You Really Can Use AI To Level Up Your Organic Traffic This Year — Michael Simmons | How To Generate Organic Traffic On Shopify, Why AI Makes SEO Faster

You Really Can Use AI To Level Up Your Organic Traffic This Year — Michael Simmons | How To Generate Organic Traffic On Shopify, Why AI Makes SEO Faster And Easier, What SEO Strategy Works Best, How Google Ads Affect Search Engine Speaker 1: This episode is sponsored by Bravo. Time to take your marketing to the next level. Bravo is the all-in-one marketing platform that helps you connect with customers through email, SMS, WhatsApp, and automation – all from one easy-to-use platform. Keep your customer data organized, personalize every message, and drive real engagement effortlessly. Try Bravo for free or use eCB to save 50% on starter and business plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Head to bravo.com slash eCB today. You will find a link also in the show notes. Hello and welcome to another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. In today's episode, we're diving into AI and how you can boost your organic traffic with the help of AI. Joining me again as a returning guest is Mike Simmons. He helped countless store owners boost their SEO and walk away with bigger paydays. Mike's journey is impressive from software engineer to MBA to scaling a health tech startup to 21 million in revenue and 200 employees. He has raised 60 million in venture capital and now he's bringing that expertise to Shopify entrepreneurs. So we have a lot to cover. Let's welcome Mike to the show. Hi, how are you today? Speaker 2: I'm Brad Claus. Great to see you again and nice to be on with your listeners again as well. Hope everyone's having a good day. Speaker 1: Let's dive into it. So most Shopify store owners struggle to get traffic without paying for ads. Why is getting organic traffic still such a challenge for them? Speaker 2: If you look at where these platforms invest, if you look at Google or Meta as examples, they are spending billions of dollars probably creating the perfect product to help you buy an ad and understand the analytics behind your ad. That doesn't exist the same way. The motivation to develop a product for optimizing your SEO doesn't exist in those companies the way that it does to buy ads because that's such a big revenue stream for them. And the other thing that's really important is that they have great search results on the search engines results pages and they want to reward those websites that are. And today, we're going to be talking about how to be the masters of their domain, right? Or the websites that know a lot about whatever the topic is that people are searching for. They want to understand who actually knows what they're talking about and is offering great products and things like that. And that's how they keep their search engine results pages high quality. We know that that's what the motivation is of the Google strategy. And then what's left out of that is like, what's the great product to help Today, we're going to talk about how to implement good CEOs so that they can get ranked and they can be recognized as a high-trusted content on a particular topic. And that's where products like the ones we're going to be talking about today come in because that's really the challenge is that the market has developed in such a way that the best products in top of funnel products are in the ad space. And that's really where all the development and product research has gone. And there's a whole other market that's outside of the Google or meta ecosystem that are trying to help the brands and the entrepreneurs find their way into those listings. And that industry is probably dwarfed by the ad revenues. So I think that's why the product evolved so differently. Speaker 1: It makes perfect sense. I think Google is sort of in between on two sides. Obviously, they want to make money with selling their ads and then still providing good search results. I reckon, as you said, the focus is more on selling ads because that's easier for them to make revenue there. Now, for a smaller brand, In the ecommerce space, it's always very difficult to get into the rankings. You have fast-moving products, a lot of SKUs coming in, specifically with Shopify. So where do you see is the biggest advantage of using AI to get SEO right and to get your store ranked? Speaker 2: If we think about the overall funnel of your sales, we could just break it up into three parts. The top of funnel or what I call tofu, middle of funnel, and then bottom of the funnel. And then once you have a customer, then you're thinking about things like retention of that. But you really need a strategy at each of those parts of the funnel. And the strategies that are available to us, so like in SEO land, we're talking about top of funnel. And the strategies that are available to us in the Top of Funnel is either paid ads or organic traffic finding their way to your site. That's the whole game. So of those two things, obviously, we are more interested in the SEO. It's not a conversation about ad buying strategies. It's about SEO strategy. And what we want to think about there is really getting into the mindset that in search engine optimization, it's a zero-sum game. It's a dog-eat-dog world, let's say. You have to be willing and have the mindset that you have to knock somebody off in order to get your spot there. It's not like the rest of life where we can all win. It's really there's only five places. They're filled. You got to get on there. You got to knock somebody off. So the interesting thing is to think about what are the weaknesses of the brands or the pages that are ranking at the top of the stack for the words that you care about the most. And identifying what those weak spots are shouldn't be able to inform you as a brand that's emerging or trying to compete in a new product area and things like that. It should inform you on how to create your content so that you can take advantage of the places that are weak. We have to think in this way or you're going to lose focus on the most important thing in search engine optimization, which is getting to the top of the organic search engine results listings. Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense. I think everyone can win because the five top spots are where you want to be. It's quite important. I think you highlighted this organic traffic, and I think that's a long saying for a very long time. Organic traffic is the best traffic because you invest once to get there, and then the traffic just comes in. It's the art and science of SEO where a lot of people get scared because it's a long-term game. You need to be on it. It can be, to a certain degree, very technical, but it's definitely very time-consuming. So what has changed? How is this getting easier? Speaker 2: That's a really good question. I think one of the most encouraging things and exciting things in this business of search engine optimization is the capabilities that generated AI gives us. We have, you know, we've been running apps in the Shopify app store around SEO for many years. And ever since the original founder of the app that I currently run was in this space, you know, people were asking him for basically an easy button. Can I just install your app and make everything better? And to some extent, We've been able, we can help. By just installing the app, we can do some things, implement some things that are going to make it better. But it's never really been able to take the ball and run downfield with it, you know, to really score the goal that you need. And generative AI takes us an incredible step down that idea because, so AI is like super powerful, but it's also like capable of doing really disastrous things, right? And like, if you, I'm sure all of your listeners have had this experience, like, I'll use AI for X, fill in the blank. And then they, you know, type in a question or a prompt and get back like something that's, you know, way too flowery or way off base. And like, I always find I have to check the math on what AI does. So you have to, you really have to look at like, what is the prompt, the set of prompts or the series of prompts that are going to get you a good result? So It's like we have this very wide capability with AI, but we have to put some boundaries on it to make it have the results that we want. So, let's say magic that's been unleashed with generative AI and the practical know-how of the industry. With all of our experience, you couple those two things together and you can put in the brand's hands some incredibly powerful tools that will take a huge amount of time off of the laborious work and the laborious nature of the work. That SEO has always been associated with. So it's a pretty amazing time in the SEO industry to be able to bring tools to the market that can make it much, much easier for the end user to get great results without paying, you know, pretty high prices for sometimes really unclear deliverables. And that's sort of the story that we hear all the time from our clients that have tried to use an SEO agency There's a lot of great SEO agencies out there, but oftentimes the work, because it's slow, it's a little behind the scenes, it's not really clear what's happening and people don't always feel like they can see or feel the value of that. But when you give them a tool, and all we ask them to do is give us some guidance and put us in the right direction and click the button, And they see improvements happen in front of their eyes. That's a much different rewarding experience and you can't compare the prices. I mean, it's a very inexpensive approach to staying on top of your SEO work if you're really leveraging the capability of AI plus the guardrails that you need to develop the right prompts. And I think that's what we're excited about in the work that we're doing. Speaker 1: And now a quick break to thank the sponsors of today's episode. Are you looking to take your business marketing to the next level? Meet Brevo, the all-in-one marketing and CRM platform designed to help you connect with customers, drive engagement, and grow your business. With Brevo you can manage all your customer interactions in one place, nurture leads through their built-in CRM, reach them through email and SMS, and boost retention with powerful automation efforts. Effortlessly create personalized multi-channel campaigns that ensure every single customer gets the right message at the right time. And that's not all. Brevo offers AI-driven personalization, advanced analytics, seamless integrations, and more, giving you everything you need to market smarter, not harder. Get started for free or use code ECB to save 50% on starter and business plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Head over to brevo.com slash ECB and take your marketing further with Brevo. You will find the link in the show notes. Now, I'm also very excited about that. I mean, obviously, I'm in the game for 25 years. I have worked with SEO agencies, and the example that you just gave is that they do not 100% understand what you're trying to achieve. So this happens quite often. And as I said, you don't see results very, very quickly. So I'm excited about what's happening there in the world of SEO. Now, with the app that you have and with Shopify, how does that work? How does the day-to-day work look like? Speaker 2: One of the things that we're super excited about is we're bringing a new app to market right now. We're calling it Plugin AI. It's an SEO-driven content optimizer or content generator specifically built for Shopify stores. It doesn't have any applicability outside of Shopify. We're completely focused on this experience, right? So it's deeply tied into the Shopify owners or the brand owners' experience. Basically, the way that this works is it looks at the existing products and content that you have, and then it looks at, you know, about 10 different areas on each of the pages, whether it's your category page or your product page, where it evaluates your content. How is the headline written? How is the URL crafted, the slug of the URL crafted? Is that SEO optimized? We take a shot at everything from What keywords should we be targeting here? And of course, as the brand owner, you can override the AI's suggestion. But we start with kind of what's the