probably on Shopify. Totally.

Yeah.

Totally. It's a great platform. Very,

yeah, you probably don't have to

spend too much if you're on Shopify,

Magento two, BigCommerce or WooCommerce,

any of those four platforms,

you're probably pretty solid.

If you're on a custom platform,

if you're on Volution or you still

haven't left Yahoo stores or some of these

old legacy platforms,

you're probably going to want to spend

a lot more effort on technical SEO.

But for most people.

It's you're probably going

to want to migrate, honestly.

More so migrate. But for most people,

technical, SEO gets overblown.

I honestly think people

talk about it too much.

People love to talk about it because

it's something you can control.

You can go in and make

updates to your XML side map,

and you can make changes to your robots

text that your crawl efficiency is super

dialed in. You can make sure you

have schema on all these pages,

which a lot of times Google's not even

respecting all the different schemas and

structured markups these days.

So honestly, yes, there might be.

It's still good to have a professional,

do an audit and say, okay,

fix this and then move on. Don't

dwell on the technical SEO stage.

It should be a one and done type

thing. It should not be a big project.

Totally makes sense. Number two,

page optimization. Very simple.

Make sure whatever keyword

you're trying to rank for,

you have that in the

beginning of your title tag.

And if you're not familiar

what a title tag is,

if you search a keyword in Google,

it has that blue or purple

link that's the title tag.

It's a very important ranking factor.

Google puts a fair amount of weight

into what keywords you put in there.

In the search in general.

Then in the search results,

that title tag is going to become kind

of the headline almost for that organic

listing. Not always, Google can kind

of put whatever they want to put there,

but a lot of times the title tag shows

up there, but also shows up in the

tab of the browser as well.

So it's going to have some

pretty prominent placements

and Google gives it a lot

of weight.

And speaking of title tags,

like this is one thing I see a lot I

a mistake a lot of people make, and

you can have a very brandable name.

So I was talking with a client who they

sell leather conditioners and leather

cleaners. It's a product for,

if you have a car and you want to

have the leather look in its best,

you get this leather conditioner

that you can put on the car seats.

But they don't call it leather

conditioner. They call it rejuvenator oil,

and that's the brand name.

So the issue with that is people

aren't searching rejuvenator oil,

they're searching.

So their products weren't ranking very

well in Google because they're calling it

what they want to call it.

Not.

What the customers are calling it.

So finding a balance between

brandable names and keywords

is always something that you're

going to have to keep in mind,

but you're going to want to have that

whatever keyword you're ranking for,

ideally you want to have that in your

title tag as close to beginning as

possible.

Love.

It, love it. And then meta descriptions,

that's those two lines of black text

that we see in the search results.

These aren't really a ranking factor.

It doesn't matter if you have your

keyword in there a bunch or not at all.

The best way I like to describe it is

meta descriptions are your ad copy for

SEO. So having really well written meta

descriptions with your calls to actions,

unique selling points, it's going

to have a higher click-through rate,

which will send more traffic.

But if Google sees your listings

getting a higher click-through rate,

that's also going to have a

positive impact on rankings.

Yeah.

I.

Love that. So it's an indirect ranking

factor, isn't it, where it's like,

use this text to get more

clicks, organic clicks,

the more organic clicks you get.

Actually Google's going to reward

that by ranking you higher. So yeah,

it's an indirect but important piece.

And just to nerd out a little bit more,

Google had this massive

ranking factor leak last year.

We saw thousands of documents,

internal documents on what they're

looking at when scoring websites.

One of the things that's confirmed is

they look at the click-through rate and

the search results. So if

you're in position three,

but you have a higher click-through

rate than position two because you have

either a brand name that people

recognize or a really well-written meta

description, Google, it's one of

the most powerful ranking factors.

Google will move you up so fast.

Yes.

So yeah, metas script is going.

To huge impact. Again, that's a vote of

confidence, right? That's Google saying,

Hey,

people are voting with their clicks

and with their attention that they like

this result. So we're moving it up.

Exactly. And then the last

piece of page optimization,

second to last would be header tags.

This is what's actually

displayed on your page.

This is the big header that users

see. Not as important as a title tag,

but still there's some

ranking benefits there.

