Mastering Ecommerce SEO: The Power of AI | #271 Andrew Maffettone

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Claus Lauter [00:00:00]:
This is episode two seven, one of the ecommerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to find out how you can leverage AI in your SEO strategy to focus on organic revenue. With me on the show, I have Andrew Maffettone, founder and CEO of Bluetuskr.com. So let's dive right into it.

Claus Lauter [00:00:15]:
But before we get started, a big thank you to our sponsors for supporting today's episode.

Claus Lauter [00:00:20]:
Loyalty Lion is a leading loyalty platform helping Shopify brands rocket returning customers with their own loyalty programs. With Loyalty Lion, it's quick and easy to create a program that uses points and rewards to engage shoppers, secure more second purchases, and drive up lifetime value. Loyalty Lion has been increasing returning customer rates for thousands of Shopify stores for over ten years. Visit loyaltyline.com to find out more. Find the link in the show notes.

Claus Lauter [00:00:46]:
Have you heard about Partner Hero? They're experts in support on the ecommerce industry, known for their outstanding team building skills. Their main pillars, quality people and culture makes them a great fit for your company. Learn more on partnerhero.com or click the.

Claus Lauter [00:00:59]:
Link in the show notes this is.

Voice over [00:01:03]:
The e commerce Coffee Break, a top rated Shopify growth podcast dedicated to Shopify merchants and business owners looking to grow their online stores. Learn how to survive in the fast changing e commerce world with your host Klaus Lauter, and get marketing advice you can't find on Google. Welcome. Welcome to the show.

Claus Lauter [00:01:28]:
Hello and welcome to another episode of the e commerce Coffee Break podcast. Today we want to talk about AI, artificial intelligence and SEO. So that's actually something that I personally looking right into it because I think there's a lot of potential using AI for search engine optimization purposes. And with me on the show, I have Andrew Mafitone. He is an ecommerce marketing focused entrepreneur and fellow podcast host. He has over 15 years of experience in the ecommerce industry and now is the founder CEO of Bluetusker.com, a full service marketing agency for ecommerce sellers that help brands expand their reach through robust digital strategies. So let's dive right into it. Hi Andrew, how are you today?

Andrew Maffettone [00:02:06]:
Doing good. Thanks for having me on, Andrew.

Claus Lauter [00:02:09]:
AI all over the place and SEO is probably one of the oldest marketing strategies when it comes to the interwebs. How can we bring these two things together to make the most out of it?

Andrew Maffettone [00:02:20]:
AI and SEO are working together very well. I think in my opinion, AI and SEO are probably working together better than any other strategy. I think AI is a very sexy term and a lot of brands and platforms and stuff are just throwing in their own thing that like, oh, we have AI. But from an SEO perspective, I find that it's doing very well. It caught on pretty quickly. Some of the other stuff, people use it for imagery and video and things like that, and if you've seen it, it's close, but it's not there yet. It's a little creepy, but with SEO, it still gives you that benefit of being able to edit things and review things. So I think that it's possible that AI may maybe not fully replace SEO, but it's definitely going to completely change how SEO has been done probably about like three to five years from now.

Andrew Maffettone [00:03:09]:
But with where we're at right now, it's been fantastic to be able to speed things up, really start to learn about your data, write a lot of content, and just make sure that you're able to provide that whole eeat stuff that Google focuses on.

Claus Lauter [00:03:23]:
Now, Google obviously is the 300 pound gorilla in the cage when it comes to SEO. They're sort of giving all the guidelines, even if they are unknown, on how to do SEO. Now, a lot of ecommerce merchants are obviously interested to get their product listings as high as possible. Are there any tools yet or any strategies on how to use SEO and AI for shopify merchants and woocommerce merchants and whoever is out there selling something?

Andrew Maffettone [00:03:50]:
Yeah. So why don't I go through kind of like, our process, right? So right in the beginning, we want to map out which target keywords do we want to go after. That's usually relatively straightforward based on the product line, the collection. And then if you go a little bit more top of funnel, you're looking into audience style words, like if they're searching, like how to's and things like that. But you start off with your main keywords, right. There are aspects of AI that you can do in there. You can leverage things like chat, GPT and something like that and ask it about what terms you should be looking at when you have a product like this. Or you can go a little bit deeper and use like, Semrush does have a little bit of AI functionality to it, but otherwise it also is meant for that.

