How To Create Automated Links to Anywhere | #211 Garry Egan

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Claus Lauter: Hello, and welcome to another episode of the e commerce coffee break podcast. Today, we want to revisit the topic of search engine optimization, SEO. A lot of merchants have a rough idea what SEO is. They know that SEO is important, but really going into the detail and really seeing the benefits of SEO is a little bit of a secret to most of them.

So we want to dive a little bit deeper into that and look also at a very specific part of SEO. With me on the show today is Gary Egan. He is the founder of interlinks and he has more than 15 years. In the app space, 25 years experience deploying technical solution, and he has launched interlinks in October 22 after living with division since 2016.

Egan's previous clients include Cisco Systems, nbc, Disney, Tokyo, and H B O. So he has a vast background when it comes to s e O and apps. So let's welcome Gary to the show. Hi Gary. How are you today? Hi, Klaus. 

Garry Egan: Congratulations on a thousand subscribers, 10, 000 downloads, big accomplishment. 

Claus Lauter: Well done. Thanks so much.

Gary, tell me a little bit more why SEO is so important and why merchants should actually focus 

Garry Egan: on it. That's a good question. You can really sum up an SEO effort into three goals, right? We've got awareness to actually a tree falls in the forest, no one can see it, right? So we want to make sure people can see it.

So the first one is awareness, right? To get us visible. The second is. Consideration, right? They've landed on this page. What do you want that user to do tonight? So we're trying to guide them to the converting pages, right? So we call that consideration. And finally, let's convert that customer, right? So the conversion event itself.

So if you get all of those three pieces firing together, awareness, consideration, and then conversion, that is the three legged stool of SEO, which is find me. Get me to start funneling me to the right pages get me to a category category gets me to a product product gets me to check out or maybe a link gets me to a contact form.

Contact form gets me to lead acquisition, right? Whatever your conversion metric is. But those are the 3 legged stool of SEO is consideration awareness and conversion

Claus Lauter: now, SEO is a long term game and it is also a strategic approach and a lot of merchants, I think they miss out on the strategic approach.

They just think I do a headline, I do a product description and the rest of Google will sort out. But it's more complicated than that. Specifically looking at keywords. How do you select the right keywords for your product detail page, for instance? 

Garry Egan: And that's going to be the argument you're going to see across every SEO is going to have their own style of the keywords they choose now, whether there's two primary methods, right?

There's the which keywords have the most volume. Let's go for those, right? And let's just go ahead and compete with all of the other big players in the space and hope we get a piece of that pie, That's One way. And the other way is, of course, you're probably familiar with long tail, right? Very longer words, other than just a credit card, you might have the cheapest credit cards, right?

Start getting longer words in there that have less searches, but less people are competing for them. So there's two kind of schools of thought on how you want to do your SEO strategy. But for the most part, keyword acquisition and figuring out what keywords you want to use can be done. Now I use, let's say Google, pay per click, the keyword research tool.

 They used to, Google used to have a bunch of different tools back in the day. They had Google labs, trends, you could Google set in case you ever remember sets. We used to use sets back in the day we used to create a blog post. Centered around a whole Google set. So you could, let's say cheapest credit cards, right?

You'd be like, all right, Google stats, give me the seven best terms around cheapest credit cards. And if you worked those seven terms into your blog post, you would fire off all the Google signals, right? It'd be like, oh, I found a card by lowest credit cards. And you had a phrase in there about. the top 10 lowest credit cards and lowest credit cards with no interest and lowest credit cards with no annual fee.

You hit all my buzzwords. So that usually is what it takes to light up Google. And it's like, Hey, I found what you're looking for. And I would venture to say that SEO really hasn't changed much from that core concept, which is listen, we are humans and we are trying to talk to search engines. So if you built a search engine, What would you how would you reverse talk to each other?

Right? How would you guys communicate? Well, I would look on the page for certain phrases, and then I would reverse those out to a core phrase and say, listen, I think your page is about this top topic because you have a lot of these sub topics under it. And that's siloing. There's a lot of different ways you can call that.

I call it common sense because like, why would you want to have, auto parts on a credit card store? It doesn't make any sense, right? And Google thinks the same thing. It wants relevant links and it gives more weight to those relevant links, right? So that are on topic. To answer your question, to come back to which keywords do you choose, start with your root keyword, like what you're trying to rank on, and let's look for some related words under that.

And that's where I start. I'm like, all right, let's see what you think this page, what should be on this page, Google, for you to understand that this is what I say this page is about. I've told you it in the H1, I've told you it in the H2, I've got a bunch of repetition stuff in there. Okay, we'll check those boxes.

