The Amazon Strategist Show

Boost Your Amazon Sales: Top SEO Techniques You Need To Know

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In this episode of the Amazon Strategist Show, John talks with SEO expert Steven Schneider, co-founder & CEO of TrioSEO, about the importance of SEO for e-commerce businesses.

Steven shares insights on bottom-of-funnel content, on-page SEO best practices, and the long-term benefits of investing in SEO.

Learn why SEO isn't dead, how it works for e-commerce, and why patience is key when building your organic traffic. Discover practical strategies to grow your Amazon business and expand your online presence beyond the marketplace.

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Website: https://trioseo.com/
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Speaker 1:

I always tell people that you didn't get into business for it to be a short-term kind of quick win, and if you actually are in your business, your brand, for the long haul, it makes sense to kind of invest in SEO now so that when you look back in three years you're going to say, wow, I'm so happy that I started to do this.

Speaker 2:

Hello, I'm your host, jon Cavendish, and welcome to the Amazon Strategy Show. The show that's all strategy, with no hacks, no silver bullets and no magic pills, just real, practical strategies to grow your Amazon business. So today we have something a bit different. We have the pleasure of being joined by Stephen Schneider from Trio SEO here, and we're going to be talking about something very different.

Speaker 2:

Steve is the co-founder of Trio SEO, a blog writing agency that helps online businesses drive high, converting organic traffic through block of fellow content. Before that, he ran 40 blogs, 400 articles a month, so he knows SEO Today. True SEO basically creates content that converts their buyers and manages everything from writing and publishing to guidance on UX and conversion. So, steve, welcome to the podcast. Thanks, sean, sad to be here. Great to have you here. So, seo a lot of my friends were into SEO back from like 2015 to 2020, exited their companies Then lots of people have been saying SEO is dead. I went to an SEO conference recently in Ho Chi Minh City, vietnam, and everyone was talking not really about SEO. They were talking about Google, my Business, which maybe is a part of SEO and PR. So what are people talking about in the SEO space these days?

Speaker 1:

I mean, they're definitely not wrong. I think the Google my Business in that aspect for local is way important. It's definitely what moves the needle for local businesses, brick and mortar, and I think that even people like us who are more of a virtual business can still benefit from stuff like that. Pr also great aspect there. I mean, you'll never have any downside by building high authority PR links. The more people are talking about you, the better. But you know, seo is not dead. I think that if you look at it from a branding perspective like brands are built with intent to last for years down the road and Google is obviously not going anywhere. And so by that kind of train of thought, as long as you're doing SEO right and kind of playing by the rules and not, you know, dabbling in any of the black hat tactics uh, you know, I think that you can have some pretty good success, kind of on top.

Speaker 2:

That makes a lot of sense. So you know, talking about it from the point of view of someone who's got an e-commerce business and they want it. They're thinking, okay, well, I want to start building a store because I sell on Amazon, I'm doing good revenue Amazon, but I don't have anything outside of Amazon. What would you suggest as kind of a way to start setting themselves up to success for the future?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, yeah. So I mean, like the best place is obviously to, like you know, import, you know, try to get some of your product on your site. Obviously, keep it on Amazon just because of the conversion tactics and I don't even have to try to convince your seller otherwise or your audience. But the side of things that we dabble into is going to be the blog content, which is really what can impact e-commerce sellers. If you're tackling all different funnel aspects, we focus on bottom of funnel first, just because, obviously, the ROI component.

Speaker 1:

But when you create that content for your site, that becomes a piece of real estate, a valuable asset for your brand. It's not going anywhere. If you do it right. It's only going to compound over time and what that does is it attracts organic traffic to potentially benefit your brand and drive sales or newsletter signups or lead magnet downloads, whatever that does to get people into your nurture sequence. So as you kind of create content consistently, that flywheel just starts to turn and it just spins faster and faster and you know you look back over a 12 month or 36 month period and you have all these keywords on your site with all these doors essentially to your house where people can find you.

Speaker 2:

So if someone's coming into this cold don't know that much about SEO, could you kind of give a brief overview of um, of how it works, so you know how people are actually finding it, how it's actually bringing up your you know, bringing more traffic to your site?

Speaker 1:

yeah.

Speaker 1:

So the the best way to think about it is kind of like the house to the door analogy, where your website is going to be your house and the more keywords or the more you know opportunities you allow people to it, the more they can kind of enter the party and come visit you.