Andrew Maffettone [00:04:30]:
So that's a lot of what you can do. So when we get started with the keyword research side, we like to look at pretty much every platform out there because they all give you slightly different data. So we look at aggregating all that data to kind of truly paint a picture for us. So we'll look at Semrush, Moz and hrefs. Now, once you figure that out, now you're looking into, okay, do I need to create an article with this or do I need to create a product description or am I changing copy on a core page? Something like that. So for the sake of this, let's say we're looking at article descriptions. We now want to look at what are our competitors ranking for, right. Those similar platforms can do the same thing.

Andrew Maffettone [00:05:06]:
They can help you figure out what your competitors are ranking for. The keyword difficulty. If you want to incorporate paid advertising into your SEO strategy, it gives you your cost per click, that kind of stuff. Once you start going, the next thing to do is obviously go into the writing phase. Now with SEO, there's a lot of best practices. We usually don't write anything under like 1500 words. We want to make sure that obviously you have your h one tags, but you got several h two tags, threes, fours, et cetera. You've got bullet points, make it really easy to read.

Andrew Maffettone [00:05:36]:
Don't make these big massive paragraphs. Then you've got internal links, external links. Obviously you want to do a CRO aspect to the blog, which I'll touch on a second, but the next thing you want to do from there is the writing part, right? Like you want to go ahead and write it. This is where AI has been awesome. You can go and plug it into Chat GPT. Chat GPT is going to limit how much words you can actually get out of it. I think it's like 500 or something like that. So we've incorporated using Jasper right now.

Andrew Maffettone [00:06:04]:
We've also looked at a few others out there. Basically what you can do there, like with us, we're an agency, so we have multiple profiles, but even just a solo brand, right? What will happen is you can give it like here's the keywords I want to go after. Here's the topic. You can have it write a brief for you, or you can supply it with a brief, whichever way you want to do that. And then you can have it write to maybe three paragraphs. You can then edit those paragraphs, hit a button and it will create more paragraphs for you and more content based on the edits you put in place. And so the more and more you edit it and you adjust it, the quicker it becomes used to your brand voice and how you like to style your words and things like that. And the nice thing for us is we can separate that out by certain brands and make sure that it's all on point.

Andrew Maffettone [00:06:48]:
The thing with AI though, that I'm not a fan of is it's still difficult to give it that little nuanced brand voice that you typically will want a brand to have to stand out. AI can be very fluffy and just like a bunch of garbage. So while we're leveraging AI, we still have writers that are using it, and then once it's completed, we still have editors reviewing it. So from an AI perspective, it's really helped us with the research aspect and just the overall writing aspect. Our writers don't have issues with writer's block or anything like that. Getting the content going is great, but we still got to put those checks and balances in place because it can sometimes come out like not so good. You can do the same stuff with product descriptions, all that kind of stuff. Then once that is published and you're live, the other aspect is once it's up, usually about 30 to 60 days later, we then use surfer.

Andrew Maffettone [00:07:48]:
So I think it's SEO surfer or surfer SEO. I can never much they do it. There's surfer. And what you can do is you can take the article that you wrote after it's been published for a little while, compare it to several other articles that you were trying to outrank, and it can actually read all of that and give you insight into how many additional words you should probably add, how many new images you should add, h one tags, et cetera, h tags, et cetera. So now you're not just, which I find is the biggest issue with seos and ecommerce sellers. They write these articles, they throw them up there and then they go, it didn't work. Let's write the next one. If you go back and you consistently update them, you refresh them.

Andrew Maffettone [00:08:23]:
They work really well. So this platform really helps you do that. So we just constantly go back and refresh old articles while making new ones at the same time. So there's a bunch of different platforms out there and they're all used in different areas. From a content creation side is where I find AI to be one of the strongest right now.

