In this 115th episode of The E-Comm Show, our host Andrew Maff delves into both SEO guidelines and Google Search Ads, offering insights beneficial for content creation and business promotion. He outlines his SEO strategy, emphasizing a minimum of 1,200 words, incorporating 2+ H2 tags and 3+ H3 tags, linking 4+ articles internally, and adding 2+ links to services or products, as well as 5+ outbound links. Maff also explains keyword structuring techniques and various other aspects of SEO. Additionally, he explores the use of Google Search Ads for driving leads or shoppers, detailing aspects like the use of branded search terms, testing frequency, campaign and ad group structuring, ad types, bidding strategies, and the optimization of landing pages for these ads.

Furthermore, Maff addresses the keyword targeting strategy used by paid advertising agencies for e-commerce sellers, highlighting its simplicity and effectiveness. He elaborates on the creation of campaigns that strategically negate keywords, leveraging different priority campaigns for more controlled bidding on specific keywords. His discussion extends to the importance of optimizing the Google Merchant Center, providing a comprehensive view of both organic and paid strategies for enhancing online presence and e-commerce success.

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Andrew Maff 

CONNECT WITH OUR HOST: AndrewMaff.com  |  Twitter: @AndrewMaff | LinkedIn: @AndrewMaff 

00:06

I want to show you show you an awesome another episode of the show your host, Andrew Maffetone. So today what I'm going to do is I'm going to be giving you all the exact SEO guidelines that I have all of our writers follow. Marketers favorite term, it depends. Sometimes blog posts are significantly shorter. Sometimes it depends on who we're writing for. Sometimes it's our own blog post somewhere times we're rewriting blog posts, but so we're gonna go on the basis here, if I'm writing a brand new piece of content, I'm giving it to a writer, I'm giving them what I usually provide them is a working title, description, very short couple sentences of like, here's what we're thinking, if I already know what I want them to talk about, I'll give him some bullet points, like hit this, hit this at this. And then I'll give him the keyword obviously, that I want to go after. And then I'll usually give them the top three to five best articles that I was able to find for that specific keyword. So a, you know, use these articles to get some information b Don't link back to these articles, because obviously, I want to try to meet them. And then C make sure that whatever it is you're writing is better than those. So I have my my guidelines here. So provide them on stuff. There's gonna be a lot of stuff I say here too, by the way, where everyone's like, Oh, that's bullshit, you don't have to do that well bite me, don't, it's true. The length of an article does not mean what it wants did. However, I find that an article that is 1200 Words or Less is not providing as much value as it needs to. Now if the article is being written, and my writer goes, Look, I've written everything. This is as far as I can get. It's about 1000 words. And I can definitely reach 1200, but it's going to be fluffy, then no, don't force it. But 1200 words or more. Two h2 tags, right to remain titles, h1, two, like main categories of breaking up the article two h2 tags, three h3 tags at a minimum. So four plus inbound links, or internal links, whatever you guys want to call them to either product or service. Whatever it is, the company offers or for us, if it's our own thing, four of those need to go to like an about page or our services page or contact us or anything like that. Then to know I'm sorry, three other inbound links to other articles. So other articles we wrote. So if I'm doing blog posts, and I have another blog with how tos, or even marketing interruption or something like that, they need to link over to those specific blog posts. So we're looking at about a total of seven minimum internal links, then five outbound links, non competitor can only go to like stats, data, things like that stuff that we're able to clarify, need to make sure that the words that are actually being linked are relevant to whatever that article is about. Obviously, shouldn't link to a competitor, which I think I just said, and then always has to open up a new window. So that's something that I always find most people end up working with haven't done. It's very small. It's nothing compared to other stuff that you should be doing, obviously. But if I click on a link, and I want to go see more information, most of the time, what will happen, at least when I'm reading is someone will reference a stat and I'll go Oh, that's interesting. I'd love to read more about that. I'll click it, it'll open up a new tab and I'll go back to the old tab to finish the article. And then do my own follow up research. If that if that link opens up and changes the tab I'm on get pissed because I'm always like great now yo yo Hunter back. So always have an open up a new tab. Even internal one should also open open up a new tab. So then making sure that all the linked words are anchor texts are relevant. I just touched on that. Each main key word is as provided. So let's say I can see my dog in the corner. So let's say we're doing Golden Retriever puppy as our keyword If I want the words Golden Retriever puppy use two or three times in that order, then each individual, okay, so then six plus times, so six or more times, I want the words golden retriever and puppy used at a minimum. So they need to go through and make sure that excluding the Golden Retriever puppy, keyword six other times they mentioned puppy, and then six other times, you're probably not going to separate them. So maybe golden retriever was mentioned. So this is your you're not keyword stuffing, do not keyword stuff that obviously needs to be placed correctly. If for some reason my writer comes back and goes, Oh, I almost only ever use it four times, it's totally fine. That's it. And then that's it. So that's our SEO guidelines, those are the ones I always follow. Again, kind of depends, sometimes they can be longer, sometimes they need more h2 