Speaker 1:

So you know you want to optimize your titles and your pages. Specifically, if you're looking at blogs, you want to target the topics that actually have intent based behind them. So if you're, you know, selling like winter jackets, for example, like it probably makes sense that you're going to have a best 2024 winter jackets write up and even though you mentioned your competitors, obviously put yourself as number one. So think about ways to strategically insert your brand in front of your buyers and then also mix in some informational content on your site. And then obviously there's a lot of like technicalities of just making sure that your site runs well, has a good user experience and all the things that matter for Google's point of view and also the visitors who are so kind of. In a nutshell, it's all the things that encompass your website and how Google reacts to that. And if say you know you do it right, they'll rank you according.

Speaker 2:

Awesome, cool. And then you said we should start with bottom of funnel content. So could you give some kind of examples of, like, say, I sell kitchen tools what would be some good bottom funnel content that you could start with?

Speaker 1:

Yeah. So if you're looking at, we'll say, like cutting boards, you know it could be plastic cutting board versus wood cutting board or it could be brand A versus brand B. So in that sense, like brand topics are great because you know people are already searching for those brands, they have search intent and they also have, you know, people who are looking to learn more and potentially make a decision around which one to choose. So from that perspective, what you could do is kind of like a trifecta, where you're doing brand A versus brand B and then inserting yourself as the C option in that discussion and then trying to kind of highlight why you are the better option in that case. That would be kind of one example of bottom funnel.

Speaker 1:

You could also do like best of or review type content. It's a little bit more challenging, just based on the stricter guidelines of Google, but e commerce sellers are in a perfect position because they have access to the product and they can take photos, do direct reviews and do like hand tested, authentic kind of spins on it, compared to people who are just, you know, writing a paragraph on the pros and cons and slapping that online. The more authentic you can get and the more intimate you can become with the buyer journey and how they're going to respond to the product, the more you're going to benefit. So really just kind of speaking to how you can kind of put your product in front of that dental buyer and then just do it better than your competitors cool.

Speaker 2:

That makes a lot of sense, and you know these are all seo noob questions and I've tried to educate myself but I'm still not really done that much seo. So, from what I understand you know, you have seo on page seo, which is, yeah, I guess, keywords and an optimization, making things happen, and then you have backlinks, and can you tell us a bit about backlinks and how that interacts with your SEO strategy?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so backlinks would fall under the category of what's called off-page SEO. So these are all the things that are going to do off-site that would impact your website. So you know, it's like social media content. If you are posting a TikTok video and then linking that to your website, that would be an off page backlink, because TikTok essentially linking to your website and has a funnel back to your website. So these backlinks can be in all different types of forms.

Speaker 1:

Obviously, if you get one from TikTok, it's not really gonna matter, because Google just kind of like says okay, it's not like everyone's's linking, but they have these what are called like do follow links.

Speaker 1:

That's kind of like where the authority comes through. So if you have a partner in the space or a potential ally in your brand or, you know, if you're going on podcasts, you're doing newsletter write-ups or pr, they'll link to your website as kind of like a vote of confidence, and that's what google takes it as. So the more kind of votes you get, where other people are kind of, you know, vouching for your site and being like, hey, if I'm willing to link to the site, go check them out, sort of thing, google kind of takes it as like oh, this, they actually are meaningful and let's you know, take that into consideration. So the more relevance you can gain, the more links you can get, the more kind of clout. I guess, if you want to look at it like that, is just how you build your authority and kind of build your expertise, and then all that translates to better ranking Cool.

Speaker 2:

So I mean thinking about it. Is this a correct analogy that you know? Your content on the site is to give Google context of what they should be showing, and then the backlinks are kind of giving them the authority and the juice of how high you should be for what you are showing.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, 100%. I always like to say that the content is kind of like the iceberg. You know, it's like the. You see your website on top was like your homepage, your about page, all that sort of stuff, and then your blog is below the water of the iceberg, which kind of adds depth, it adds your authority, it adds your expertise and kind of like all the knowledgeable topics around that. And then another way to think about back things is like a spider web where if you have one versus if you have a million lines kind of going to the center. So all that is kind of how I kind of like to translate seo to visuals.