So make sure you have your keyword and

the header tag. That's kind of like the.

Headline for the page, right?

So when you open a page, it's.

Basically the headline

that you see exactly.

It's the big bold text you see at the

top. And then the last piece is content.

You want to include your

keyword in the content,

preferably at least once in

the first 100 words or so.

You want to include

variations throughout it.

You want to include related keywords.

So having your keyword throughout your

content is also a very helpful ranking

factor, which is why for category

pages and collection pages,

you want to have at least 200 to 300

words of content and sprinkle your keyword

in there a few times.

Love it. Love it. Okay,

so we got technical SEO that's probably

covered before on a reputable platform.

Most listeners are probably on

Shopify, so you're mostly good there.

Then we got page optimization, which is

really those factors, title tag content,

header tag. Yeah. So

it totally makes sense.

So then what's bucket number three.

Content? So with content,

where I see the most opportunity is

making sure your category pages and your

collection pages have that

200 to 300 words of content.

It can make such a big difference

in ranking. It's so easy to do,

especially with ai.

There's honestly no excuse not to have

some well-written category descriptions

on your pages.

And then there's also blog posts

now I think gets overblown a bit.

In the SEO world, everyone feels

like they have to create content.

You have to keep having fresh content

on your website that way Google keeps

indexing things. There's

all these myths about it.

My take on blogging is you

should only blog if there's

particular topics that have high search

volume and decent conversion potential.

So sticking with the gaming laptops,

I bet you there's a lot of

people searching best gaming

laptops or maybe they're

searching Dell versus

Lenovo gaming laptops.

Any keyword like that, that's like best

gaming laptops or comparison, Harrison,

or maybe it's laptops for

programming students.

Anytime that the keyword has some type

of search intent that they're looking to

do research and byproduct,

those are great blog posts to create

That way you're not just getting traffic,

but you can get conversions. But

writing about what is a laptop,

how to clean your laptop,

how to install Windows 12,

whatever it is, those are not going to

convert. Yes, they'll drive traffic rank.

Whatcha going to get from that? Exactly.

That's all going to be answered

in the AI overview anyway, so.

That's a hundred percent.

So realistically,

most clients I see,

I'd say maybe 20 to 30% actually have

some good topics where it makes sense to

go down that direction of

blogging. But for me, honestly,

about 70% of e-commerce

sites I take a look at.

I don't think blogging's a waste of

time and that they're not going to get a

positive ROI from it.

Just put content on the category

page, product page, things like that,

and leave the blog alone. Yeah.

Now another interesting thing,

I was talking to Steve at Seller Summit

and he was talking about how his blog

traffic has died. A lot of blog traffic

has died, and that was tied to a recent,

somewhat recent Google update. Can

you talk about that a little bit?

When did blogs, again,

maybe die is overdramatic,

but when did blogs die or when

did they reduce in importance?

Because there was definitely a

day early in our SEO careers,

I'm sure where leaning heavily

into blogs, that was a winning.

Strategy. Yeah, we can

go deep into this one.

I was actually working with Steve

on his blog while all this stuff was

unfolding. So we had worked

together, we Forex his blog traffic,

and then it was around 2023 that

Google had a barrage of updates,

different core algorithm updates.

They had the helpful content update,

and I'm going to give you a little

backstory and a tie it all back into your

question.

So essentially what happened is Google

was pretty good at giving results,

but what really dropped the

ball and really failed was

anything like best gaming

laptops, best protein powders,

best weight loss supplements, best VPNs,

the affiliates. And for those that

dunno what affiliate is, it's basically

I have a blog. I am going

to be an Amazon affiliate.

I include links to products on

Amazon. If people with those links,

I get a commission. So

there's an incentive for these

affiliates to rank as high

as they can. They can make a lot of money,

and they were making a lot of money,

millions upon millions of dollars.

So they're just flooding Google

with all these really crappy low

quality affiliate sites that just

regurgitating information on Amazon.

It's causing a nightmare for

Google. Everyone knew the results.

You just can't trust them.

It's just you're hearing reviews about

products and it's obvious they've never

even touched the product in their life.

They're just regurgitating Amazon

reviews and other information.

So Google what their solution to this was.

