EP #285] [ENG] - Importance of SEO to scale a brand beyond Amazon - Thomas Phillips

EP #285] [ENG] - Importance of SEO to scale a brand beyond Amazon - Thomas Phillips Unknown Speaker: Welcome to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. This is the place for everything related to Amazon private label and e-commerce. Learn exactly what you need to start or scale your business. Get insights from the top industry experts who will discuss the latest trends and best practices in the world of Amazon. From choosing products and sourcing from a supplier to setting up your Amazon account and marketing your business, you will hear it here. Let's get started. Here is your host, Vincenzo Toscano. Speaker 2: Hello guys, welcome to another episode of The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy, the place where everything related to Amazon FBA, Private Level and Ecommerce. My name is Vincenzo Toscano, Founder and CEO of Ecomcy and today we bring another special guest. His name is Thomas Phillips and he's the CEO at D2C ACO Agency, which I will say is one of those solutions that you have to consider right now when it comes to scaling your business beyond Amazon. We know that We get fixated into, you know, how things work only on Amazon, but for a lot of those brands that have been struggling on Amazon for the last year, they're already starting to figure out, you know, I have to have a presence of my own, my own website, my own channel. And understanding how SEO works is definitely the key to succeed beyond Amazon. And that's why we're going to be talking with Thomas today. So Thomas, it's a pleasure to have you on the show today. How are you doing, my friend? Speaker 1: Yeah, thank you so much. Yeah, I really appreciate it. First thing in the morning here in Austin, so bright and early, ready for it. Speaker 2: Let's roll. So as I was saying before going live, you know, I think for a lot of the listeners, you know, a big part of the audience are people that have a presence on Amazon and they're starting their stores beyond Amazon, Shopify, WooCommerce and all of that. And understanding ACO is something that people really struggle with because Let's be honest, SEO in Amazon is relatively simple compared to what you can actually do outside of Amazon when it comes to Google and all of that. It's much more complex. And what I want to do with today's episode, just to, you know, lay down some foundation, mistakes to avoid. And how things have changed, especially with AI, which I know that's been playing, you know, a lot of with a lot of things when it comes to how it's affecting ACO. Now, before going in with that, I would like to just take a minute or so to just have a quick interview on site about who is Thomas, your agency, and then let's go from there. Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Speaker 2: I appreciate that. Speaker 1: Yeah, so my name is Thomas Phillips. I started my first business when I was 13. It was ecommerce. I basically built mini finger skateboards in my dad's garage, sold them to 39 different countries in the first year and then it got to the point I had to close it down because I was so busy and I didn't understand about taking on employees. So that was my first real experience with building a website online. Selling products and everything around that. SEO was very very easy back then. Speaker 2: Yeah, I know. That's good. Speaker 1: Yeah, and then I realized that entrepreneurial bug side of things and then we basically just built out many many many brands coming up to today. Built, scaled and sold 16 different brands online now. And now we're transitioning into Helping clients as well as building our own brands in tandem with things, which has been extremely fulfilling, which is awesome. So I get to see sites go up and just our few brands from that side of things. So it's, yeah, it's been very, very fulfilling so far, which is awesome. Speaker 2: That's awesome. And I think, you know, every single time I bring founders to my show, that's one of the things I love the most. Most of us have agencies and provide solutions out there to entrepreneurs. Most of the time this solution comes because we went through the struggle ourselves and we had to figure out that for our own business and now we just essentially don't want you guys to do the same expensive mistakes. I can't tell you how many thousands of dollars I wasted trying to figure Amazon many years ago. I'm sure you also did the same when you were learning ACL. So you know that's the beauty of really putting this knowledge out there and now be able to support so many entrepreneurs to succeed into their journey. Speaker 1: Now. Speaker 2: Let's bring to the conversation SEO, because I feel when it comes to SEO, it's such a vast topic, like there's so many things that you really need to master when it comes to making sure you have a good exposure as an ecommerce brand that a lot of people don't really know how to put together and therefore draft a strategy for their business. I would like to start with the basics. I think, you know, when I say basics, it's like what are some of the main things you have to