Claus Lauter [00:08:41]:
A lot of golden nuggets that you addressed there, I think Neil Patel said it as well, that you need to refresh content. You don't need to really rewrite, just go back and refresh and then it will start ranking again. The one thing that you mentioned and I was smiling about that is you need to do a manual check after AI has written your content, your text. I'm making a bit of a fun seeing, I don't know, cold email outreach coming in and you can really look at the text and it's like, yep, that was not written by a human. Yeah, that's really backfire on the brand. And I think a lot of brands are doing this right now. They're just creating tons of content out there and at some point it just feels not real anymore. Which brings me to the question, where's the risk of using AI? Is there a risk of using it too much? Is there a risk that Google at some point will figure it out? What do you think?

Andrew Maffettone [00:09:31]:
I definitely don't think Google will figure it out. And even if Google does figure it out, I don't think they're going to care because Google and Amazon, to me, the way that they run their businesses are very similar. They really just want you to make sure that you're supplying the best value, giving the best experience possible. So if Google's going to put you at number one for a certain keyword, they want to be confident that when they come to your website, it's going to be mobile friendly and easy to use on every browser and it's going to load quickly and it's going to have a low bounce rate. And there's all these other aspects of SEO outside of the content that comes into a factor. So if Google eventually figures out, like, hey, we now can tell everything that's ever been used by AI, which I don't think they'll ever figure out, but if they were able to, they wouldn't care. As long as the stuff that you're publishing is quality content, they're still going to go with it. Plus they're releasing their own AI and they've got barred and all that fun stuff.

Andrew Maffettone [00:10:28]:
Now, I do think down the line, I'm interested to see how SEO is going to change at a certain point. Are these AI platforms going to be leveraged more and more like a search platform? And all of a sudden now Google is going to just give you an answer and not 500 pages for you to figure out the answer. But those answers have to come from somewhere. So I think that there's still going to be benefit in creating content, but I think the way that we create content is going to have to be a little bit less evergreen and more timely and sexy and new stuff so that people are interested in reading the article, not just looking for an answer. Because if they're just looking for an answer, my guess is that's where AI is going to end up going.

Claus Lauter [00:11:13]:
And now a quick break to thank the sponsors of today's episode.

Claus Lauter [00:11:17]:
Tired of watching customer drift away after their first purchase, then it's time to rocket your returning customer rates and drive six times more second purchases. With loyalty line as a leading loyalty platform in the Shopify space, loyalty line exists to make it as easy as possible for you to launch and manage your own loyalty program. They'll even build your loyalty page for you. With loyalty line, you unlock everything you need to engage shoppers with points and rewards and integrate loyalty data into your email, SMS and help desk platforms.

Claus Lauter [00:11:44]:
You also get a five star support.

Claus Lauter [00:11:46]:
As shown by the customer reviews on the Shopify App Store and G two. Visit loyaltyline.com to find out more and start your loyalty journey. Find the link in the show notes.

Claus Lauter [00:11:56]:
As a prominent player in the ecommerce support arena, partner Hero specialize in delivering personalized customer experience solutions with a clear focus on helping you not just meet but exceed your goals and requirements. They have become experts in e commerce support. Their commitment to tailoring solutions to your unique needs ensures that your support experience is nothing short of exceptional. Partner Hero is more than a CX company, they are your partner in success. Visit their website and learn more on partnerhero.com.

Claus Lauter [00:12:23]:
Now with Bluetooth.com, you're running a full service marketing agency for ecommerce sellers. Where would you rank SEO as a strategy in the overall marketing landscape? Where would you rank it? Is it something that's up there or something that's more like a side project? How do you deal with that?

Andrew Maffettone [00:12:39]:
Right now, SEO is definitely one of the top three things we usually focus on specifically for e commerce. That and we work with CBD brands and stuff sometimes, which they don't have a choice, that's really all they can do. But from an SEO perspective, when I started Blue Tusker, one of the very first things I started doing was creating content. I got a writer, started having them do SEO stuff because I know that when you do SEO and you do it correctly, it takes a very long time for it to really start to show its face, right? Six months in, depending on how fast you're putting out content and adjusting things, you really start to feel it. And then after about a year you're like, oh, I'm so glad I did this. So I knew like let's just get it started now. So a year from now I'll be happy about it. I definitely think that SEO in many situations is exactly what Shopify sellers need to be focusing on because they're going to be thanking themselves later.