They pretty much just

decimated any middle tier,

low tier, standalone blog. If

you're just a blog, you're screwed.

But if you're an e-commerce store with

a real business that has a business

address and has customers and you

happen to have a blog doing great,

you're blogs can perform better than ever.

If you're a service provider like

Brett, you or me, and we have a blog,

we're established businesses. We

might even be Google My Business,

we might have a physical address

and we have a blog, that's great.

But if I'm just a blog and that's all

I do and I don't have a product or a

service, those sites got decimated.

Which makes sense.

And a lot of those were back in the day

when you would pay for backlinks and

things like that. Not

that I ever did that,

but you'd get links from sites like that.

And so a lot of them just got torched.

Yeah, it got destroyed. I mean,

the results now are way better.

But one of the byproducts of that

is even really good quality content.

Like Steve and his website, my

wife quit. Her job is good stuff.

He's a true industry expert. He

knows his stuff, his content's great.

It's a high authority I

think of for those SEO nerds,

domain rating 70 or domain rating

domain authority around 70, huge, huge.

But even then his traffic dropped

off like 90% because these updates.

Now I am working with one content

site that's pretty authoritative,

and we're doing an experiment right now.

So I have a theory because when I

work with Steve and I did analysis,

all his competitors that are just

standalone content sites, they plummeted.

They dropped off like 90%.

The sites that absorbed all those

rankings and benefited were the product

and service sites that had,

they were in Google My Business,

they were in Google's knowledge

graph. So if you do auto complete,

they'll show up as like a

known entity and Google.

And so right now I'm doing an

experiment to see if I can take a blog,

get them and Google my business,

get them a Wikipedia page,

get them all the signals that

show it's a legit business.

This a real business.

A real business. What impact

will that have? So TBD,

but the correlation is there.

I love that theory, man. That's

smart. Yeah, keep me posted on that.

That's super interesting.

Yeah, so to be determined,

but the correlation is still there.

The sites that have a physical address,

a phone number, they're in Google my

business, they're in the knowledge panel.

Those sites were fine.

The ones that didn't have a

knowledge panel or any of that,

they all just got decimated.

Got it, got it. Interesting. Okay,

super interesting insight there.

Thanks for sharing that. What

else about this content bucket?

What else would you advise or coach

us on for our e-commerce store?

That's pretty much it. I have

200, 300 on category pages.

Include your keyword and

then just one little pro tip.

If you're wondering what related

keywords to include in your content,

just search your keyword and Google image

search and you'll have that refinement

bar at the top.

Those are all great related keywords

that you might want to consider ones that

are applicable, including your content.

Interesting. Great, great

insight there. Cool.

So we've got our technical

on page, our content.

What's bucket number four? Bucket

number four is link building.

You want to get as many other sites

linking back to you as possible. Now,

if you want to do this, the white hat way,

one strategy that can work really well

for e-commerce sites is product reviews.

If you have a direct to consumer

product, you can find some blogs,

you send them some product for free, they

take some photos, they write about it,

and in the writeup, they're

going to include a link back.

So that's probably one of

the best ways to do it.

And you can also get some referral

traffic from these sites if it has a big

enough following.

Another strategy that can work well

but is extremely difficult is content

marketing, creating

content, promoting content.

And the reason it's so hard is when

you're doing content marketing for link

building,

it's less about what topics will appeal

to your customers and what topics will

appeal to bloggers. So you're probably

going to create content that might not

even interest your, it could be if

we're sticking with gaming laptops,

I could do an article

about gaming statistics,

like what percent of Americans youth spend

10 hours a day or more on video games,

which video games are the

most popular by hours?

I do a whole breakdown on all these

statistics that's not really going to

interest someone looking

to buy a gaming laptop,

but it could interest a journalist

who's writing about screen time on kids

and wants to reference a statistic.

Now that's going to get some backlink.

So it's why it's so hard to do it is

you have to really kind of change your

thinking and less of what will my

customers want versus what will the

journalists and the

bloggers want to link to.

Super interesting. Yeah.

So what are the most used tactics then,

and what are you coaching your clients

on in terms of practical ways to build

links? Because this has always been one

of those areas where it's the highest

correlation in terms of ranking factors.

