[00:00:00] Katie Keith: In the past year, lots of WordPress product companies have seen huge volatility in their Google rankings, with their search positions going up and down as Google makes more and more algorithm changes. SEO is more unpredictable than ever before, so what can we as product owners do about it?

[00:00:29] Matt Cromwell: This is WP Product Talk, a place where every week we bring you insights, product marketing, business management and growth, customer experience, product development, and more. It's your go to podcast for WordPress product owners, by WordPress product owners. And now, enjoy the show.

[00:00:50] Katie Keith: Hi, I'm Katie Keith.

[00:00:52] Zack Katz: And I'm Zach Katz.

[00:01:08] Katie Keith: And today we're talking about marketing problems and how to reverse your declining SEO.

[00:01:15] Zack Katz: And that's why we invited Patrick Rolland today. Uh, Patrick, welcome. Thanks for joining us.

[00:01:21] Please introduce yourself and, uh, and tell us what you do.

[00:01:24] Patrick Rauland: Perfect. Yeah. My name is Patrick Rauland. I've been in WordPress for forever.

[00:01:28] Um, And currently I am working at Zero Shoes as a senior e commerce engineer, and I have a background in all sorts of other stuff. I love, I love everything e commerce is kind of the, the summary of Patrick.

[00:01:44] Zack Katz: And, uh, and how do you, uh, how do you integrate e commerce and SEO? What's your, uh, what's your relationship there? Uh, to your position with Xero Shoes.

[00:01:54] Patrick Rauland: Yes. So I'm an engineer at Xero Shoes. So we're a big company that's built on that's a website is built on WooCommerce. So I'm a huge fan of WooCommerce. I used to work at WooCommerce, have a bunch of courses and all sorts of stuff about it.

[00:02:08] Um, and then obviously a lot of SEO is the technical side. It's about exposing the things that you want Google to understand about your website, your, your, your products. Um, to Google so that it can show it in the search results. So a lot of it is that the technical side, I've also done SEO as in a, more of a marketing capacity, other companies in the past.

[00:02:28] So I have a pretty good understanding of what marketing wants and then also how to implement it and send it to Google.

[00:02:37] Zack Katz: And back in the day, I used to do SEO as well. Um, way back in the day. And it was, uh, not what it is today.

[00:02:47] Katie Keith: Well, you were Mr. Black Hat, weren't you? I remember you saying on a recent episode.

[00:02:51] Zack Katz: Oh, Katie. Digging up the old dirt. Uh, yeah. One of the reasons I got into WordPress is because, uh, it had dofollow links in the readme files, uh, when you submitted a plugin. And I also did some nasty things with like, I did, I did bad things, Patrick, uh, with RSS feeds, adding dynamic links on my plugins way back in the day, way long ago, none of the plugins anybody has installed anymore.

[00:03:19] Like, and I, I, uh, I was trying to get some dynamic ad or dynamic backlinks. And I submitted a plug in and the plug in happened to check an RSS feed for the dynamic backlinks, uh, on my own website.

[00:03:33] Patrick Rauland: Fantastic. Interesting. Interesting. There was a lot of stuff you used to be able to do in SEO. And just over the last, let's say, decade, a lot of that stuff is just no longer possible.

[00:03:43] Two decades it was, I'm going to add, you know, words at the bottom of my website, hollers, the background that was ancient stuff. And then there's been a lot of stuff that Google has slowly kind of phased out or, or stopped, um, ranking using as a ranking factor. So, but, but interesting background, right? It's about what does Google want and how do I.

[00:04:05] How do I do that for my website?

[00:04:08] Zack Katz: Patrick, what does Google want? And how do I do that for my website?

[00:04:11] Patrick Rauland: You know what, actually, I'm a big fan of, um, and this is this, so this definitely applies to SEO. It also just applies to business. It is give people what they want. It is that if I could summarize SEO, it is give people what they want, because Google will will send that content to users.

[00:04:29] Um, and also, 1 of the thing that Google wants is they want people to click and then to sort of fulfill their search needs. So if you are answering their questions and doing it in a. That doesn't mean be thorough. Sometimes it means be succinct, but answer people's problems. Give them what they want and Google will send you traffic.

[00:04:51] There's lots of, and we feel like

[00:04:53] Katie Keith: we've been doing that. We all think we've been giving Google what it wants, but. Things are changing. Um, a lot of product companies are seeing a decline. So let's get on to the decline side of things. So, um, I think, uh, I'll start with why I think this topic is important.

[00:05:11] Then I'd love to hear both of your takes. So I've seen a massive change in the last year, which probably started in about October, uh, when we first started suffering. So in about October, We had a big decrease in sales and then there were more algorithm changes and it went up at barn two And we were doing great.

[00:05:32] We had our best ever black friday and things were great Up till the end of may and then in june we've had a big drop So we had, um, nine from our search traffic from search has gone down 19. 4 percent in the last two months. So if you compare April and may with June and July, we've got a 19. 4 percent drop.

[00:05:56] And that has translated into a drop in new sales revenue. Um, we've had a 12 percent drop in that our overall revenue is about the same because of renewals being up. New sales are obviously vitally important to business, and we've had a 12 percent drop. And when you compare it to last year over the same period, we went up 0.