understand about SEO because I feel a lot of people don't even know what are some of the basics and if you don't know that, like how you even go into the rabbit hole of the other more complex things. So let's start with that, like what are some of the initial conversations you have with people when they come to you and say, you know, I have this website, I just launched this website, how do I make sure I get some SEO kind of Thing going on here. Speaker 1: Yeah. Excellent question. So, um, I think really understanding or rather what we see a lot, a lot of, um, uh, newer Shopify stores, um, doing is they just kind of create the products and create the collection pages that they, um, think is, is associated with the right keyword. So what we usually find is that a bunch of the collection pages are just not set up for the actual keyword that is going to bring in the highest ROI. So let's say, for example, like a red hat I've got on the shelf here. Someone might say, oh, this is a burgundy hat with a white outline or something, right? Whereas actually it is a red hat in its core. So if you went after that keyword instead, that keyword is so much bigger than some very, very specific random thing that you might have named your product. So what we find is that going back through and doing all the keyword research to find all the different variations of the keywords that people are searching to find that exact product, That is like the core of it and then we build out the website architecture around that. So is it going to be a collection page or is it going to be a product page? And when you have that foundation, you have that whole blueprint and footprint laid out, Google is then very easily able to go like, okay, this collection page is for red hats or this collection page is for this particular thing. So already you're getting like a leg up on the competition by just researching properly all the different types of keywords that people are searching to find that same product. Because a lot of the time, there's like multiple search terms that mean the same product. So it's a case of working all of that out. You can use a tool like Ahrefs from an SEO perspective. Yeah, to basically work all of that out. So that is, I would say, one of the core things, the absolute number one first step building out the site. Speaker 2: Something I want to add on this, which is actually good that you're describing so much depth, is that it seems like from what you're saying, SEO is a conversation we have to have Before even we launched the website, because a lot of times I see people do the mistake that say, let me do the website, let me do all the branding and everything, and ACO is a second thought. And then what they don't realize is, you know, the assumptions and the foundation you did the website based on is wrong in the first place. All the things you're building on top of it, release it will also be wrong. So it's actually very good that your point that ACO is something that has to happen from day one. So you can use that as the seed of what is going to come next, right? Speaker 1: Absolutely. Yeah. And it's just the absolute best way of working out like, okay, what are all the blog articles I might create? Because we don't just want to create hundreds of random articles around hats, as an example, we want to be very, very deliberate with it. So we want it to create relevancy around the existing products that we have. But we also want to have the problem and solution kind of articles because those are the ones that are way more likely to convert into a sale. So the ROI is a lot higher. So just being very, very, very deliberate with every single page that's created on the website. Yeah, number one step, hugely important. You save yourself so much time and aggravation. And from a technical SEO standpoint, if you can build out the website correctly from the start and you're not chopping and changing and changing URLs and you have redirects going everywhere and 404s because you deleted a bunch of products, you just cause more issues for yourself in the long term by not setting up correct from the start. Speaker 2: Cool. Now, let's bring to the conversation around SEO the timelines associated with that, because I feel that's another mistake people do. They think SEO is something that you do certain changes and 24 hours is your first page in Google. And it doesn't work like that. It takes time. And I would like you to pick your brain in terms of why it takes time and what are some of the things that could potentially accelerate that exposure in terms of resources. What is your take on that as well? Speaker 1: Yeah, great question. So there's two main buckets really. It's either you're starting a brand new website. It has zero authority with Google. You might have just bought the domain name. There's no pages indexed in Google right now. That website is going to take a lot longer to rank than the second bucket, which is an existing website. So they're really the clients that we love to work with because we can get a lot quicker results. We work with both, but I'll explain the other side. So as an example, we have a client who The Ecommerce Lab has had their brand for like 10 plus years. Their website was super, super unoptimized. They had a whole bunch of collection pages and products. And for the keyword tennis skirt, they were like 70th or something like that. We have the case study on our website. And within two weeks, we're able to get them up to the top, the first page, and then within 90 days into the top three. 