It's how Google was

built based on backlinks,

but to do it the right way is really

time intensive and really difficult.

So what are some of the tips, suggestions,

advice that you give to clients?

So I'd say try go the white

hat as much as you can.

Definitely do the content

marketing or the product reviews.

But here's the sad truth about it.

If you want to get a

link to a product page,

if you want to get link to a

category page, nine times of the 10,

a blogger is going to require payment.

You could have the most compelling

pitch with the best product.

That's truly groundbreaking.

But these bloggers,

this is how they put food on

their table. They live off this.

This is their income. And

if they check your site,

if you were a library

or you were a nonprofit,

they're probably not going to charge you.

If you reach out to them and they

click on your site, it's like, oh,

this is an e-commerce

site. Nine times out of 10,

they're going to require payment.

So they might call it an editorial fee of

like, oh, we'll write about

you, we'll feature you,

but it's going to take time to pull up

that post and make the edits and then

publish it and do all this stuff.

So you can expect

anywhere from 50, I'd say,

to a hundred dollars of these editorial

fees or blog fees to get featured.

So that's the sad truth of it.

What's even kind of more sad is

I wish it didn't work as well.

I really wish that the

links paid links from

blogs didn't work, but they do. And the

correlations there, insights rank. Well,

the tricky part is deciphering a good

backlink from a bad one.

So let say have two blogs,

trying to determine which blog is going

to be helpful and which is going to be

harmful is extremely difficult.

I see even SEO veterans have been

doing this for five to 10 years.

They still get it wrong.

You have to look at, well,

what's the domain rating and

domain authority of the site?

Is this going to help me?

Okay, let's go a step deeper.

How much traffic does this have?

Does it actually have some rankings in

Google? But now they're getting smart,

and I don't know if you know this Brett,

but a lot of sites will manipulate

and game their traffic numbers by

artificially running a bunch of

fake searches on nonsense nonsense

keywords and that they ranked for.

So now they're inflating that.

So you have to go a step deeper and see

the keywords that are driving traffic

are those keywords related

to the site's main focus.

So there's so many checks you have to do.

We'll even go deep and look

at who is this linking out to?

Is it linking out to porn sites

and escort sites and Viagra sites?

So for most people, they stop

at level one and level two,

they'll look at the domain rating,

the traffic, they'll move on,

but you'll end up buying links that are

just absolute garbage and can hurt your

sites. So link billing, it's

so hard for that reason.

So that's why I say if you're going

to do it, the white hat approach,

going to real blogs and product reviews

and take a stab at content marketing

is probably best. But just

know of all the four buckets,

link billing is the most difficult and

the hardest for an e-commerce brand to

make a core competency.

Yeah, it totally makes sense,

man. Super, super helpful.

So let's then get to maybe the question

that was most burning in people's

minds. Well then what about

ai, SEO? So what do we do?

So, okay, this is our core SEO,

and that's aimed at Google,

but what if we want to rank in

Jet GPT or Perplexity or Gemini,

which is related to Google or

other AI that's yet to come?

What's your advice on that?

It's a great question. There is some

overlap. If you're doing SEO, right,

a lot of it's going to

carry over to chat GPT.

So one thing that chat GT does is a lot

of times they'll show the sources of

where it's pulling information

from and it's pulling from the web.

So content marketing and blocking

can be great if you have some posts

and anyone to this, if you want

to show up better in chat g bt,

first thing you should do is do a best

gaming laptops, best protein powder,

whatever your product is, create a buyer's

guide or a product roundup about it.

So those get picked up very

frequently in chat GBT,

so you get a little more

influence on swaying the model,

whatever you think is best. So blogging,

content marketing is one.

Link building is another one.

We see if there's getting

mentioned on other websites,

getting your product reviews

on authoritative sites,

those are also getting picked

up as sources. So that can help.

It's like a PR play where the

more sites and webpages in the web

that mention your products, The higher

chance you have of being cited in these

large language models.

But if you want to be just kind of go

straight to the jugular on how you're

going to rank, well search

your keyword or go into a chat,

GPT type best protein powder,

whatever your keyword is in there,

scroll down, look at the sources,

it's going to tell you exactly where

it's pulling from to generic this result

and try to get your

product featured in those.