keyword that we should be optimizing for and all the way to, you know, how creative or flowery is the description of the item being sold. But in the creation of that description, Are we really highlighting the right keywords and getting all the meta tags and everything else correct so that you're not only talking to your customers really well, but you're also talking to, you know, Google's spider robots really well, right? You've got to be talking. That's another thing for, you know, just a little thing to hold on to for our listeners. It's like as an SEO person in your brand, you've got to be able to not only – so let's say you're a marketer, right? And if your SEO is part of your job function, You're not only tasked with talking to your customers, you also have to know and be conversant with the Google spiders, the Google crawlers, and having that mindset that you need to be in the business of translating, not just to whatever language you're selling in, but also the language of the Search engines, that's like a really important characteristic of a modern marketer. But again, we've developed Plugin AI to take a lot of that work off of your plate so you don't have to consciously be thinking about it. But in the work that you're doing to speak to your customers, we can help you interpret that into language that's conversant with the crawlers. Speaker 1: I love that because it breaks your mind, your brain if you always have to think about keywords and then put it into a brand's language. It's really a skill. Nothing becomes very, very easy to do this kind of thing. to be good in the technical SEO and still talk in the right way to your customer. Now, tell me, is there any kind of learning curve or what's the onboarding of the app, so to say? Speaker 2: I think there's a trade-off here. So let's talk about this concept. We have tools that do everything in bulk for you. But in doing that, you're giving more control over to the AI, right? If you want to say like, Just optimize all my pages for me. We can take that task on, but the keywords aren't going to be as fine-tuned as if you go into that page and say, this is what I'm really trying to communicate for this page and assign it the right keywords to optimize all the content for. So you can outsource a lot of that to AI. You can actually switch it all to AI, but AI is going to then have more control over the words that are being optimized for. And if you want to take that control back, you just go into the pages that you care about most. So maybe the suggestion that I make to our customers is optimize everything, get a good start, let AI do its thing across, let's say, your 500 products or what have you in your catalog. And then look at what are the most important pages for you. Probably some of your category pages, some of your collections pages, and some of your top-selling products. And then make sure that you have a really good fine level control over those handful. So, you know, maybe it's like an 80-20 rule. You give 80% of the pages completely over to AI and then the 20% that drives most of your revenue, that's where you spend the extra time because that needs to get dialed in. And the beautiful thing about this is like every time you add another product, all that work is just kind of going to happen automatically as long as you keep the app installed. And it's just easy to include this SEO step in your workflow as you bring new products online. I was working with a customer the other day that has like 20,000. They're in the medical supply field, right? And so they're supplying doctor's offices with like latex gloves and swabs and, you know, all the like literally tens of thousands of things that you see in a doctor's office. And, you know, they're kind of worried about like, how much work is it to optimize every single page? You multiply that by 20,000 products and you're like, it'll make your head explode. But really, we can bring this down to minutes of work for your whole 20,000-item catalog and then let you spend the hours that you can budget for this on the top sellers, on the category pages that matter the most to you. And then I think that's a really good way to get a stable starting point. Speaker 1: That makes perfect sense, and I think it was a very good example having 20,000 SKUs doing this manually. It's a lot. Speaker 2: It's a lot. Speaker 1: I mean, probably no brand can do this on their own, but with the help of AI, one of a sudden you can. Is there any kind of monitoring, tracking, reporting tool involved so that I actually can see what's happening in the background? Speaker 2: Yeah, so in Plugin AI, what we give you the ability to monitor is kind of the health of your on-page SEO at any given time across the site and across each page. And then actually built into our original app, Plugin SEO, that's where we have the little bit more mature suite of monitoring tools. So you can see over time what's your click-through rate and what's your organic traffic patterns actually looking like. And get into more, you know, deeper keyword research and more sophisticated tools. But those are available as part of like the plug-in suite or the plug-in useful family and plug-in AI is specifically kind of around generating content that's high quality and very automated. And then plug-in SEO is kind of that control panel or the suite of tools that you need to see your progress over time and, you know, have a much more Yeah, it gets more detailed, gets more like in the technical side, if you will, of SEO. Speaker 1: I like that because then you have the full picture of what's happening with your SEO workflow basically from scratch, from optimizing to see actually is there progress and how I'm doing with SEO. Now, who's your perfect customer? You gave the example with someone who has 20,000 products. Are there specific industries or sizes that it works very well with? Speaker 2: Part of what I love about working in the Shopify space for the last few years is the customer is everybody from the first-time entrepreneur to the enterprise. And we have customers that span that whole landscape. So if you are a brand that's just starting, plugging AI is a great way to get