43,000 searches per month, so absolutely huge. And that is really building off of the existing power and reputation and authority that they have with Google because they already had a good number of links, backlinks, like other websites linking to their website. They already had a baseline amount of power that Google associates with that brand. This is the brand new website. There is zero authority. You know, Google doesn't know who you are. Essentially, it's kind of like if you literally just opened up an Instagram account, you know, you're not a celebrity yet from that side of things. And it's really the links. It's other websites linking to your website that build up that reputation and trust with Google. And that's why a brand new website can't rank for red hats all of a sudden on day one. You have to compound that and build it up. Depending on how fast, um, and the competition, like how fast people want to go and, and the competition level, you know, you, it depends on how quickly you're going to risk, you're going to see like keywords increase and ultimately, uh, see a return on, on, uh, on capital deployed essentially. Speaker 2: Cool. Now I have a question regarding this because you mentioned links. Um, I have a question I'm sure a lot of people might ask themselves, which is, does it matter what kind of authorities are pointing back to your website? Because I'm assuming maybe you can point me out in the right direction. If I'm getting, for example, mentioned in BBC News or something like, you know, SBN or some of these big entities in terms of exposure to Google compared to a random website. I guess the way to my history gets is different, right? It depends also on the authority dimension and links, right? Speaker 1: A hundred percent, yeah. Not all links are created equal, unfortunately. Yeah, and you're a hundred percent correct. You know, a link from Forbes, as an example, is a hundred times more powerful than a link from your local bakery up the road. You have a website, you know, from that side of things. So I think looking at links as like a vote of confidence from Google is a really good way of looking at it. If the president said, hey, go to this pizza shop versus some random person in the street, who would you trust more? Subjective, I guess. If it was your best friend versus some random in the street, that might be a better analogy. You're going to trust one source more than the other. And essentially, that's the same with links and power. Speaker 2: Cool. Now, another thing is Regarding the platform that you use when it comes to your website because I heard some certain rumors and maybe you can confirm this is true or not. There's a certain what we call the holes where your website is built on that might rank better than others. Some people say Shopify is better, some people say WooCommerce is better, some people say WordPress. So there is a certain conversation around those things and I get those questions all the time. Like what do you see based on your experience? Do you really think it matters, you know, what is the engine you build your website on or realistically it's more down to what we've been discussing which is the domain that has the history attributed to? Speaker 1: Yeah, that's an excellent question. Yeah, so Shopify is just by far the easiest to set up. It has the most integrations. It ticks all the boxes around that. From an SEO point of view, it's pretty much there. There are core things that our developer goes in immediately and fixes because Shopify just still have not fixed them from an SEO point of view. So immediately you get a A nice little bump on that, which is great. Um, uh, you know, WordPress slash WooCommerce, um, again, also another great platform. Uh, we've ranked many, many, uh, WordPress sites. Um, the trouble that I have with WooCommerce though, is the plugins are like very fickle. Like they. Speaker 2: It's not as clean as Shopify for example, that's very clean. Speaker 1: Yeah, and Shopify there's some kind of like level of code checking because we've had it before where like a Stripe app or plugin on WooCommerce or WordPress. It's been a while since we last updated. We didn't realize that it then conflicted with our theme and then it knocked out the checkout for like four days before we realized and we're like, what's going on? So yeah, it's kind of swings and roundabouts really. But we see a lot of people, you know, they're on BigCommerce or they're on WordPress and then they migrate over to Shopify. Shopify charges a lot of fees as well. So it's kind of like, you've got to work out what's going to be best for you. Speaker 2: Cool. Now in terms of SEO, another question I get all the time is also how does the geographical effort might impact your rank across the