So it's going to show you all

these top 10 protein powder,

top eight protein powder type pages.

You're going to want to reach out to them.

You're probably going to have

to send them free product.

You'll probably have to send them an

affiliate link to make it worth it.

You'll probably have to have a compelling

pitch on why they should include you.

But that what I'm seeing

is the biggest impact.

We did some correlation research on this,

and it was like we talked about links

being highly correlated with 0.3

when it came to chat GPT and

getting your product included,

it was like 0.45 correlation

of the number of different

product roundups you were cited in.

So the more product roundups your product

is found in, that's in the sources,

the much higher chance you're going to

have of showing up in those chat GBT

shopping carousels.

Yeah, it totally makes sense. And in some

ways it's similar to product reviews.

And what I mean by that is

looking at Amazon reviews,

product reviews make a big difference

in terms of ranking and conversions and

all those things. And the issue

is that they can be gamed, right?

People can manipulate them. There's

tons of fake reviews. So it's like,

well then won't Amazon just get away

from that? And the real answer is no,

they can't. There's no better signal.

Every user or every shopper

wants to see reviews.

And so it's got to get better at

weeding out the crappy reviews.

And I think it's the same

thing with these roundup blogs,

with backlinks, with things like that.

These are signals that when

done right are the clearest,

most powerful signals that

are out there right now.

And so really just got to do it the right

way, build those things the right way.

But it makes sense to me that those are

going to continue to be a ranking factor

for SEO and for AI SEO.

Yeah, I would a hundred percent

agree with that. Cool. Cool.

Awesome, man. Well,

this has been fantastic.

I really want to pick your brain on AI

as well. So how about, let's do this.

Let's be like a little

teaser. We'll do another ai,

let's do an AI focused episode. This

will be the little teaser for it.

What models are you playing

with the most right now?

What are you most excited about with

ai and specifically like AI and working

with your agency and

automation and stuff like that?

And is there one cool thing you can

share with the audience related to ai?

Yeah, so models wise, I was

using Claude 3.7 a bunch,

and then four for a while, but then

I started using Gemini 2.5 pro,

and I think that's my favorite one

right now. What I love doing for fun,

I'm not a coder, I've always

wanted to be a programmer,

but I dunno how to program. So

I've been using this tool Rept,

which is like an AI code generator,

and I've been able to build some

pretty powerful apps that can take a

screenshot of a blog, pass

that screenshot to an AI model,

analyze it, and then from

that analysis also pull on

keyword ranking data for page

and then generate title tags,

meta descriptions and headers.

So basically automating the SEO process

where you take a screenshot of a page,

you pull on the ranking data,

you give all this to the AI model

and have it optimize the page.

So as far as your teaser goes,

literally just last week I pulled

the trigger and hired three

full-time AI automation specialists.

And we're doing an experiment

to build a fully autonomous

AI agency where there'd be no people.

It's just I'm going to see how

many of the SEO steps can I

automate with ai? And instead of

having an actual account manager,

you have your AI account manager. So this

is something that we're building out.

Dude, can't wait to see that. Okay.

That was a good teaser right there.

That was powerful. Definitely going

to do an AI episode coming up next.

And so looking forward to that. But Jeff,

as people are listening to this

and they're like, dang, alright,

I got to think about seo. I got to think

about ai seo. I need to talk to Jeff.

How can people reach out to

you? How can they work with you?

Yeah, you can go to my website.

It's just 1 8 0 marketing.com,

180 marketing.com. Or you can

just shoot me an email directly.

My email is Jeff at 1 8 0 marketing.com.

Happy to hear from you guys.

And Jeff, as you can tell,

just super cool dude,

the kind of guy you want to hang

out with. Grab a beer with talk,

SEO and talk e-commerce with. And so

with that, Jeff, awesome job, man.

Thanks for the time and looking forward

to that AI episode. Thanks, Brett.

This has been fun. Awesome. And as

always, thank you for tuning in.

Would love to hear from you,

connect with me on LinkedIn or

shoot us a note about the pod.

Or if you like this episode,

share it with somebody that you

think will enjoy it. And with that,

until next time, thank you for listening.