[00:06:16] 76%. So it's not simply a summer seasonal lull. So it's easy to feel helpless when this happens. So we need to talk about how we can all take control of our marketing in this strange world of Google changes. So Patrick, what about you? Why do you think this is particularly the time to talk about this?

[00:06:39] Patrick Rauland: Well, Google always has, um, Google, always Google always has these updates.

[00:06:45] Um, you know, there's, there's updates. Yeah. Last fall. And then there was updates in the spring of this year. There's some other planned for later this year. Um, so the algorithm is always changing. Um, but I think to the bigger, the bigger question of why is this topic important? If you aren't getting some sort of like organic visitors to your website, you're paying either Google.

[00:07:11] Facebook or Amazon, and they feel like toll booths on a business, um, for your traffic. Um, and a lot of people, you know, it's hard to make the margins work if you have to pay 5 a click to Google or whatever. So the reason it's so important is because SEO is one of the only. Sort of reliable, consistent, organic ways to get people to your website.

[00:07:30] You can do stuff with social, but that social is a little bit more of like a sugar high. It's a little bit more of like, wow, we had this one incredible post. We got a hundred thousand visitors because we did something incredible on Tik Tok or whatever. But, but organic SEO is like, cool. We've, we hit, we've, Uh, we've, I don't want to say mastered.

[00:07:49] We have the number one position for this long tail keyword that relates directly to our business, our product. And now we're getting 200 people a month on this one keyword. That's going to be, you know, for sales a month. I know that's a silly example, but you do that enough times and it actually your business.

[00:08:05] And then of course that's long tail, then we can get into fat. Head and we have these huge keywords that, that generate business revenue for our business. But to me, it all just comes back to you want to build. This is a channel where you don't pay anyone. Ultimately you, you only pay yourself for the time that you put in.

[00:08:23] Um, you don't have to pay external people for, you don't have to pay 5 a click to Google or 3 a click to face or Amazon or whatever. So that, that to me is why SEO is super important.

[00:08:35] Zack Katz: Yeah. And for me, the. We've had a similar decline, even worse decline, perhaps, Katie, a two year decline in traffic. We had, according to Google Search Console, because Google Analytics 4 is unreadable, it's impossible to figure out, we had 874 clicks last August on 31, 000 impressions.

[00:09:00] And this August, uh, on a, on a single day, um, this August 490 clicks on 15, 800 impressions. So that's a nearly 52 percent decline in clicks and a 50 percent decline in impressions. And yeah, that has resulted in our sales dropping. Thankfully, we've made changes to, you know, our our flows and our revenue is stable thanks to renewals, but also to reduce churn and other things.

[00:09:28] But, um, we've had a long strategy at Gravity Kit of writing quality content, not using AI. But like actually doing in depth content writing, um, and it was working so well, our traffic had been up essentially a hundred percent year over year because of the quality content we've been putting out. And then all of a sudden Google decided, Oh, we aren't rewarding this anymore.

[00:09:53] So part of what we've been trying to figure out at gravity kit is what to do next. And from some of the. Some of the research that we've been doing, it's things like, uh, trying to write contents in the first person and do more opinions and find, uh, find more narrative takes on things rather than like the ultimate guide to X, Y, Z.

[00:10:18] Uh, is that, I guess we're getting into the, uh, into the weeds a little bit, but, uh, are we on the right track, Patrick?

[00:10:29] Patrick Rauland: Uh, good question. Uh, I, I kind of think of those as a superficial changes, right? Like changing from like we to I is maybe helpful. You, you know, do this for your business versus we did this to our business.

[00:10:45] Maybe helpful. I do think original, uh, unique day, something that Google appreciates. Um, right. If you have like a. A study that you commissioned that, or, or we, we surveyed, or here's the results of 100, 000 of our users and how they blah, blah, that Google does appreciate that. But there's a, there's a lot of things, and maybe there's, um, there's some Google leaks in the last year, but there's literally thousands of ranking factors.

[00:11:14] Many of those ranking factors are like tie breakers. They're like coin flips. So it's like, cool. You, you change it from you to I, um, Now, if you were on the cusp of six or seven, now you're on six, that's good. I'll, I'll take it. Um, but I wouldn't like revamp my SEO strategy for, for some of those things.

[00:11:33] It's, but that stuff is also really hard to test. Everything in Google is you do this thing and then you wait a couple of weeks to see if it had an effect. So it's really hard to test to see if those things really matter.

[00:11:45] Katie Keith: Yeah, definitely. So, uh, before we move on to story time, we'll look at a couple of A comment from one of our co hosts, Amber Hines. She says, we experimented with AdWords and the cost per click was more than 20 for anything accessibility related. The venture capitalist funded overlay companies drive the cost up so much is unaffordable to a small company.

[00:12:08] And that makes SEO key. Yeah, that really underlines, um, what you were saying, Patrick, about SEO being free, at least once you've got the content and so on, and it remains online forever for no further cost.

[00:12:22] Patrick Rauland: Definitely. Definitely.

[00:12:24] Katie Keith: Yeah. Okay. So let's move into story time then, where we each talk about our personal experiences.

[00:12:31] Experiences in a bit more depth and I know that you've got a great story to share with this So would you like to go first Patrick?