But if you check the boxes of related keywords on the page, and that's got to be the lowest hanging fruit of any SEO ever out there. I'm like, go to your page. What are you trying to rank for? They'll be like, I'm trying to rank for this. All right. Give me the seven or eight top related phrases under that.

Now you can get this easy without Google pay per click. Just go to Google, Google it, scroll to the bottom, and you'll see the related phrases. But there's 10 of them. They're in a block. Grab all of them. Grab all of them. Go to your blog and paste them in there. , no formatting and start. There's my column headers.

Let's do a paragraph on that. Let's do a paragraph on that. I promise you, you will find that page blow up. Google will freak out and be like, I found a page that has almost all now I always get a little paranoid. I'm like, but don't do all eight because it'll know, do seven. Don't do it all right.

That'll be a signal. That's what I would write. So anyway, be smart about it. But that is you are talking directly into Google's brain when you do that. Which keywords do you choose clouds to answer your question? The ones that are directly related to your core keyword. 

Claus Lauter: I think you mentioned common sense, and I think that's where it starts.

So working your way through and then finding related keywords. Now, with the keywords, it's not only that you use keywords that Google will find you. So there's inbound, outbound links, and there's internal linking, and all of this works with keywords. Tell me a little bit about inbound links, outbound links, and why internal linking is so important.

That's a 

Garry Egan: good question. So, Here we've went through. Imagine you as a store owner. We've got emails. We've got SNS blasts. We will do anything to get a customer to go on our store, right? We'll do anything. We'll pay for it. We'll pay you to come to our store and look around. Maybe you'll find something. You know the deal.

We need to do everything we can to keep that customer on that store. Right. If they're on a blog post, we want them scrolling on the second scroll, there better be a link in there that goes to a contextual link because not only do blog links carry more weight than navigation and menu links, because if you look at, I have a great stat, I'll have to rip it out here, but a significant amount of users weight credibility within body content.

Much higher than navigation and menu links. If you look at where your eyes are focused, they're not off to the sides. They're right there in the center of that blog post. And when you start scrolling through and you get two or three empty paragraphs with no links, there it goes. You're there. The mind starts to wander.

You've just violated your first commandment, which is, Hey, Hey, Hey, Hey, let's get you, let's get you somewhere else that you might like better. Let's start funneling you to a conversion page. So what better way to funnel to a conversion page to get them in on the blog, see a contextual link inside the body content that goes to a cat, a collection or category in your Shopify store.

Boom, we started funneling the user. Now they're in a collection, right? And you've got them shopping again. I have interlink set up so you can insert, you can automate links link creation within collection descriptions, blog posts, pages. And product descriptions. If you really want to get super aggressive about it.

Now, I had disabled product description linking by default because my position is listen, I've got you to that conversion page. I don't want you to no more clicking. You're all done. I don't want you leaving this page anymore. Right? I've got you right where I want so I turn off product description linking.

I don't want you leaving. That's from a funneling standpoint. That's internal linking. I've kept my customer on the site longer. And I dug last night for like what I would call like the magic metric, which is like, can you please tell me how much longer I can keep a customer on site with every link in a blog post.

Is it one minute? Is it three minutes? I haven't found any solid source yet where I can actually put my reputation on it and be like, did you know that every link is 18 seconds of customer retention time? I'm like, but I will find that, that, that stat when it's available. 

Claus Lauter: I'm sure it speaks for itself.

If you catch people and you keep them on the site, obviously the time on site will increase massively. And I liked that you said on the product detail page, no further linking, and I see quite often that people merchants have social media links. They are. Like on Facebook, share on Twitter, what's everyone that's on the product detail page.

And that's the worst thing you can do. Don't have any external links there. As you said, you have the people there where you want to have them. And the only one call to action you want to have on a product detail page is the ads to cart button. So totally agree with not having any further links. Now, bigger stores, bigger merchants.

Have thousands of SKUs. They have hopefully a big block for SEO purposes. Now creating links, linking all this together might be very difficult. And I think you came up with a solution with interlinks for that. And you said that your vision started in 2016. What took you so long? 

Garry Egan: It's a good point. For 2016 to 2019, I was on the hunt it was peak technical Shopify finding a good Shopify developer to actually synchronize with me and even do a couple of meetings was quite the task. It was an interview process to get a developer on board, and I think the most challenging part for me, and I, and it's something I debated sharing with the world, but I'm like, I've got a linking tool my background is IT security along with, that's Cisco, right?

So I went nuts with security on this. I made it so the links are encrypted on the database. Not even interlinked staff can view links on the database. There's a hash generated on every link. So I've went through exhaustive efforts to make it secure from that standpoint.