Speaker 2:

I like it, I like the analogy. And then your business is the titanic, that if google changes anything in the iceberg, destroys it and sinks it.

Speaker 1:

We're the life ship that if google is the, is the the sinking part. We're like the life show that comes around and like makes people who are in the water like be picked up into safety.

Speaker 2:

Okay because, yeah, all my friends that had seo-based businesses whether it's e-com or sites or niche sites have yeah got slapped at some point, whether it's hard or or soft yeah, yeah recently, my friend was pumping out thousands of ai pages and then it got slapped as well.

Speaker 2:

Oh yeah, live and die by google. That's what we say. So, as you say that I mean, the question I would be asking if I was about trying to you know five seo partner would be how long is this gonna last? Do you think there's gonna be an end to it as this ai comes in and google starts creating answers for you Like what do you think is the long term vision for SEO?

Speaker 1:

It's definitely going to get harder.

Speaker 1:

I think that we've already seen in the last kind of six months that quality is more important than ever, especially with AI and kind of how people are choosing to use and abuse it.

Speaker 1:

At Trio SEO, we're 100% human written and edited agencies, so we don't really dabble in any AI content. We look at AI as more of a tool, and I think that it's still so early that those who are choosing to experiment with a lot of AI content and trying to put corners by just doing hundreds of articles at once, you know they're going to get penalized, and I think that that's fair. I think that as long as you're trying to abuse the system, some people can do it really well, but those people are usually using AI and editing it for four or five hours to make sure that it's not AI-like, and so I think at the end of the day, people have to remember that you're writing content for humans, you're not writing it for Google, and if people are actually going to engage with your brand and read the content, at the end of the day it should come off conversational, it should come off authoritative, it should come off like you're not using ai terms like digital landscape and all these weird things that chat gpt pumps out.

Speaker 2:

So I think, as long as you're keeping the actual reader in mind, then you'll be yeah, I think that's really important for anyone listening, like ai being a tool, not a, not a crutch, and that's what worries me the most about the upcoming generation of people. Getting stuff done is like you know. Yesterday I was talking to my sales guy. We were diving deep into a new appointment center we were looking to hire, so we looked at their stuff. We're like, ah, this is okay, let's just shove the message that we gave them as a test message into AI. See what it says. First message came back with like three paragraphs of absolute rubbish. But then, you know, as long as you know how to coach it and give it feedback, you know, even if it's just as little, as what we did was like, just keep it short and sweet, come to the back with like a perfect, perfect response. So you know, with the right, a smart person attached to AI is going to be so productive. It's amazing. I love it.

Speaker 1:

Yeah, and I think it really just. It just has to speak to the person who's using it. Like if you're just thinking like oh my gosh, this is the best thing ever, I'm just going to take it at face value and slap it on my site like sure you should be penalized. But I think that if you're willing to tinker with it and look at it more as a engagement of how it responds, you're giving it feedback and you're taking it and you know, spending some time on it and it actually produces a quality piece of content that it'll probably perform well. Yeah, it makes a lot of sense.

Speaker 2:

So I guess one technical question then would be like what are some of the on-page SEO best practices, like some of it's somewhat good implement now when they're doing their first few articles there?

Speaker 1:

Maybe it starts in keyword research, I don't know, but when they figure out what to write and then how to display it on their page, yeah, some of the like low-hanging fruit that's just like non-negotiables are going to be making sure that your headings are optimized, like h2s, h3s, h4s, so those make sense. Do those have like primary keywords or secondary keywords in there? Um, and then kind of looking at like internal linking as a big thing, so that would be how well your pages on your site are connected to one another and if the anchor text on the page or like the keyword that you're linking page a to page B to make sense and is relevant. And then making sure that, like your, you know your pictures are there and you have alt text and your images are descriptive and you're not trying to like stuff extra keywords in your images. It should be, you know, descriptive and kind of like tell what the picture is about.

Speaker 1:

And then just making sure that you would abide by like your EAT guidelines, which is an acronym for experience, your expertise, your authoritativeness and the trustworthiness. So if you have a blog like, do you have an author bio, do you have that bio link to their LinkedIn? You know, for example, like ours, I talk about my expertise, I talk about how I'm on LinkedIn and I give people direct links so that people know that there's an actual human behind the content and it's not just this persona, so to speak. So yeah, I think as long as you're just trying to make every page the best experience possible for whoever visits it, it's going to perform pretty well.