Andrew Maffettone [00:13:34]:
Cost per clicks are always going up, cpms are always going up, especially this time of year when everyone's looking into things and everyone's advertising. Cpms are already up at the day of this recording. So by having a strong organic approach, you're getting in all these sales that you've built an asset for that you're not having to pay as much. So your customer acquisition costs come down over time. Plus, the other side of it, one of the things I always talk to our sellers about is like, well, what's the end goal? Are you trying to sell? Are you trying to exit the business? So if you are, I always say this to Amazon sellers. If you're just selling an Amazon business, you've got just what, your product, your profit and your process is kind of all you can sell. When you've got your own brand, you've got an email list, you've got a social following. And then even that organic traffic that's coming in is easily retargeted.

Andrew Maffettone [00:14:22]:
So all of a sudden it really opens up your buyer pool of who's interested because you've built this website into a great asset that's just bringing in revenue on an organic basis. So I love focusing on SEO. I think it's probably one of the better long term strategies to stay focused on.

Claus Lauter [00:14:38]:
Obviously, revenue generated from organic traffic is the best because that's basically for free. Not completely for free. You had to invest in SEO first, but at the end of the day, it's the cheapest traffic. And you mentioned that. Are there any specific industries? And you mentioned one before where SEO doesn't work or what doesn't make much sense. I'm thinking about drop shipping, things like.

Andrew Maffettone [00:14:59]:
That, stuff that's really brand focused. You think of most apparel brands, it's a t shirt. There's only so much you can do from an SEO perspective. So you need to do social media and you need to showcase the differences and build that audience. They're not really looking for answers to stuff and searching things and then they're coming to your website and purchasing. Search is better for a product where someone has a problem and they know a solution exists. If it's a shirt company, right, and it's just apparel, they don't really have a shirt problem. There's hundreds and thousands of brands out there that sell shirts.

Andrew Maffettone [00:15:35]:
So it's a tough sell. Coffee is another one. It's an incredibly crowded market. You needed to tell a story and build an audience and create a community to sell there. But from an SEO perspective, trying to rank for coffee is not going to happen. So there's no point in going after that. So there's definitely certain brands where I look at it and I go, I don't think that this is useful for you. Longer term strategies are probably better with like influencer marketing or affiliate marketing or something like that.

Andrew Maffettone [00:16:02]:
But from a search perspective, if you probably shouldn't run Google Ads, then you probably shouldn't really focus on SEO either.

Claus Lauter [00:16:11]:
How do you monitor SEO? How do you use reporting tools to see the result of your SEO strategy? Is there anything out there, even AI driven, that helps you with that?

Andrew Maffettone [00:16:23]:
Some of the platforms that we have, they can do forecasting and they pull that from an AI perspective. So obviously we connect everyone to whichever platforms we're using. So I mentioned the beginning, like Semrush, Ahrefs, Moz, that kind of stuff. We'll connect them in there and monitor it there. But none of them have AI. But we have our own dashboard system that we basically have integrated with Databox. And so with that, when we pull in the data from all of the different touch points that we have, we can actually map out projections of where we think SEO is going to go. And that has some AI capabilities to it.

Andrew Maffettone [00:16:55]:
I always tread lightly when some of these platforms say that they have AI because some of them release the exact same functionality they've had for years, but then they just add the word AI to it and all of a sudden it's AI. So some of it, I'm like, I don't know that I would call this AI, but I guess it is like projections. You put together a formula, you can map that stuff out pretty easily. From a reporting perspective, it's usually directed that way.

Claus Lauter [00:17:21]:
Okay, let's come to what you do. Full service agency for ecommerce sellers. What kind of services do you provide? Who's your perfect customer?