[00:12:39] Patrick Rauland: I would love to and if I can promote I also wrote up a good chunk of this on my personal blog speaking and bites So you can sort of get the written version of this There as well.

[00:12:49] I think the summary is Um, I'll try to lay the, give the context and I'll, I'll get to the, the answer, the solution, but I, your issues in December and actually almost. So there is a, we talked about the Google update last fall, so it kind of hit us a little bit late, but it was October through December. It kind of hit us a little bit late.

[00:13:07] And basically the week I joined was the week that it actually hit us. So I, I hadn't written any code yet. It wasn't anything I did, but all of a sudden our search rankings dropped and. You know, that's scary, right? Um, Zach, your point that it's scary whenever your search rankings drop, right? You didn't do anything to your website.

[00:13:21] The website's exactly as it was yesterday, but now I'm position seven. Yesterday I was position two and we have what's called a fat head keyword, which is like some, so a long tail keyword is, you know, um, I'll, I'll, I'll talk about shoes since that's, that's what I work in now be the best barefoot running shoes to run in the mountains.

[00:13:43] That's like an incredibly long, long word. You're going to get like 200. Searches a month and, you know, rank number one, you'll get 20 clicks, something like that. A fat opposite that would be like, in this case, the, the keyword is barefoot shoes. And it's, it's a little over, we technically a little bit less than that.

[00:14:00] Depends on how you search this, but the total traffic volume for that keyword or very similar keywords is a hundred thousand a month on the first page of Google for a fat head keyword. That matters a lot. And similarly, we were positioned to, we dropped to position seven. So it was a, it was a big deal for us.

[00:14:17] It's, it's like five figures of clicks. Um, that you just, that's a lot of e commerce orders that, that appear. So we lost traffic and we weren't sure what it was. We had multiple SEO agencies that were helping us, but also giving us conflicting advice. Um, And we started, so we started, I mentioned at the top that I do a lot of technical SEO.

[00:14:41] Think of that as like fixing 404s and images, broken images and images that are too large and not having the right headings for your site, stuff like that. Um, I would call all technical SEO fixing. It is like they're like paper cuts. If you have, you know, A wrong if you have one page on your site that has five h1s It's probably fine.

[00:15:00] Google's not going to penalize you but if you have hundreds of technical seo issues On your site hundreds of paper cuts. That's a serious problem. Not a not a Not a simple one. So we actually started by doing, so we started fixing all these problems. There, there was a hidden H one on the page that we took care of and removed.

[00:15:17] There was our menu structure was weird. We found a mini cart. Um, so like the mini cart, like the subtotal was an H two on every page. So there's a little weird things that you find when you start digging in. We, uh, we also removed one of my favorite SEO tricks, by the way, is removing bad content. We removed over 80 pieces of like.

[00:15:37] Thin content where it's generally a couple paragraphs of text, and that was it that, by the way, worked really well, like, 5 years ago, but we got rid of those. We got to redirect chains and redirect loops. Um, we consolidated a whole bunch of our, we had, like, meme contents kind of before you shared it on social media sites.

[00:15:54] So we are kind of archived all that into 1 page. We did so much stuff. And you know what? None of it helped. Uh, or maybe it helped in small ways, right? It's like, as I said, there are literally thousands of ranking factors that Google considers. I bet, I bet it moved us, in many cases, into position 18. Three on this one search to position two, it probably helped in some minor ways, but it didn't, it, we were, again, we lost five figures of clicks from a hundred thousand volume keyword for barefoot shoes.

[00:16:26] That's what we want to get back. And I, I think actually what happened was I was watching YouTube and I, I'm, uh, if you can see in the background, I love painting miniatures. That's my favorite personal hobby. Ask me about it on Twitter. I love talking about it, but one of my YouTube creators said today I'm using a gesso board.

[00:16:44] And so I just went to Google. I'm like, what is a gesso board? And I typed it in and I kind of got this result that was like, you know, it's, it's a 12 wood thing. It looks like this. I'm like, Oh, that's That's what people are, and I realize that's what our customers are probably doing for the word barefoot shoes, your general term, you just want to know what color is it?

[00:17:03] What material is it? Is it 10 or is it 100? Is it, you know, 12 feet big? Or is it 1 foot big? I think you're looking for these general, um, solutions. General, like, give me the shape of this, of this problem. This query. Don't I don't need to. I don't need the ultimate guide to barefoot shoes. I just want. Mhm.

[00:17:22] What is a barefoot shoe? Is it in our case, right? Barefoot shoes. You know, is it a shoe with a hole in the bottom of it? Some, some people think that that's a, that's a reasonable, that's a reasonable assumption, right? Like a barefoot shoe. Is it? Are you literally on the ground? After all this work, months of work, haven't seen anything really happen.

[00:17:44] We added, and I should say on our homepage, we have many images of our products, but what we didn't have is an actual, like a, like a WooCommerce product and like a product shortcode, we didn't have like, sort of like an embed of a product image, a title, a price and a shop now button. And we added that and instantly we went up to number.

[00:18:05] So we actually. Probably because of all the technical SEO we fixed, we went, we didn't just go back up to number two, we went up to number one. Um, so just this, and it all came from that realization of, you know, people, it's a general search term. People don't probably don't want to buy from you, but they do just want to see the products.