board? Because especially as an ecommerce brand, you could have enough sometimes present in different countries. Which sometimes increases the complexity because not only the effort you have to do in the specific region, but it comes down to also language, right? So I mentioned this because a lot of people do Amazon, you should do international markets and I'm sure they might ask themselves, okay, how does it work when it goes beyond the USA? I'm also have to do Europe and things like that. Is the strategy then becomes localized at the region level? Like what is your experience with that as well? Speaker 1: Yeah, so I mean, to be fair, this is where Shopify do it really, really well. Like they have Shopify markets, which is built in directly. Not to be confused with Shopify markets pro. I don't know why they try and charge for that. But yeah, Shopify markets anyway. And from an SEO point of view, if you set up other locations on the sub domain, Sorry, on a subfolder. Very, very important because it will piggyback off the power of the existing websites. So, for example, you know, redhats.com forward slash en-gb for UK as an example. So, yeah, and we rank that a lot, right? So, it really depends on the client. If they want to completely translate the website into, say, Swedish because they want to go into Sweden, highly, highly recommended. And Google essentially sees that section of the website as the Swedish section. So, it starts to then rank that independent of And also they, Shopify, have excellent tools built in where, you know, you can change it, change the currency over. You can even change, like, is it going to be .99, you know, at the end of the pricing and everything like that, you can inflate the pricing for, you know, to swallow the VAT and in certain locations, all kinds of stuff. So they handle that very, very well, to be fair. So that would be my recommendation. That's what we use. Speaker 2: Nice. Cool. And now when it comes to Advertising, this is another thing that comes to me all the time. It's like, what is the effect of advertising as well in terms of how your ACO gets impacted? Because just to make a quick parenthesis, in Amazon, we all know that if you do advertising and you get sales through a specific keyword, Amazon ranks you higher on that keyword. So does it work the same when it comes to ACO? Like if you run Google Ads, for example, and you start converting very well on that keyword, does it also help you with ACO exposure organically? Or how does it work? Speaker 1: No, no, unfortunately not. Yeah, it's not a pay to play type thing, annoyingly. But I think it's the analogy that would make most sense for Amazon sellers is, you know, that as you make more sales on Amazon, obviously, Amazon then starts to bring your listing up. Now, the same applies with links. Essentially, so the more high powered links that are relevant to your website that you get, the higher Google essentially is going to lift your website up. So I think that's probably a really good way of looking at it from that side of things. Speaker 2: But yeah, unfortunately, as a metric click, try to track how many clicks you get on your links from different sources. That's going to be, I guess, how you define success on SEO kind of work, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, so yeah, as a KPI, we'd want to be understanding. So we mainly use Google Analytics unless the client has A third-party tracking software built in if they're spending a lot on paid ads like TripleWhale or HiROS. Then we'd also track inside of there. So we want to see like, okay, which pages are getting the most clicks right now? We're tracking each keyword. What position are they in right now? What do we need more links for? What do we need less? Which pages need a lot more content? Because we add a lot of content to collection pages. Big, big thing that a lot of people miss. We want to add as much relevancy to the page as possible. So Google fully understands like, okay, This is 100% the right keyword that we should be ranking here. Speaker 2: Cool. Now, in terms of the sources of these, in terms of these links that come to your website, what do you feel is the most effective? Like what I say in terms of type, I mean, do you recommend doing more blogs? Or more like working with influencers or working more with, you know, YouTube channels that put your links into the description. What kind of sorts of traffic do you think is the most effective or tends to have the highest conversion? Speaker 1: Yeah. So in terms of like acquiring a link for the site, Digital PR is like my absolute preference. So I'll give you a few different ways that we get that. So number one is through gift guides. So for example, a writer at Forbes is writing up the best Ferrari hats, whatever it might be. We would then want to be pitching our product or our client's product directly to that journalist so that they then feature their product inside of that gift guide. And when that goes live, obviously, we potentially might get sales as well from it, which is awesome. But we get a link directly from that high powered website. So that's one of the first ways. Another