Andrew Maffettone [00:17:28]:
So we almost primarily work with d to c ecommerce sellers private label for the most part. We've got a couple of drop shippers we work with, but not many of them really our focus. We're almost like an outsourced marketing department, basically. I was in house for years, I was in house with a couple of different brands, big eight figure sellers, like mid eight figures. And I was the only marketer in house. And so it drove me crazy because I'd have some contractors or we'd have an intern for a summer, and then I'd have like two or three agencies we're working with, and I could never get them all to work together. They didn't talk to each other. My SEO agency didn't talk to my Google Ads agency, even though they were doing things that were helping each other.

Andrew Maffettone [00:18:09]:
It was like they don't want to work together. And it became wildly frustrating. And so I was like, okay, let's explore one of these full service agencies. And they exist, they're out there, but almost all of them set it up where it's like you get x amount of hours of someone's time and they know a little about a lot and it's like, okay, that's not going to cut it either for a brand that size. So our approach is very different. Our account strategists act as almost fractional cmos and then we have specialized departments. So I have a team that solely does SEO and they don't do anything else. I have a retention team, paid ads team, who's got a Google Ads? Amazon and Facebook team underneath them got a whole website design UX team.

Andrew Maffettone [00:18:52]:
My goal with putting this agency together was to be you need to have one singular person that can oversee the full strategy. So instead of just a fractional CMO, why not a fractional marketing department? And that's more or less how we position ourselves.

Claus Lauter [00:19:08]:
I feel you. I have been there. If you're alone in a company and have to deal with everything, it's like hurting fleas. It's just not working. So who's your perfect customer? What kind of brands, verticals, industries do you work with?

Andrew Maffettone [00:19:23]:
In terms of verticals and industries, we're pretty all over the place. I've got a ton of b to B ecommerce sellers we work with. I've got apparel brands and coffee brands and CBD and different restricted brands with alcohol and sex toys and all this different stuff. So from an industry perspective and a vertical perspective, it doesn't really matter. We do a lot with omnichannel marketing. I originally came from an Amazon agency, so I know how to leverage a lot of marketing channels and strategies to benefit both a website and an Amazon business and a Walmart business, eBay, Wayfair, chewy, like wherever they're at, right? So we develop different omni channel strategies to kind of push and pull that information. Find ways to leverage these like Amazon, leverage it more as a customer acquisition channel and get them back to the site. But really we focus a lot with private label sellers.

Andrew Maffettone [00:20:15]:
They tend to be closer to about a million a year, annual or higher. I've definitely got a handful that are smaller. I've got a handful that are much larger. It kind of depends on a few things and then it comes down to tech stack stuff that the team's really familiar with. We're shopify partners. We are also bigcommerce partners, but really, those are the only two platforms that we tend to work with. We're Klavi o partners and Mailchimp and HubSpot partners. So depending on those, that's kind of where we keep that.

Andrew Maffettone [00:20:41]:
So there is a bit of a tech stack of trying to make sure that we align with those, but in terms of industry and verticals, there's not really that much of a specificity by it.

Claus Lauter [00:20:50]:
Quickly, going back to the topic of AI, how many of your customers or prospects are already using AI in their marketing, and what's their experience with that?

Andrew Maffettone [00:20:59]:
So far, everyone that we're doing SEO with, we're using AI with them, so they're obviously part of that. We do have a handful of brands that will make some creative with it and video every now and then that they use. I know of a couple that have, like, I mean, you can call it AI, but like the AI chat bot on their site that they've experimented with, some of them have different AI platforms that are pulling in different reporting and kind of being able to paint pictures and project other aspects of their business outside of marketing. But out of our full client list, I would be pretty confident to say at least like 60% to 70% are using it in some way, shape or form.

Claus Lauter [00:21:40]:
What's your prediction going into 2024? Will marketers become unemployed through AI, or what's your take on that?

Andrew Maffettone [00:21:47]:
No, definitely not at all. I think what's going to happen is AI is going to get stronger and stronger, and the marketers that know how to leverage it best are going to be the ones that will always be in play. None of these AI platforms put together brand guides and build out customer profiles, and none of them really can make sure that everything's working cohesively across the board. There's no marketing AI that you put in some information and it does your ads and your emails and your SEO, and it doesn't do everything. So it's going to be about knowing the individual platforms and how to use them. At the end of the day, it's really what most marketers are best at is they have certain tools at their disposal and they know how to use those tools to the best of their ability. AI is just going to be another tool.