[00:18:22] Like what color is it? How big is it roughly? How much does it, does it cost? They just wanted to see that general information. I think we're answering that, the, that general problem that they had. And if I can also highlight one other thing. So that was our main fat head keyword we were targeting. There's one keyword that we didn't target, but is now on our radar.

[00:18:44] We temporarily went up to number nine or number eight in shoes. So because wow,

[00:18:50] Matt Cromwell: I

[00:18:50] Patrick Rauland: think is like. I, I, maybe a million a month. There was some, some crazy number. Uh, so the fact that now and I, we dropped down, that was just sort of a temporary boost. I think we dropped down to position 24 for that. But by giving people like little, little products on the homepage, it solved all of our SEO problems.

[00:19:10] It fi it fixed the SEO problems and, and, and I think gave us also where we can go in the future Anyways, that, that's sort of the, the loose story. Do you have a. Questions or thoughts on it?

[00:19:22] Katie Keith: So that's really interesting, putting a product on the homepage. So our audience is WordPress product people. Do you think that would translate?

[00:19:31] Because the vast majority of theme and plugin shops have general homepages, not actual products.

[00:19:39] Patrick Rauland: Number one, I think you should test it. Um, just, you know, it's, it, especially if you use WooCommerce or Edd, it's just a, you know, it's a short code. You add it. I wouldn't even need, you wouldn't even need to put it above the fold, maybe slightly below the fold, just sort of a little.

[00:19:53] The thing that I think Google picked up on is they wanted the product metadata. So whenever you, you know, all, all these e commerce systems are pretty good about adding metadata. So if you include, and again, we actually had as of photographs of our products on the homepage. What we didn't have is all the metadata that tells Google, this is a product.

[00:20:11] There's a bunch of costs. These are things, et cetera, et cetera. I think, I think it's worth a test. I don't know if it works for software, but it definitely worked for us in this case. You know, I think when I think of like shoppable products, the little, you know, thumbnail title price by now that doesn't super relate to software.

[00:20:33] Cause generally you want to look at the specs. What versions does it work with? Does it work with PHP? Blah, blah, blah. Yeah. Right. It's not really an impulse purchase like it is with a physical product, but I think it's worth a test. I would give it a try. What, one of the things that you've seen in the most recent update.

[00:20:46] So you can go, you know, look at what sites are doing poorly, what sites are doing well. Affiliates got really hammered in the last updates because they're not selling products. So Google really, they were just trying to shorten from someone doing 10 searches and 20 clicks to people doing. Five searches and three clicks to buy.

[00:21:05] I think that's what Google was trying to do. So if you can make that process a little bit easier for your customers, maybe that is having a little product block on the homepage. People click it. They could have got there through your menu, but. Um, Google thinks it's a little bit faster for users. I would definitely give it a test.

[00:21:23] Zack Katz: And how do you, how do you account for the shape of, um, you, you, you discussed giving people a sense of what you're selling and when, uh, with, when it comes to shoes, uh, like giving them, letting Google know what, what the shape is of what you're selling and letting consumers see immediately what you're selling, um, how does AI play into that?

[00:21:45] Because. You know, when when Google is giving answers that are generated is should should we as site owners leave it up to Google when somebody says how to display entries on a website that are submitted by gravity forms as a hypothetical, uh, Google would ideally would say, Hey, use gravity view. Uh, and we, they wouldn't necessarily click on the gravity view website, but they would be answered by Google.

[00:22:14] Uh, so how do you take AI into this? Even if like, is it up to us still to, to tell, to, to prevent, present consumers with that information. If AI is already going to be summarizing that.

[00:22:32] Patrick Rauland: Yeah, AI is, uh, boy, we're going to be talking about that for years. Um, I, first of all, a lot of stuff Google does is already AI, right? Just like, just the way you like, it's not like people are sorting the Google search results, uh, you know, obviously that's done by like a sophisticated algorithm, um, but yeah, there's all these AI summaries, there's chat GPT.

[00:22:52] Um, people will ask questions, you know, are people going to start moving to chat GPT because, right. So Google is, I have this question. Google says, here's 2 million results. You'll find your answer in there somewhere. Chat GPT is, I'm 80 percent sure this is what you want. Um, which is just a very different, um, uh, type of way to solve that problem.

[00:23:14] First of all, I, I know some people I've seen some people like turn off AI search bots to their sites. I would not do that because maybe people do move towards some sort of, what is it? Search GPT is what it's tentatively called. Um, I would definitely try to get picked up in AI. Bots for lack of a better word, things like chat, GPT, um, choose is in there and you can, what's actually really cool.

[00:23:39] The founder, uh, you can even ask chat GPT. Hey, cause we, we've made so much content for the last roughly 15 years. Hey, can you answer this question in the voice of, of the founder of zero shoes? And it'll, it'll do it pretty high, but you definitely want to be serviceable in all those, in all those places.

[00:23:58] It is another organic channel. It's very similar to SEO. You just want to make sure. You're giving these tools as much data as possible. I do sorry, going back to your question. I don't there's a lot of AI summaries that I don't quite trust yet. Um, and I really appreciate when they have sources. Um, so I'm, I'm hoping what they'll do in the future is, Hey, if I want to organize my gravity forms entries on my website, how do I do that?