your foot in the door, get your head around Today, we're going to talk about what needs to be done and almost effortlessly get to a great starting point. The other day, I was working with a customer who actually works at a marketing agency, and his client is a European brand, and their agency's job is to bring that brand to the US and Canada markets. Great. But he's not an SEO expert. He's got a lot of marketing bona fides, but not an SEO expert. So he, using PluginSEO, which is the more deep and detailed coverage content and technical SEO, is using, able to leverage that to actually help for him to do his job, which is like this big multinational, the marketing for this big multinational brand. So it's really everyone from, we talk to first-time entrepreneurs every day, And it's so rewarding working with those brands that are just getting out. Every little thing is helpful that we can offer for them. And then the bigger brands, obviously, what's rewarding about that is not only the personal relationships, but the scale of that benefit is much more measurable and much more impactful. So the perfect customer for us is a Shopify brand that's ambitious and wants to grow. And I think maybe one way to think about it is like, Those individuals who have realized that like if you go to the Eisenhower metrics, right, like what's important and urgent and If you're someone who understands and appreciates that there's potentially thousands and maybe tens or hundreds of thousands of dollars in the important tasks that don't have the urgency for right now, we're trying to help you build that discipline. We're trying to make it easy for you to build that discipline to take care of the important stuff and not always be, you know, fighting with the urgent stuff because we want to unlock that value that's kind of hidden in those important jobs. That may not have the urgency is like whatever's going up wrong in your heart on fire in your business today, you know. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think a lot of people underestimate the power of SEO. And as a new brand, when you do it right from scratch, congratulations, that's the best decision you can make. Yeah, yeah. I want to ask a bit of the question. If somebody comes to you and they have completely messed up their SEO, so they come with a data set and every product is just not right, how long would it take to optimize this with your plugin? But then also a timeline, how long would it take potentially on Google to get it right? Speaker 2: Yeah, that's a good question. So, I mean, we do see this from time to time. Like, we actually offer, in addition to the apps, we offer an SEO service that rides along and, you know, where we can do a little bit more hands-on work for our clients. And, you know, we get to roll up our sleeves and do the work along with our clients. So, I think, like, in our experience, the work of The initial lift is probably like I'm going to say in hours, like 10 to 15 hours of work can make a huge amount of difference in a brand that's like, you know, maybe been around a while, has a bunch of content that needs to be tweaked or organized. And stuff like that, plus all the keyword research to really make sure that you are competing for the right places, right? You can't knock just anybody off of that top, going back to the zero-sum game mentality, right? Some things are easier to get into. You have to be smart about which fights are you going to pick in getting to that top five, right? We want to be smart about it and pick areas where we can help a brand who may have a lower domain ranking or domain authority. We want to help them find the right keywords that get a lot of traffic, get a lot of searches, but there are some weaknesses in those top five. And that's a really important part of And today, we're going to be talking about how to get the most out of this SEO game. So yeah, I think like 10 to 15 hours is sort of where we see where it doesn't make a huge amount of impact. Now, if you're just doing this on your own and you plug in, you know, you get plug in AI and you hit go, you could accomplish a cleanup of all of your content over 500 products or whatever an average store might have. In a handful of hours and some of those some of that time is going to be letting AI do its thing. It's just going to tell you what it's done. And it's not like you're kind of working or committed to that time, but you got to start it and then, you know, come back and check the work and stuff like that. And so I think on the front end, that's let's say it's like 2 to 10 hours, 2 to 15 hours, something like that. And then for those to make an impact, obviously, it depends a lot on when your site's going to be re-indexed. So it's a good idea to, you know, log into your Google Search Console and proactively request a re-crawl. But then, you know, your results could, you know, I think we see on average, like, In the first month or two after we execute one of those services where we're very hands-on, we watch these customers closely, and we see measurable improvements in one to two months. So let's call it 60 days on average. And maybe the third mindset idea to hold on to is, You've got to get improvement from wherever you are. So if you're at like 10 clicks a day right now, like getting to 100 clicks a day, it's a 10x. It's still not a lot of clicks by any standard, but for your shop, it's 10x. It's a huge deal. Is that going to change your business wildly? Probably not, but what it does change is your trajectory and the ability to go from 100 to 200. Now, that doesn't require a 10x effort. That requires a 2x effort, right? And you can keep on making that, but getting that first big change is a milestone to celebrate. And we do that with our customers. So I think it's really important to understand where you are, whether you feel it's good or bad or indifferent. It doesn't really matter. Wherever you are, there's upside if you play your game right and then look at the milestones that you accomplish over time, celebrate those milestones and figure out what your next steps are. Like everything else in life, we can make progress. Speaker 1: Yeah, yeah. No, absolutely