Speaker 2:

And do you have any guides for that, like on your site, that people can go and check it out and see?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, so we have a great like Trio SEO sop download. Uh, we're in the process of updating it right now too. So even if you update it like you'll get a free copy of the new one. It's just all of our kind of like best practices. I think there's 10 of them right now, and then we'll obviously update that over time. And then you can always just poke around our site trio seocom, and kind of see like what are we doing? Once you kind of look at a site through a different lens and see like how the titles are shaped or how the you know sidebars are, you kind of start to look at it like, oh, this makes sense. But to anyone who's just usually poking around the site like you'd never know, which is fine.

Speaker 2:

But that's kind of where I nerd out man, that makes a lot of sense, cool, yeah, is there anything else anyone should know about seo that, before they can get ready to, you know, start prepping themselves and getting ready to uh, expand their business off of amazon?

Speaker 1:

uh, just be patient. You know seo takes a long time for it to come to light. Uh, you know, if you're starting a new site from scratch, don't be upset. If it takes at least six months to get your first little trickle in of traffic. As you kind of grow your authority and backlinks, all this sort of stuff, it'll obviously help speed things up. But you know, for example, like with Trio, you know we've been pumping out 10 pieces of content per month the last year. We have a decent stack and you know we're only at like 2000 organic traffic. So I mean, it's it takes time, but once it does it's kind of like this hockey stick effect where it's slow, slow, slow and then just kind of like takes off and launches and then you have that kind of in your back pocket. So if you're looking to kind of invest in your seo it's, it's a really smart move. But just be realistic with kind of the timeline attached to that.

Speaker 2:

Yes, uh results take time, especially, especially in seo 100, awesome, cool. So we're gonna move on to the next part of the uh podcast. So we we call this the controversial take, so we say what is your most debatable or controversial opinion related to the industry in general?

Speaker 1:

I think it's just like kind of that it doesn't work. You know, it kind of like goes back to the idea that it takes time. But, um, yeah, I think that so many people people kind of look at SEO as like an experiment. You know, it's easy to pull the PPC lever and kind of see what that does for a business. But if you're just going to kind of go to an SEO agency and say, hey, let's test this for 30 or 60 days and then nothing happens like that's kind of a fair we could submit a book might happen.

Speaker 1:

So, um, yeah, it kind of just goes back to, like you know, I always tell people that you didn't get into business for it to be a short-term kind of quick win and if you actually are in your business, your brand, for the long haul it makes sense to kind of invest in seo now so that when you look back in three years you're going to say, wow, I'm so happy that I started to do this. So, um, yeah, I think that's kind of a big misconception. It's just that it's this like magic, fairy dust, black magic on the internet which I can understand.

Speaker 2:

Yeah, I mean, and, to be honest, I've had the same experience with SEO. You know, I always wish I'd started earlier. You know, we started investing in SEO two years into the business and, yeah, we would have made a lot more money by now, once it had compounded, if we'd started two years before Exactly, awesome. So, stephen, thank you so much for being here on the show. If people want to learn more, follow you online, stalk you what's the best way to contact and reach out?

Speaker 1:

Yeah, I'm very active on LinkedIn. You can find me there, stephen Schneider. You can also Google my name plus Trio SEO. I always joke that we're an seo company so we'll show up on google if you just google my name or the company. But uh, yeah, all right, I'll say that now. But yeah, no, you can always reach out to me. I love talking people, I love networking, so my dms are always open. Um, don't feel afraid to reach out and, you know, ask for questions or just have a coffee chat, love it.

Speaker 2:

please do slide into steven's d yeah, of course. So that brings us to the end of our episode. Thank you so much for being here, stephen, and yeah, we hope that everyone's listening has got some valuable insights they can implement today in getting things moving for the rest of their business. If this is a long-term business that you see as something that you're going to invest in long-term, if you're listening, then SEO is something you should be getting at least the basics done, so it gets Google to know what your website does and where you are in the world. So, if you did find today's discussion useful, please do follow us, look out for us and, whatever platform you're listening on, follow and like, because it really helps us get reach. Spotify has just got a rating system, so feel free to go in and rate us whatever number of stars you feel like five stars, and we will hopefully grow even more there. So, yeah, steven, thank you so much for being here. Thanks, john, it's a blast.

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