So I knew that when I did this app, It was, I was going to need an intermediate advanced developer. This is, even though someone could do an app, this is not your vanilla app. I've got link, I've got link data. I've got encryptions. I've got hashes. I've got what happens when the hash breaks. I've got server hardening, server ports.

 It was an exhaustive effort to make sure that my service, I could sleep at night going, all right, you guys are all safe and sound in here and we're all protected here. So that's why it took so long to find it. Then COVID, right? 1920. And that brought me to 21, 22. And then I'm like, got started right away and found the right developer and made the vision happen exactly how I wanted it.

Claus Lauter: Okay. So how does it work in real life? Once you have installed the Shopify app what's happening next? 

Garry Egan: Right. So the onboarding process was something I dealt with in the beginning that I didn't have an automated way to do. I just had it. So, Hey, create your link start typing.

Right. And that presented challenges for users. They have to know about relative links versus full they were pasting links to pictures in there for the keywords and for the target URL and stuff. So I made an onboarding piece to where the app reads all of your collections, like reads them all.

Blindly and says, Hey, I've got an empty collection here. What word would trigger like what word or phrase would land a customer to this collection, right? Is it one word? Is it a couple of words? And what that means is now we've got all of our collections. We've got these keywords that can define those collections.

So now when we go into a blog post or a page and that word gets uttered epoxy, it goes right to the epoxy collection and that's done automatically. Right. So to answer your question. A big merchant can retroactively onboard their store and have all of their previous blog posts linked by using interlinks.

And that's one of the greatest things I love about larger merchants is, did you know, you can retroactively do a link campaign in mass with interlinks? And so the second piece of that puzzle with enterprise, because I have an enterprise background, which kind of started this whole server hardening security thing, rather than I'm not doing a homegrown tool, I'm doing a secure tool that I can sleep with at night, right?

So I knew I had secure servers, secure apps, secure code. And then I just said, okay, it's time to make this thing suitable for Mass onboarding for corporations. So I made a import CSV function so you can import in 1000 links, and to your chart to your whether you make it programmatically or however you do it.

 That's what I did to make it suitable for corpse is a import CSV. You could affect all of your previous blog posts. And get caught up pretty quick. 

Claus Lauter: Okay. Now, once you have interlinked all your categories, your blogs, your pages do you need to report that to Google or what's happening when it comes to becoming more searchable from Google itself?

That's a 

Garry Egan: good point. Now that brings us into a little bit of a technical discussion regarding. Link code and Google, right? And you, right? Sounds like a blog post. Link, code, Google, and you. And what it comes down to is this. There's two ways that a link can be scraped from Google, right? And the first way is...

Right from the source code where Google bot fetches the your pages, Google source code, parses it scans it and says, Okay, I know what's going on because that's way one. And that is the way it is done right now. But as mobile apps come out more your phone all these different phones.

Those are written in a different type of language. Okay, a coding language that works on Apple and Android devices equally. Right. And it's a language called react. Okay. And it's the core language of mobile devices. And it's claim to fame is ubiquity. In other words, I work on iPhone.

I worked on Android. You can just build to one platform and I work for everything. And Google is quite aware of this platform and knows that this is the way that apps that the future is turning. And there's a term for that. It's called client side rendering, right? In other words, what we do is we don't affect the core code.

We actually go to the client's browser, make changes on the link there, and show it to the end user. Google's position on parsing client side links is one of, Hey, we're aware that you guys are doing client side links. We're gonna get that working, and we are on it right now. We're working on it, so stay tuned, right?

So they have every intention of starting to crawl that. But they're slow to the move right now. We always feel that right now interlinks is ideal number one value proposition. The one that I put my hand up on be like works. Is the customer retention link flow value proposition, right?

We've got the customer on the site. Let's funnel them to the page, right? What I don't want to work on is, I don't want to try to market interlinks as this great, awesome SEO tool. Because you're banking too much on trying to understand Google. You're just trying to say, listen, Google, I know how you think, and I'm going to sell, make a tool, market it like this and collect collected money on it.

That's just not how I operate. I just can't do that. I build this tool as a link flow tool, customer retention. Let's get your customers funneled into conversion pages. 99% interlinks, right? When. Google eventually comes around and starts parsing mobile type pages in the type of format that we have. Yeah, I'll go ahead and pop on there.

The best SEO tool you ever heard of, right? Yeah, and I'll go to town and I'll go nuts. But right now, I just don't feel super 100% going. It's a massively great SEO tool. Because I'm like, no, Google is still trying to catch up on React and client side linking. I've got it on the site too. Any SEO kind of knows, ah, it's not for me.

and then mostly the reason just so you know, and I'll close with this, the main reason for this is Shopify Shopify wants it so no app can ever permanently alter Shopify data. They don't want it. So if a 3rd party app gets hacked. They went in and made all your posts say this word and put it in Viagra and all the links.