[00:24:26] I'm hoping, you know, AI summary says there's a number of plugins you can use. We recommend this one documentation and it seems to answer this one problem you had go visit this blog post. That to me is like, it's almost like a summary. Like a, like a one sentence call to action and view this for more. I'm hoping that's where it moves, but we don't know if that's where it's going to go.

[00:24:50] Katie Keith: Yeah, I totally agree. And don't feel threatened by that. We've had customers tell us that they bought out one of our plugins after chat GPT told them to. So I think it's, it's crazy that some people are trying to block bots, uh, AI tools from crawling their site. This is the future and an opportunity.

[00:25:10] Patrick Rauland: Yeah, it's a, and it's a scary, so let me, let me speak to the people.

[00:25:14] I totally understand. I want to get, you don't want to get replaced by chat GPT. If you think you're an author worth, you need voice and stuff like I, I totally understand that, but this is a new technology and the technology seems to move forward no matter if we want it to or not. But, uh, so I, I would try to get indexed in things like chat GPT.

[00:25:33] Definitely don't block it. I, I think I would say I'm 90 percent confident. I would, I would want to be surfaced in all those places.

[00:25:43] Zack Katz: And how do you go about, uh, you said, is it big head queries,

[00:25:48] Patrick Rauland: fat head,

[00:25:49] Zack Katz: fat tail fat, uh, lots of, how can you talk some more about the tools that you used for doing your keyword research and how you identify the keywords that.

[00:26:03] Patrick Rauland: Yeah, sure. Um, so, so first of all, number one, uh, it, it kind of doesn't matter what SEO tool tool you use, but I would recommend one source of truth.

[00:26:13] So one of the things that we actually cleaned up was we have, um, we, so we, we were on, um, oh boy, was it surfer? SEO CEO. I'm sorry. There's no, it's blanking on me. We, we had another, uh, SEO tool that we were using, but they kept sending people and some people in marketing who aren't, Don't understand the technical details

[00:26:34] that is like you have a hundred new problems on your website. Well, we have a hundred problems on every page and we added a new page to our website, so that's why there's a hundred new problems on the site. So we actually, so just, uh, we use a traps. It seems to give us the really consistent, good data. And it's one source of truth that the whole team can agree on.

[00:26:52] And if one other SEO tool says we have a technical SEO problem on this page, but it's not picked up in a, in a traps, we kind of ignore it for now, obviously that can change in the future, but. But get on one SEO tool for sure. Um, the one thing on traffic, if you're looking at keywords, don't look at the keyword volume, look at the traffic potential.

[00:27:12] I was kind of mentioning this earlier. So technically the keyword volume for barefoot shoes as of a couple of months ago was 77, 000 a month, but the traffic potential is 108, 000. So that's, so the, the difference there is choose get 77, 000 searches. But, but shoes barefoot probably gets, I don't know, 5, 000 searches that's included in Google generally we'll combine those together.

[00:27:37] So there's a lot of very similar keywords that produce almost identical SERPs. Um, so that's what that traffic potential is. So look at traffic potential. That's what you, that's what you want to go after. There there's other stuff you can look at. You can look at difficulty. We're lucky that in our so difficulty is in our niche.

[00:27:56] I think we have a domain authority of let's say, and this is domain authority is kind of a made up number, but let's say it's in the 50s or 60s, but that's. As high as our highest competitor. So we can compete with our, our highest competitors on any keyword. That's very different than in a lot of software.

[00:28:12] I've done SEO for a couple different software companies. I feel like, you know, you may, you may have a domain authority of 70, but if your opponents, your competitor has a domain authority of 90, that's a bad example. Cause 90 is crazy high, but, but you get my point. It's really hard to compete with them.

[00:28:27] And then you want to look at the keyword difficulty. And then if like, if a competitor, you know, silly example of Forbes has an article on the same thing you're writing about, they have such a high domain authority, you're probably not going to beat them. Um, they also have crazy amounts of full time SEOs, but.

[00:28:41] You're probably just not going to beat them. So I would say, understand your, look at traffic potential and then, and then understand your niche and who you're competing with. So Zach, in your case, right, you don't really compete with gravity forms. You're an add on to them. Your content might compete with them, right?

[00:28:59] Like Google doesn't know if I should show gravity forms. com or gravity view. So I would definitely look at that. If gravity forms already has a really high ranking article on X, Y, and Z, you might get up into the top 10, but you might not be beating them, right? Uh, that's assuming they have a higher domain authority.

[00:29:14] I don't know if that's the case, but

[00:29:16] Zack Katz: those are the, and that's part of what we identified was that some of our traffic was going to gravity forms, writing an article that we, we, and for articles that are about us or that we have, uh, written and shared with them to promote, and so they were outranking us for, um, Our content, uh, so we found that that that was part of the domain shift.

[00:29:37] Uh, it shifted toward higher value domains and WordPress. org and WordPress. com because they have the plugin directory on. com now. Um, even though they refuse to admit that that's a problem, it's, uh, it is, it's, uh, outranking us for a lot of things that we used to rank for because we have the higher quality content.

[00:30:00] Katie Keith: Definitely. So, shall we move on to your story time, Zach, then?