Claus Lauter [00:22:34]:
Exactly. Yeah. Big time saver there. Before we come to the end of the coffee break today, what's the final thoughts that you want to leave our listeners with?

Andrew Maffettone [00:22:41]:
One of my favorite sayings came from my stepmom years ago. Cheap is expensive is one of my favorite things. And the more and more I work with ecommerce sellers, the more that I realize how true that is. Let's use paid ads as an example. We'll have some sellers who are like, oh, I want to try Pinterest ads and they want to put a very small budget behind it to give it a test. Those types of platforms need to bring in a lot of data in order for them to actually start to learn and to adjust themselves. So by being so cheap, you're actually going to spend significantly more time trying to figure out what actually works, which, especially if you're working with an agency or someone on an hourly rate, you're paying them to manage it. So then all of a sudden you've actually spent more than, if you actually used the platform correctly, 100%.

Andrew Maffettone [00:23:33]:
The exact same thing about a Shopify website. Way too many times people just grab a template, throw stuff up there, and then they start running a ton of ads to these websites that just are not optimized. No, CRO was just grab a template and throw it up. And basically, not to curse on your show, but to half asset is going to be very expensive. You're going to spend a ton of money on advertising and all your marketing initiatives, driving traffic to a website that just doesn't convert. So not spending money on putting a quality website together and then not spending the money to continuously optimize it with CRO and overseeing strategy testing, things like that, it just blows my mind. So if anything I could take away from this show. I always say cheap is expensive.

Andrew Maffettone [00:24:16]:
If you're going to do it, do it right or just don't do it 100% agree.

Claus Lauter [00:24:20]:
If you want to grow a business, you need to take some money and make it work. And with $25 on the ad set, you probably won't get far. Andrew, where can people find out more about you?

Andrew Maffettone [00:24:30]:
Bluetusker.com B-L-U-E-T-U-S-K-R or you can email me, Andrew, at bluetusker and then we're pretty much on every social channel I can think of. So at Andrew Maff, on whichever channel, or at Bluetusker, wherever you're most comfortable. We're always happy to communicate there.

Claus Lauter [00:24:45]:
We'll put the links in the show notes as always, in just one click away. Andrew, thanks so much. That was a great chat about AI and SEO, and I think this is a massive opportunity to optimize your SEO and to get higher in your rankings. Thanks so much for your time today.

Andrew Maffettone [00:24:59]:
Thanks for having me.

Claus Lauter [00:25:01]:
Hey Klaus, here.

Claus Lauter [00:25:02]:
Thanks for joining me on another episode of the e commerce Coffee Break podcast.

Claus Lauter [00:25:06]:
Before you go, I'd like to ask.

Claus Lauter [00:25:07]:
Two things from you. First, please help me with the algorithm so I can bring more impactful guests on the show. It will make it also 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. Secondly, please take a moment to check out today's episode sponsors. They play a crucial role in keeping the show in our newsletter, available to you for free. Thanks again and I'll catch you in the next episode.

Claus Lauter [00:25:30]:
Have a good one.

Claus Lauter [00:25:32]:
Before you leave, don't forget to visit the sponsor of today's episode. Have you heard about partner Hero? They're experts in support on the e commerce industry, known for their outstanding team building skills. Their main pillars, quality people and culture makes them a great fit for your company. Learn more on partnerhero.com or click the.

Claus Lauter [00:25:48]:
Link in the show notes Loyalty lion is a leading loyalty platform helping Shopify brands rocket, rejoining customers with their own loyalty programs. With Loyalty lion, it's quick and easy to create a program that uses points and rewards to engage shoppers, secure more second purchases, and drive up lifetime value. Loyalty lion has been increasing returning customer rates for thousands of Shopify stores for over ten years. Visit loyaltylion.com to find out more. Find the link in the show notes.