Nope, they want it. So once that app is removed, the links are gone, any bad stuff is gone. So I don't see Shopify changing course on this anytime soon because this is the why they do it. They want it so no rogue app. Can ever wreck a store. The most that can happen is we'll just discontinue the app and everything's fixed, And I actually agree with that. I would do it the same way. I have always thought WordPress had a huge gaping hole of, especially with auto updates on. You're like, wait a minute. That means any developer can just push code to every WordPress site it gives, it keeps me up I only auto update on like WooCommerce the big brands, right?

But any low WordPress plugin, I'm like, I'm not auto updating on mail. What do you got going on here? Yeah, I think 

Claus Lauter: we all have our horror stories with WordPress at some point in our lives. Right. Coming back to Shopify. Now, obviously interlinks has a massive impact on the user experience because it's shorter clicks.

You get people or people get quicker to what they're looking for. And. Do not need to go through the navigation. The link will take them directly to a category page and they're, they hopefully will find what they're looking for right now. We spoke about the implementation, but was there a kind of learning curve for implementing it?

How long does it take before you get? 

Garry Egan: That's a good, right. So I've got it set up and thanks for circling back to that. Onboarding is set up for with. We reread your collections, we present to you the keyword we think that you wanted for that collection and that's, we basically just rattled that collection name back and be like, Hey, did you want to use the collection name as your keyword?

Here's a chance to modify it, shorten it, make it one word instead of three, remove online store best in the UK, out of the title, whatever you might have in their collection title to help an SEO. You might just want, and we recommend one or two words to trigger that link. Right. if you're stores, let's say the best epoxy in the, on the West coast, you would just have the word epoxy that would just like to it.

 Because since we're not going for that core SEO value, we just want a link there. We want it. So if you were scrolling down a blog post and you saw the word epoxy, you hammered it, you're in there, you're in the collection. Right. Um, and you're looking at all of the different products. And if you could imagine that strategy in mass, For all of your collections, you can see how that boring blog post comes to life with beautifully.

Words are all interlinked there. They all go to your target categories. You didn't even have to think about it. You just typed as normal or use chat and said, bam, pasted it. Bam image. Look at that beautifully linked page done. And you move on to the next project. And it's a beautiful experience for the user too, because they don't see big old text blocks anymore.

It's just easier to read when there's a few links through it. So yeah, I agree. I think 

Claus Lauter: interlinks is a dream for content creators, to make their life much, much easier. Tell me a little bit about the pricing structure. How is it set up? Right. 

Garry Egan: For the regular store owner, I'm a store owner, just like everybody else.

And there's a million ways you can price the super helpful tool that saves you one to three minutes per link, if you figure out how long it takes to create one link. And then we could go and twist that the time saved a million ways to Sunday. But I made this thing 9 a month for the regular user, because.

I just want to be a part of their team. We have, we plan to make interlinks. We want to bring AI in there for some cool keyword suggestions. We want it so you can have keyword aliasing, so you can have like an epoxy collection. I know that a collection is epoxy epoxify glue. I can have several different words that pipe to that right now.

So we're going to have keyword aliasing, but we set it up for 9 a month. Monthly for the regular store owner. And of course, they can get a volume discount annual. But for the more enterprise user that needs a dedicated Gary to on call 24 7 to go custom integrations, special features they might want with their store.

We've got an enterprise plan that puts an account manager makes satisfies their Whatever corporate requirements they might have, but me coming from an enterprise background as well. Yeah. We always went with the enterprise route because when we called, we wanted someone to pick up. 

Claus Lauter: it makes sense.

 Where can people find out more about the app? Where can they get it? 

Garry Egan: Right. So the best way to figure out is to go to Shopify, the app store and to type in interlinks there and to visit the app store listing, right? We really keep that one up to date. If you go to Google, you're going to find there is another interlinks as well.

That's the WordPress interlinks, right? And that one does, like I said earlier, that interlinks to WordPress does actually modify your content. And so it's a little different product than ours, but a little better for those purposes. Yeah, I wouldn't go to Google to search this out because there's another interlinks product, but the best way to find more about interlinks on Shopify is on the Shopify app 

Claus Lauter: store.

Okay. I will put the link in the show notes and you just want. Gary, thanks so much for giving us an overview of interlinks. I think it's a very, as I said, a very, very helpful tool content creators. I'm sure we'll love it. It makes their life so much easier and I hope a lot of people will check it out.

Thanks so much for your time today. Thanks Claus.