[00:30:06] Zack Katz: Sure. Um, I kind of did a short story of it, uh, which is that we had, um, yeah, where we, we were working on, uh, doing content. We had always relied on the quality of our content. Uh, we had decided to do a strong cadence when we were just getting started, when I hired, Casey, our marketing coordinator, uh, years ago, uh, we decided we didn't have enough content.

[00:30:34] Uh, we didn't produce enough content. What our site wasn't showing up as. Uh, being updated regularly, which was part of the problem. Um, so we did, I think three blog posts a week for a while and then down to two. And I think we're still at two plus a newsletter plus social media. So like we had, uh, we, we established a Canaan.

[00:30:56] And Casey, uh, has done a wonderful job writing high quality articles based on keyword research, uh, reaching out to customers to do case studies. I want to call them Casey studies. We're working on that. It's really, it's a tough sell. Um, uh, so we want to, we want to have original content that's high quality and that had been working for us for years.

[00:31:21] And, um, now that it's dropped off, we have started doing pay per click again, which I stopped doing on ethical grounds, uh, because I thought Google and Facebook are evil, and so I stopped. Wanted to give them money. Uh, but ethics matter less when it comes to the strength of the company and making sure the company is on solid ground.

[00:31:45] And so I decided it was worth reinvestigating whether or not pay per click was a good mode for the company. And, um, at the moment it's almost paying for itself when it comes to, uh, renewals for the next year. So it's going to pay for itself in two years. Um, cause we are getting some sales, but it's not enough to justify the cost per click at the moment.

[00:32:07] Um, but yeah, we're, we're looking into new channels in a way that we hadn't before, including Pinterest, for example. Uh, I set up a Pinterest, uh, page for gravity kit where it publishes the RSS feed to a Pinterest, uh, account. And it's not exactly us being participating in the network in the organic way, cause.

[00:32:31] None of us are really good Pinterest users. Um, but we have gotten, I don't know, 50 clicks or even a hundred clicks. And that's something that we wouldn't have looked into if we hadn't looked into other channels. Uh, I think that it's please everybody listening, try to diversify away from Google. Is my summary.

[00:32:52] Uh, we haven't gotten the best advice for product owners. Uh, we've talked to, uh, at gravity kit, we've talked to a lot of people about this, uh, and one of them is Jamie Marsland and he was saying YouTube. And I said, YouTube is owned by alphabet. They are Google. And he said, yeah, but they're not that they're not the Google search.

[00:33:09] They're YouTube search. And he, you know, we're going to be getting more into YouTube and we're going to be trying to optimize for YouTube. That will be another diverse, uh, area. Traffic source. And so I think that for us moving forward, in addition to optimizing, we need to diversify better, uh, to prevent Google from screwing us like they have.

[00:33:32] Recently.

[00:33:35] Patrick Rauland: I, um, I, I guess my, so I, I, I have a question for you. Do I, can I ask questions? Of course. Yeah. Um, I always like to think of like my business as like a stool. And if any leg is too long, like if that leg gets wobbly, your business.

[00:33:57] Katie Keith: You've suddenly gone quiet.

[00:33:59] Zack Katz: Yes. There we go. Am I

[00:34:00] Katie Keith: loud again?

[00:34:02] Zack Katz: Yes.

[00:34:02] Katie Keith: Yeah. Continue from wobbly.

[00:34:06] Patrick Rauland: But, but, uh, if you, if you, if one part of your business or all of the, the, the new customers for your business come from one place and that gets wobbly, it falls over and you're. Your business, um, you may have to do something really bad.

[00:34:18] Like layoff staff, some sort of really negative event. Um, I'm all, I'm all about, I want to have at least three large or three or four large legs to my stool. Um, and even if, so like, let's say SEO is going great and social media is going great, even if ads don't pay for themselves, um, sorry, I guess I'm going into a rant and then a question.

[00:34:39] Um, even if my ads don't pay for the comment,

[00:34:41] Zack Katz: then a question.

[00:34:42] Patrick Rauland: Yes. Yes. This is sorry. Apologies. Apologies. I still think it's worth doing things like PPC, pay per click and Facebook ads just to have like a backup in case you ever need it. Like you have a little bit of research done ahead of time. So let me ask you this, Zach, what percent of your marketing budget are you spending on any sort of paid ads?

[00:35:02] Zack Katz: Uh, at the moment, uh, a large percentage, uh, we don't really, our marketing budget, we've tried other things as well. In addition to pay per click, uh, through Google, we've tried ethical ads. Which is a network that is designed to not be creepy and it's designed to target developers and, uh, people like developers.

[00:35:24] Um, we found out about them because they advertise on datatables, uh, dot net, which is one of the packages that we integrate with. Uh, and so I said, Hey, that's a nice ad and it's by ethical ads. Interesting. So, uh, we set up a thousand dollar ad campaign. It hasn't really performed for us. We have a unique ad, we have a unique product in the sense that we build on top of another product.

[00:35:48] So, you know, it's, and so the, uh, so does Katie where you build on top of WooCommerce. So you have to understand the audience and where they are and know, do they know about gravity forms? Do they know about WooCommerce? And if they do, do they have a need that we're trying to meet them? Uh, so even

[00:36:06] Katie Keith: WordPress, they may not know they want WordPress yet and they find your content.