tags, sometimes they need less, obviously, you need to do what's best for the article and make sure that you're providing value. I've done this with many, many clients at this point and have yet for it to fail for me. Even as Google has made its changes, we have always usually come out on top when they do. So Google search ads to drive more leads and shoppers. So obviously, I cater more to e commerce, so leads in this case could be driving them to some kind of gated content. So maybe you didn't ebook which yes, you can for E commerce, which I'll get to in another time. But we're gonna go right into this. First thing, I always buy branded search terms absolutely bid on them, I don't care if none of your competitors are bidding on you, you always you don't want to be surprised to find out that a competitor all of a sudden started bidding on you, you're gonna pay arguably nothing per click, you're going to get a ridiculous conversion rate, the amount of money you're going to spend to pay for someone else to click on your own brand name is totally worth it, it's fine. So run a campaign for your own branded keywords. So always test right even your branded stuff. So even when you do different ad groups, you have different keywords, you have different copy that you're using different description, different title, all that fun stuff, different landing page, test all that stuff. So in what is it called drafts and experiments, set that up, always run a B test, set it up so that once one is determined, let it run, I probably set up a test on a usually about a weekly basis, maybe every other week, I'll test something out. And I'll just go screw it, I'm testing this one, and then one will win. And then I'll test that one again. And it's just, it's constant improvement. So create ad groups with relevant keywords in the copy being used. So if you have a bunch of different things that you're going after, you got to think of the variations of that keyword and then make ad groups for that so that you can have specific copy for that. So as usual, my dogs here, so Golden Retriever puppy toys, versus golden retriever squeak toys, I might want to have an ad group for more general puppy toys, and then an ad group for more general squeak related toys and make sure that I use the word squeak in there. So breaking ad groups into I have my notes here. So bear with me break breaking out of groups into discovery keywords with broaden Okay, so So we created those ad groups, right, so let's do golden retriever squeak toys. And that what I'm going to do is those keywords that are that are kind of more broad, I'm going to keep that in in their own separate ad group have a broad and phrase I like to keep the broad and phrase together. It's who I am. Once I see that one of those specific search terms keeps showing up and is doing well. I will negate it in that broad and phrase match ad group, bring it into an exact match, run it there and Jack that bid up. If it starts to do really well. I'll make my own campaign, put that ad group into that campaign of like success ad groups and Jack that budget up so that I have room to run. Because the broad and phrase you'll usually want to limit just in case you get a bunch of crap in there. Use everything you have available every friggin thing in there I go in there, sometimes I go, why didn't you use this? There's ad extensions. So you know, call outs and call extensions. And any other option, you can have all the E commerce sellers, you now have the option to put like your price into the search. There's like a little box that comes under the description with some of your products. And I think it shows like three or four and you can actually swipe and you can actually put your price in there now. So the responsive and dynamic ads. The dynamic ones works similar to shopping so you kind of wish shopping, you give them a product and then keywords just kind of show up and you negate them. In dynamic ads for search terms, that same thing, you give them the URL and it shows for what it thinks you need to show for and then you start to negate them. So it's the same process test it there's been a lot of times I've had great success with owes. And there's been times where I haven't the responsive ones are great. I always have success with those that is basically, you write like 15 different titles and 15 different descriptions. And Google just kind of picks whichever one it thinks is going to work the best based on whatever you're targeting, then. So Oh, okay. So specifically for ecommerce sellers, use your shopping data that you have your shop your shopping ads, so you'll you'll run your shopping ads, right? You're always gonna narrow it down to whichever keywords are doing the best. Once you figure out those keywords that are probably in your low priority campaign, take those keywords, put them into a search group, a search ad and create a search ad with that so that you're owning the first spot on the shopping ads, but then you're also owning the first shot as per spot for the search ads. If you're only the first spot for shopping ads, a lot of people like why do I need to also do it for search ads, not everyone uses those. Some people aren't as visual as you would think you'll actually see. And I've had this happen a lot where the search ads will actually end up doing better than the shopping ads. If you do that, and you just want to own as much real estate as you can then bidding. I prefer to use CPC enhanced, so where they fluctuate the bid based on what they think is going to work well. I'm not a fan of conversion, targeting or Target CPA or anything like that. I don't like any of those, I don't have enough control, I check my search and my shopping ads on a daily basis and go through and clean out any keywords that I don't want. So when I'm that controlled on what I'm doing, I don't need Google's help with the conversion thing. And I also find that I've not really had much success with it doesn't mean you won't, you can obviously try it. But I've had more success to CPC than the last. So last thing I wanted to mention was search ads work for everyone I've heard so many times people will tell me like, oh, search ads don't work for us. We only work well with shopping ads or