way would be expert commentary. If there was, it really depends on the niche with this one as well. Like, for example, we have a luxury furniture company, and we have an interior designer who essentially works for them. And then they can then give expert commentary on, you know, the latest shade of wall colors and how to style your lounge and everything like that. So that's another really good way. And then the final way is data-driven stories. So this is where we're like going out and pulling a whole bunch of data. Usually it's like state by state versus, so for example, we did one, which state is the most sweet, the most and least sweet obsessed for a candy client that we have. And essentially, that's like breaking down state-by-state data with all these different keywords, putting everything together, building that into an infographic, and then pitching that to journalists. So that works very, very well as well. So it's really earned media. And that's the annoying thing. It takes a little bit more time. But the links that you get from it, you know, money can't buy, essentially, which is what we want. That is like the biggest association that Google's like, sweet. We trust you now, you know. Speaker 2: I agree, I agree. Now, something with these links, in terms of attribution and, you know, results that can bring to you, is good enough that your links are mentioning on this, for example, travel guides or gift guides? It also matters how many times it gets clicked. I guess it has to be a bit of both because if they only mention the link but nobody clicks, I guess that also has a negative effect to some extent, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah, I mean, there was like a, there was a leak from the Google algorithm six months or a year ago now. And that was one of the parts of the algorithm in there. So how many people click through from a link, then determines the potential power of that link as well. But it was, by the looks of things, it was quite a low down part of the algorithm, it would just help If people were clicking through. So that's really where digital PR works really, really nicely because obviously on those top publications, they do get hundreds of people viewing each of the articles that they post, which is fantastic. So yeah, tick the box there. Speaker 2: Cool. And I guess to start concluding like what we say is one of the, you know, maybe biggest mistake or we could even flip the question to what is one of the things people have to focus on 2025 to really get the most out of SEO. Speaker 1: I would say link building for sure, but it's also the hardest, but it's the biggest factor of what Google looks at essentially. It's like the thorn in the side, so to speak, but when you get it right and you start getting the right links, it's just rocking. Speaker 2: You have to do it constantly, I guess, because maybe people think, oh, okay, I just pay a ton of links once and then that's it. But I guess this is something you have to also do repetitively, right? Speaker 1: Yeah, absolutely. Because if you think about it like Amazon, all your competitors are getting sales as well. So if you all of a sudden stop getting sales and now you're at number six in the listing, you're probably going to start dropping because other people are starting to get more sales. So if you think about it in a similar way with SEO, all your competitors, especially on the top 10 first page of Google, they are all doing SEO like 100% or else they wouldn't be there. They're all becoming more and more powerful. So you need to stay ahead of them to maintain that position. So there's a big thing at the agency of what we do is we want to drive up to the top three positions as quickly as possible. And we change the strategy to rank and defend. Because when you can stay at those top three positions for the longest period of time, that's when you're just creaming the profit. Because number one spot gets 40% of the clicks. Number 10 gets like 1.5 or 0.5. Yeah, fifth position gets 6%. So even jumping up from fifth From, you know, 5 or 6% up to first 40% of the clicks is huge, huge jump. So really being in that top position, staying there for the longest period of time is, yeah, where everyone wants to be. It's also the hardest place to be. Speaker 2: Yeah, for sure. Awesome, Thomas. So, I mean, it's been a pleasure to have you on the show. Thank you so much. I know, you know, this is only a tiny part of SEO. It's so much more than that. And that's why I'm sure people want to reach out to you, you know, to discuss this in more depth or potentially work with you. So tell us how people can find you. Speaker 1: Yeah, I mean you can head over to DTCSEOagency.com or follow me on socials at ThomasMRPhillips. Yeah, just search DTCSEOagency. We'll come up first. Speaker 2: Awesome. I'm gonna make sure to put everything down in the description. Other than that, you know, it's been a pleasure and see you soon. Yeah. Thank you for your time. Speaker 1: Fantastic. Thank you so much. Speaker 2: Thank you. Unknown Speaker: Thanks for listening to The Ecommerce Lab By Ecomcy. 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