[00:36:11] Zack Katz: Right. So when you, when you advertise for a product, that's an add on to an existing product. There's a lot more that goes into understanding whether the ad is working or not. Um, so ethical ads so far, hasn't been very good for us. Uh, that doesn't mean it won't work for whomever is listening. If you have a, um, I mean, wordpress is 43, whatever it is percent of the web.

[00:36:34] So, uh, if you don't build on top of another platform, uh, other than wordpress, it's probably a simpler proposition to do an ad that says you need this, this does that. Uh, but for, for us, it's another cognitive load. So we do ethical ads. We do Google pay per click. We've done paid reviews. We started to do those again.

[00:36:57] Um, so, uh, W. P. Mayor, we have, uh, just, uh, Uh, paid for a review recently and doesn't, they're still independent. Uh, and, uh, hopefully they rate as well, but, uh, that's another channel that we used to do and we stopped doing because our SEO had been

[00:37:18] Patrick Rauland: nice.

[00:37:18] Katie Keith: Yeah. Interesting. We've done quite similar stuff. Um, I totally agree about the different channels and it's a dilemma because.

[00:37:28] You should put your resources into what's working best. That's going to get the best returns, but with marketing, it's unpredictable. So you do need some kind of backups. So I'd say probably don't invest in like six marketing channels, certainly not heavily. But maybe it's good to have two or three and we put a lot into YouTube.

[00:37:49] We have a full time YouTuber on our team. So as well as our organic text based content, we have lots of YouTube videos and, um, all of the benefits that you, Patrick, mentioned at the beginning of organic SEO meant. apply equally to YouTube because that remains online forever in just the same way as organic content.

[00:38:10] So I think that's a really good opportunity. And I can say that as our organic SEO has declined, our YouTube has grown and that has helped to bridge the gap in our, um, Sales and traffic a bit. Uh, it's not quite as good because our YouTube is nowhere near as, um, revenue generating as our blog, but it does make significant revenue.

[00:38:33] And that has really helped as a backup. But one big thing we haven't mentioned yet is the trustability. So I work with Ellipsis, a marketing agency for WordPress product owners, and they've been doing a lot of research about all of this stuff that's happening, all the changes, and they seem to have identified the, um, credibility, what they call EEAT.

[00:38:57] I've totally forgotten what that stands for, but you know what I mean, um, about the credibility. So we've done a lot to make our pages look more credible. For example, we've now got, really nice author pages, which are inspired by the ones that AHREFs and they know SEO, of course, as you said. Uh, so it's got things like, um, a proper bio links to our social profiles to prove that we are credible authors with a presence elsewhere on the web.

[00:39:24] Uh, even for mine, it's got things like, Press coverage and interviews I've done to try and present my post as more credible. And we've also started adding like quotes by experts to our blog pages to add a bit more credibility. And we've redone our about page all with this EEAT in mind. How important do you think that is Patrick?

[00:39:47] Patrick Rauland: Um, I've definitely seen a lot with EEAT. That's expertise, experience, authority, and trust. If I remember it correctly. Thank you. Um, um, I've seen a lot talked about it. I think a good example is like medical articles I've seen. It's like written by blank. And then it's, you can even have extra fields, like reviewed by this other person who has like, you know, blah, blah, blah, MD.

[00:40:10] So there, there's some really good stuff about EAT that I really like. And I, I would like articles that are especially about medical stuff to be reviewed by a doctor. I love, I love that angle of it. Um, I think if you're just adding like a quote from an expert on your site, I'm guessing Google doesn't like rank that super highly, because that could also just be made up now, if there's a quote from them, and they're linking to that page from their sites, and they have a review that probably sort of starts to stack up where it people are coming from the site, and there's a little bit of social proof from the expert on your site.

[00:40:46] And then. Everything with, with Google and SEO is art. If people are clicking, are they also converting? Um, what you really don't want is for people to go to your page and then to go backwards and to do a different query. Um, that's kind of what you really don't want. So if the expert is helping you in any way of answering people's problems.

[00:41:03] Or just being more authoritative, um, where people trust you more. I think that's, that sounds great. We, so that's one of our areas of opportunity. We are thinking about adding a little bit more to our websites. Right now, we just have a generic author for all of our post content. And we really should have written by the founder of Zero Shoes.

[00:41:23] He's been doing this for 15 years, right? Then there's the author pages that's all built into WordPress. So if you're a WordPress company, I think you should be taking advantage of it. Authors and author pages, and then having, like, a good little bio of and your add your certifications. Um, so I've taken these courses on linkedin masters.

[00:41:41] And this, I do think there is some, you know, as I said before, Google has thousands of ranking factors. It probably is very helpful just because it's built into WordPress. So I love that. I think you, I, I, you should do something at, at a minimum, you should do something with your author pages at a minimum.

[00:41:59] Um, I think any, it's a, I don't want to say a freebie, but it's probably a day's worth of work to make your author pages nice on a small WordPress site. Um, that seems valuable to me.

[00:42:09] Zack Katz: And what about your opinion on what product owners should do when it comes to trust pilot and G2 and other sort of, uh, SAS companies out there that are.

[00:42:20] About generating reviews.