something like that you're sending you're not testing enough, you're not sending the right landing page, you're not thinking about where that person is when they're shopping. So my suggestion would be, you're definitely need to continue trying search ads until you can figure it out. So obviously, I want a feature tool. Today I'm going to feature Uber suggests So shout out to Neil Patel for that I love Uber Suggest is amazing. Because you can just plug in your competitors URL and get all the keywords that they rank for all their top pages, all that kind of stuff. Nine times out of 10 I'll just take that URL, drop it in Uber suggested and go give me all those keywords and I'll just go run a bid against them. But you I'm probably gonna get a little heated because this one, this one because we have so I'm talking about the like super, hyper, ultra mega targeted keyword search query funneling bullshit that agencies brag about. So obviously, as an agency, I will say that we do this. And I will say that we don't have a fancy term for it, we just call it our shopping campaign strategy. But I've heard some ridiculous names for this, which honestly, is the correct way to run Google Shopping ads. So you don't really need to give it a fancy name. But I digress. So here's how it's done. Right. So you're going to start with a high priority campaign and a medium priority campaign, then you're going to take a product line that is very similar to itself. So you're not going to question the search terms that are showing up. So again, I film a bunch of these at once. So my dogs just been laying there the whole time. So we're going to do dog toy. So I have golden retriever specific dog toys that I'm running, right. So I'm going to have a high priority, and a medium priority campaign with all my specific golden retriever dog toys. So that when when an ad shows, or I'm sorry, when a search term shows up, I'll know these are all my golden retriever dog toys, if they're not searching something like that, it's not a keyword I want so you have your high priority, medium priority, high priorities, gotta have a decent budget doesn't have to be massive, but you're gonna get a lot of broad stuff and a lot of crap in there. This is where you're doing your discovery, you're searching your medium priority, you're gonna have a little bit more success, you're gonna have those bids a little bit higher, and you're going to want to give some room on that budget. So basically what's going to happen is, let's say we're doing branded keywords so Andrews dog toys probably isn't good because it's kind of a bad brand name but let's let's say it's blue Tosca. Right. So we blue tusker, golden retriever dog toys, so if someone searches, blue tusker dog toy, it's going to show up in my high priority priority. I'm going to negate that keyword, which will cause it to drop down into the median price. already. So now it's going to show up in the medium priority. So next time someone searches blue Tasker dog toys, it's going to show up in the medium priority, I have that bid up higher now. So I'm going to start to own that keyword. As those start to do well, you're going to constantly just negate things out of the high priority, this is why your high priority, you're gonna want to keep that budget relatively low. And you're going to keep those bids relatively low, because it can definitely get out of hand. And once you get it to running really, really well, you're going to want to keep that CPC as low as possible on the high priority, because you're basically going to take all the good stuff and move it down into the medium priority. So now by then all of your branded keywords are in the medium priority. And all of your top performing keywords are in the medium priority, then you're going to replicate the same concept. So if it starts to do well, in the medium priority, let's say you have some really better performing branded keywords, and you have some really better performing just more general keywords, and they do really well, you're going to negate those. And you're going to drop those into a low priority. So usually what I'll do is I'll create a high and a medium priority and let it bake, get my data and if you've ever done this before, and then after I've gotten my data, I'm ready for it, then I will create my low priority, that one big budget, big bids, own these keywords. So this is basically that funnel concept that these agencies brag about. So we've basically gotten this keyword down as low priority, you've jacked it up. And now you'll see over time, in that low priority campaign, that's the only keyword that's in there, it's the only thing you're bidding on. So that's how they specifically bid on these one, individual keywords. And as you just start to shove more and more keywords down into the funnel, it works down there. So obviously, the only other side of this is you need to make sure that you're always adjusting your day time, state audience device, all that stuff, you need to make sure that you're adjusting those bids. I like to do that on close to a monthly basis, it kind of depends on the size of the account. If I'm getting a ton of data, often and we're spending a good amount of money, I'll usually do it every couple of weeks, but usually slightly newer ones where they're spending like maybe 10k or less ish month. I'll do it just once a month. That's all I wanted to talk about today. And then I'm going to feed your Google Merchant Center just because I know it's kind of a tool. To me, it still counts as a tool. A lot of shopping ads. People say that, Oh, they don't work. Well. For me. That's not true. They work well for all ecommerce sellers, you just have to really narrow down that keyword that you're going after. But the one thing I've learned is that a lot of people will just shove their stuff into Merchant Center and let it go straight to ads and they don't optimize it at all. So you need to go into Merchant Center and set up reviews, set up promotions if you can, if you offer free shipping make sure that that's mentioned but make sure that you optimize everything and you can emerge from center. But that's everything I was going to talk about today.

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