true. So for someone like me who was in SEO game for such a long time, what really makes me happy if I see generic traffic coming in from search engines, because then I know I have done my work right. And it's a difficult task. And obviously, with the help of plug-in AI and your services, you can get there quicker than trying to figure it out on your own. How does your pricing structure work? Speaker 2: Yeah, super accessible. Our prices with plug-in AI start at $10 a month. Those are small catalogs and it goes up to $34, $35 a month. And you can save if you go annual with an annual plan. You know, it's very, very accessible. If you think about, you know, compare that to a light contract with an SEO agency, you can't compare it. I think we're priced probably low, but like in this, and that's part of what we need to learn and measure in our business, but we wanted to make it super accessible to every Shopify brand. And yeah, that starts with a pricing conversation. Speaker 1: Yeah, I think at that price point, it's absolutely a no-brainer for what you get to start into your store and start optimizing right away without spending hours and thousands of dollars with agencies where you don't really know what the outcome is. Speaker 2: Absolutely. Speaker 1: Before our coffee break comes to an end today, is there anything you want to share with our listeners that we haven't covered yet? Speaker 2: The thing this week that is on everybody's mind is what's happening in the world economy and the tariffs and this and that. As I was thinking about that and coming into this conversation, the thing that I realized is whether or not the tariffs are here one day, gone the next, whatever, What we know is the environment that we operate in as entrepreneurs and getting that sale, the cost of doing business, the cost of shipping, everything's getting a little harder and more expensive. And I don't say that to be discouraging. I think the thing that we need to realize is that's the reality. It maybe can serve as a motivation to find value in those important tasks that sometimes lack the urgency to motivate us. But if we take a step back and look at our operating environment as entrepreneurs is getting more complex and it's getting, yeah, in some ways harder to do business and more expensive to do business. Where we have the ability to win is time-saving techniques with using leveraging AI. And if we can find a way to manage our time and focus on some of the important work as efficiently as possible using plug-in AI and other tools, You're going to excavate the value that's in the important but not so urgent tasks. And I think this is a good impetus that the world is giving us as entrepreneurs to really look at where do we spend our time and are we on the right track? Are we employing the strategies that are going to make us run better, long-lasting, solid businesses? And that's probably the thing that I would leave the listeners with. Speaker 1: I would 100% agree to that. I think you always can make more money, but you can't make more time. But if you have something that helps you with making time, in the case of AI, then you definitely can be a winner, even in the economic situation that we're in right now. I think you said it. Entrepreneurship, running a business is about being adopting, being flexible, and And today, we're going to talk about how to optimize whatever you have. And that has never changed and it will not change. So I think for a good entrepreneur, they just venture on what they do and they adapt to the situation they are in. Speaker 2: We're resourceful. That's the common trait of every entrepreneur that's ever been and always will be. Speaker 1: Exactly. Where can people go and find out more about you? Speaker 2: The easiest place to connect with us is on our website, pluginuseful.com. And the apps that we discussed today are available in the Shopify App Store. Of course, Plugin AI is the new plugin that's super focused on making AI work for you in SEO context. And then Plugin SEO is kind of our flagship product that has been around for quite some time. It's very rich with tools and plug-in speed for those that need a speed boost to get them over the last hump to have a better performing shop. That's our family of products, our suite of products, and those are all available on the Shopify App Store. Speaker 1: Cool. I will put the links in the show notes, as always, and you just one click away. I hope a lot of listeners will check you out. I think that's the best decision they can make today to get optimized and to really save time, get the rankings, make more money. Thanks so much, Mike. Speaker 2: You bet. Great to see you again. Take care. Speaker 1: Before you leave, don't forget to visit the sponsor of today's episode. Time to take your marketing to the next level. Bravo is the all-in-one marketing platform that helps you connect with customers through email, SMS, WhatsApp, and automation – all from one easy-to-use platform. Keep your customer data organized, personalize every message, and drive real engagement effortlessly. Try Bravo for free or use eCB to save 50% on starter and business plans for the first three months of an annual subscription. Head to bravo.com slash eCB today. You will find a link also in the show notes. Hey, Claus here. Thank you for joining me on another episode of the Ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Before you go, I'd like to ask two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will also make it easier for others to discover the podcast. Simply like, comment, and subscribe in the app you're using to listen to the podcast and even better if you could leave a rating. And finally, sign up for our free newsletter and become a smarter online seller in just 5 minutes. We curate content from more than 50 sources, saving you hours of research and helping you to stay on top of your ecommerce game with the latest news, insights and trends twice a week in your inbox, 100% free. Join now at newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. That's newsletter.ecommercecoffeebreak.com. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode. Have a good one.