[00:42:23] Patrick Rauland: So one, um, so I'm going to try not to, to mess this up. Some of these review platforms, and I think it, uh, TrustPilot, um, not G2, but, but, but some of them are like, sorry, I'm going to forget the term here. They're like vetted by Google. So like if there's reviews and TrustPilot, those can show up in Google search results.

[00:42:43] Those to me,

[00:42:44] Zack Katz: Sidebar.

[00:42:45] Patrick Rauland: And what

[00:42:46] Zack Katz: in the sidebar, uh, on the right. Yeah.

[00:42:49] Patrick Rauland: But so there's other ones that are like third party and they're like not I forget the term But they're not not vetted. So google doesn't pull them in and basically doesn't consider them There is something to like it's like if your restaurant's on yelp, but you don't own the listing Like it's really bad idea for people like for you not to be aware of that I think you need to be aware of your online presence and that includes ratings on and by the way You could I think you'd be rated on many of these websites Without you owning your own listing.

[00:43:17] Um, so I, and unfortunately then they, it feels like another toll on your business, but they do, they do charge you to own your listing and to manage stuff. It's probably worth it. And then also some

[00:43:31] negative news I've heard about the internet is general. I've seen some case studies where one listing, all of a sudden, all these negative reviews kind of go away. Um, so I, I, I think I think there's been some store case studies on Yelp and then maybe even on trust. I forget, but, um, there's, I would, I would put my, I would claim those, even if it costs a few 100 bucks a month for a small software company.

[00:43:52] I would claim those to make sure that your your reviews are. Are being that you can respond to reviews and they look more positively for you. I think it's worth it.

[00:44:04] Katie Keith: And there's generally a free plan anyway, like we're on the free trust pilot, but we can still respond and so on.

[00:44:11] Zack Katz: So Patrick, uh, now's the time when we give our best advice to new product owners.

[00:44:16] Uh, about the topic we've been talking about. So Patrick, can you share your best advice?

[00:44:22] Patrick Rauland: Best advice. Best advice is going to be, I think you want to solve users problems in as few clicks as possible. In some cases, in our case, that was shoppable products, but it's really, it's like, how can I help someone in as quick a way as possible?

[00:44:40] The most number of people in the quickest way possible. I think that's just always good business advice in SEO and in every other arena.

[00:44:50] Zack Katz: And how about you, Katie?

[00:44:52] Katie Keith: Um, I would say have a main marketing channel and a backup marketing channel as a minimum. So put lots of resources into two things, even if the main one has far more results and revenue generated than the second one, because these things do happen and we need to secure our businesses.

[00:45:14] Zack Katz: And mine is, uh, install an alternate, uh, tracking software that you can actually use. We, uh,

[00:45:22] Katie Keith: there are

[00:45:24] Zack Katz: so many out there and, uh, our friend, uh, Jack, uh, Arturo installed, uh, plish or plink, I don't know, something like that. I don't use that when I use post hog and Google analytics and post hog, uh, has a lot of other functionality that like AB testing.

[00:45:42] Um, and it has really simple web analytics and it's so refreshing whenever I want just like a basic summary of traffic, um, it's privacy sensitive as well. So, uh, if I were to start again and if I weren't running Google ads, I would not use Google analytics just because it comes with a whole bucket load of problems.

[00:46:02] Uh, including, uh, privacy and reinforcing a web monopoly

[00:46:08] Katie Keith: and performance of your website as well,

[00:46:10] Zack Katz: right?

[00:46:14] Yeah. So, uh, that's a wrap. Uh, Patrick, thank you so much for joining us. Uh, where can People find you online?

[00:46:21] Patrick Rauland: Thank you for having me. Um, probably the best place is on my personal website, speaking in bytes. That's Computer Bytes, BYTE s.com. I write about SEO WooCommerce, e-commerce stuff there. And then also you can find me on LinkedIn Learning.

[00:46:35] I do a lot of courses on WordPress and WooCommerce, SEO, all that stuff. And then last thing is I also have a book on called WooCommerce Mastering WooCommerce, which just came out, uh, second edition just came out this year. So if you. are really curious about how to make an e commerce site work, uh, check out that, uh, check out that book.

[00:46:53] Katie Keith: Perfect. So tune in next week as we discuss the future of theme and plug in marketplaces with Vova Feldman from Freemius. Um, for that, we'll be focusing specifically on how ex marketplace sellers can learn how Start selling and marketing their businesses independently. This is really timely because a lot of marketplaces like Envato are having a big decline.

[00:47:16] And Patrick, you recently hosted a panel at Freemius about this topic, which was about the kind of the future predictions of marketplaces. So this, Next week's episode of WP product talk is basically a follow up to that because there was so many comments on that panel about marketing. I'm an Envato seller, but I don't know how to run my business independently without a marketplace.

[00:47:39] I don't know how to build my website and get sales. So that's what we're going to be focusing on next week.

[00:47:45] Zack Katz: That sounds really good. And I'm looking forward to hosting it. Uh, so special thanks to post status for being our green room where we coordinate these, uh, these chats. And if you're enjoying our show, please do us a favor and hit, like, subscribe, share it with your friends, reference this show in your newsletters.

[00:48:01] And most of all, we hope to see you next week. Bye.