Interview with Benjamin Golden on E-commerce SEO

Hey Benjamin,

Thank you for joining me in this interview today.

We first met a few years back during an online marketing conference and recently undertook your SEO audit for our superfood supplement store.

So, Benjamin, I am keen to know your story, so let’s jump straight into this with my first question.

It would be great to get a little background information from where you were born to where you live today. What’s your backstory?

I was born in a tiny town in Slovenia, a tiny European country right next to Italy.

Today, most of my time is spent in Tbilisi, Georgia, where I moved about 2 years ago, mainly due to much better business opportunities compared to those available back home.

How did you first get into search engine optimization (SEO)?

I started online at the age of 12, initially on YouTube – here’s my first video.

I was incredibly passionate about smartphones and gadgets and started making video reviews of everything I had around the house.

By the age of 14, I was sponsored by every single phone carrier in Slovenia and I was regularly sent smartphones to review on my YouTube channel.

At 16 I had the idea of creating my own website.

I had no clue how to do it, so I went on YouTube and learned WordPress.

That was 7-8 years ago, and at that point, local businesses in Slovenia didn’t really have nice websites, so I started a web design company, building websites for local businesses, called GoldenWeb.

At some point, we were creating about 6-7 websites per week and had a very good process, but soon I discovered that all these businesses didn’t really care about websites, they wanted leads.

This realization led me to Google Ads, and then eventually to SEO – because I don’t like paying for stuff I can get for free – especially when it comes to traffic.

Very rarely do I see SEOs focusing on E-commerce (you may be the first). How come you focused on E-Commerce only?

After the transformation of GoldenWeb from a web design agency, to an SEO agency, we were primarily serving local businesses in Slovenia, but to tell you the truth, there just weren’t that many quality projects available.

I wanted to go big and eventually got into affiliate marketing with SEO after attending the Chiang Mai SEO conference in Thailand, hosted by Matt Diggity.

About a year after that, I had a very successful affiliate website making solid income, so I decided to start offering SEO services to other affiliate websites.

Since my background is in web development, I have the advantage of being able to really dial in the technical SEO of a website – which is a big deal, since SEO is all about stacking marginal quick-wins and improvements.

We got quite popular in 2019 after appearing on some bigger niche website podcasts, but I was always thinking about going bigger.

How can I work with the biggest websites in the world, where I can have the most impact, and provide the most value?

This led me to the question…

Why am I serving affiliate websites, if they all work for eCommerce websites?

This ultimately leads to one more transformation of GoldenWeb, now into an eCommerce SEO agency.

Today we work primarily with Shopify (and some WooCommerce) eCommerce businesses and some of the biggest DTC brands in the world, such as ORLY, BlendJet, Theory11 & others.

What are the quick wins for e-commerce sites looking to get search traffic?

We have our own internal list of 285 eCom SEO quick-wins, ranging from technical SEO all the way to off-page SEO.

I’ll share 3 quick wins as an example, that you can apply to any eCom store if you want to boost up its organic traffic.

Keyword Mapping

Keyword mapping is the process of defining the best possible target keyword for a specific page.

We do this by going into Google Search Console, selecting the page we want to find a keyword for, and noting down all of the keywords it’s already getting clicks for.

We then go into Ahrefs, and compare the search volume of the keywords we noted down, as well as the average DR of a domain ranking for that keyword, and also our current keyword position.

By looking at all of those factors, for all of those keywords, we then compare them with each other and pick the keyword that has the highest search volume, with the highest chances of ranking in the top 3 results in the shortest time possible.

We then put that target keyword at the start of the meta title, put that keyword as an H1, and start building links.

Recapturing Broken Backlinks

Nowadays everyone’s so obsessed with building links, and while I agree that it should be one of the top priorities of an SEO – many forget that they might already have links, but aren’t utilizing them to their full potential.

You see, if another website sends a link to your page (and your page doesn’t work, has been renamed, or shows a 404 code), then Google won’t pass the link power from the linking domain over to yours.

The solution is to create a list of all 404 pages receiving external links and either recreate the pages or redirect them to a page that actually works.

Unoptimized Index

Another major opportunity that I see pretty much every eCommerce brand missing out on is not optimizing their index.

You see, Google will only crawl a small portion of your pages at once, thus you have to make sure that all of those pages are highly optimized and target specific keywords.

If you have low-quality/duplicate content indexed, you’re doing yourself a disservice and losing out on a lot of potential traffic and customers.

We get search traffic to our blog posts, how would you turn this traffic into buyers?

Turning blog traffic into customers is a process that starts before you even publish the blog post.

It’s of crucial importance that you pick keywords to target that have high buying intent (to either convert into a sale or into an opt-in for your email list).

When you first plan out your content, have a list of calls to action for every single blog post you plan on writing and publishing.

My biggest piece of advice would be to plan the call to action ahead of time, whether those are placing buy now buttons into the blog post or linking to the product pages…

Or if those are quizzes and free resources that you offer in exchange for an email address (and convert the customer at a later date with email marketing).

I have seen your case studies, they are impressive. Can you go through one of your best case studies and how you grew their traffic?

It’s never easy picking out a case study – especially since we’re currently uploading 5 new ones…

For now, I’ll share a case study on how we generated $981,172.04 in Additional Organic Revenue in 6 months for a Solar Shopify brand.

The return on SEO investment (just in the 6-month period) was over 28x and we achieved a 111.79% increase in revenue.

I’ll summarize the 2000-word case study below, but here’s the link to it, in case you want to read it in full.

Full Technical SEO Audit

We start off every SEO project with a full SEO audit, where we cover over 285 on-page, off-page, and technical SEO factors & opportunities.

The Solar brand mentioned above had tons of technical SEO issues, keyword cannibalization, on-page issues, as well as off-page SEO problems due to negative SEO done by competitors.

SEO Audit Implementations

After we identified all of the issues it took us about 16 days to clean up all of the errors & apply all of our suggestions to the client’s store.

Keyword Mapping

On top of the technical issues, the store didn’t really have any keyword research/on-page SEO done.

We selected and identified the top 25 money keywords, assigned them a target keyword, and optimized their on-page SEO, which instantly boosted the rankings.

Keyword Research and Content Planning

When it comes to content, we’re known for a fact that we write more content than any other SEO agency does for their clients (we write from 30k to 100k words a month).

In the case of this project, we exported around 200,000 keywords related to solar, clustered them, and then sorted them into SILOs for better internal linking.

Here’s our full Shopify SEO guide, which explains how we go about content planning (as it’s quite an in-depth process).

Content Writing, Uploading, and Publishing

After the content plan is done, we start with writing and publishing.

It’s important to note that every article will link to all other relevant articles in the same SILO, as well as all of the relevant keyword-mapped pages that we defined in step 3.

Linkbuilding

Our go-to linkbuilding method is PR and outreach linkbuilding, where we get our clients featured in relevant media publications and guest posts.

We mainly build links to the client’s money pages, with keyword variations used as anchors.

You give free SEO mini audits to E-commerce owners. Can you tell me the process and what you can expect from the audit?

We offer a free mini SEO audit where we run your site through 10 potential quick wins that can be applied for a boost in SEO and rankings.

This is mainly, so we see if there are enough opportunities to implement for the site and if it makes sense to run the full SEO audit, which covers 285 opportunities.

At the same time, it also gives you an idea of how we work and what these opportunities look like.

If you’d like to request a free mini SEO audit for your store and book a time for a call with me, you can do so by clicking here.

GoldenWeb Mini SEO Audit