E60: Eli Schwartz

Richard Hill:
Hi there, I'm Richard Hill, the host of eCom@One. Welcome to our 60th episode. Yep, can you believe it's 60 episodes in? And we thought we would celebrate it with an absolute corker. In this episode I speak with Eli Schwartz. Eli has helped companies like Shutterstock, SurveyMonkey, Quora, Mixpanel and Zendesk build and scale their SEO strategy.

Richard Hill:
And is more recently known for his recent bestselling book titled Product-Led SEO. So, who better to get on and talk about all things eCommerce SEO than Eli. We talk about product-led SEO and how it differs from traditional SEO, how eCommerce stores can make sure their products are product market fit.

Richard Hill:
Eli shares the inner workings of specific eCommerce campaigns that worked at scale, and the all important question about monitoring performance and results using a product-led approach. If you enjoy this episode, please make sure you subscribe so you're always the first to know when a new episode is released. Now, let's head over to this fantastic episode.

Richard Hill:
How are you doing, Eli?

Eli Schwartz:
Doing well. Great to be here. Thanks for having me.

Richard Hill:
Well, thank you so much for coming on. As an agency, we bought seven copies of your latest book and passed them around the SEO team about three weeks ago. And everyone came to the same conclusion that we have to get you on the podcast. So, I really appreciate you coming on. I know the team we're excited to listen to this one as well.

Eli Schwartz:
Thanks for reading the book, thanks for having me. I'm so happy you bought seven copies. I think that's a pandemic feature. If everyone was in the office, everyone would have bought one, taking turns, passed it around. So, I feel like my sales of the book had sort of multiple of that.

Richard Hill:
Yeah, I guess. A lot of drop-shipping going on around the world, different home addresses and whatnot. But absolutely perfect book for the podcast, I think. So, I thought we had to get you on. Obviously most of our listeners are eCommerce stores that are all trying to optimize products and multiple products and so very, very fitting for our listeners. So, I think let's maybe get in at the start. So, what event sort of led you to the creation of Product-Led SEO?

Eli Schwartz:
So, I'm excited to dig into the eCommerce thing. I don't get to talk about that enough. I spend a lot of my time consulting with larger companies and really thinking through the strategies for them and like how they're going to create an acquisition channel.

Eli Schwartz:
What led me to write this, I spent years working at SurveyMonkey and I was incredibly successful at building out an SEO channel for them. When I joined, they didn't have any SEO at all. I mean you search SurveyMonkey, you found SurveyMonkey. You search survey, you found SurveyMonkey. But other than that, there was no strategic effort, there was no thought behind it.

Eli Schwartz:
And I was really able to grow that into almost three quarters of global revenue, came from SEO by the time I left. And I achieved that not by following the typical best practices and tactics of here's the keyword we're going to optimize, and here we're going to measure this with rankings. It was really about coming up with strategy and then manoeuvring that strategy across teams.

Eli Schwartz:
When I joined the company, there was 100 people, when I left there was probably close to 1,500 people, so it became infinitely harder. And also while I was there, I had the opportunity to consult with some really great companies and to do the exact same thing. I might have had a single point of contact.

Eli Schwartz:
Say that point of contact was even a CEO and that CEO needs to convince a CTO who's not on the call, they need to convince engineers who aren't on a call, they need to convince marketing manager who's not on the call how to do SEO. And when you're doing that, traditionally, everything gets lost in the translation.

Eli Schwartz:
So, I started putting these thoughts together while I was at SurveyMonkey and explaining to my team how should they explain to CEO that they should stop freaking out about rankings? Or how should they explain to the CEO that traffic's going to grow and revenue's not going to grow? There is no instant gratification there.

Eli Schwartz:
Or how should they explain that they're doing something that's not even going to be noticed for six to 12 to 18 months? So, I started putting those thoughts down and it became a book. And I'm thrilled to hear that, you bought the book and that others are buying the book. Because again, I just meant to put thoughts down. I meant to be able to explain these things.

Eli Schwartz:
And a lot of the thoughts came from my own consulting and working with clients where they were having these questions about like... I would explain to how they should set up the website and they're like, "Okay, great. But where do we get high domain authority back links?"

Eli Schwartz:
And I just like slammed my head on the table and be like, "That's not the point. which of this did you not hear?" So, I felt if I put it in a book, now I can have these conversations and I can say, "You know what, why don't you read the book and let's have this call again next week?" So, that's where it all came from. And again, like I said, I'm so happy that others are reading it and learning from it, rather than it just being something that I can share and talk about.

Richard Hill:
That's brilliant. So, it came from a real need in your day job, in effect, and then like a lot of great ideas I think it's just a case of putting it out there, creating it, documenting it. But if you were to sort of summarize what is product-led SEO? So you saw a need for a new way of doing things, but what is product-led SEO?

Eli Schwartz:
Product-led SEO is hard to understand on your own. I know that a lot of listeners, they've never read the book. You've read the book, I hope, or at least your team has read the book. And a lot of listeners, this is going to be very new to them. So, I think it's more important to really understand what product-led SEO is not.

Eli Schwartz:
So, product-led SEO is not the typical way of doing SEO, which is your listeners are eCommerce, most of them are eCommerce. And I assume that you bought my book on Amazon, and I think we can all acknowledge the reality is that Amazon owns most of eCommerce.

Eli Schwartz:
And again, I assume the listeners know that, and they're not just going to hang up their boots and say, "We're done. We're not going to do SEO. Amazon has won. eCommerce belongs to Amazon, and that's it. We're just going to spend all our money on Facebook ads, or we're just going to put banners on bus stops."

Eli Schwartz:
Like that's not the way this works. But again, they don't know an alternative way. So, the way they'll do SEO is they'll try to chase Amazon. So, they'll say, "Well, I'm selling this blue widget and Amazon sells this blue widget, but I'm going to out-hustle Amazon. I'm going to get better links. I'm going to have longer content. I'm going to go track these rankings, and I'm going to cheer myself when I get to page two."

Eli Schwartz:
Now in reality, a lot of that effort is all SEO tactics and in reality a lot of that effort will never ever pay off, because you're not going to beat Amazon, not on a grand scale, maybe on a few terms you'll get lucky.

Eli Schwartz:
So, product-led SEO is really the opposite. It's thinking of your SEO strategy as a product. What is it that you can build for a user that will make a user want to come to your website that should make you want to shine in the search? So, if the other alternative to product-led SEO is content-led SEO, writing blog posts, stuffing eCommerce descriptions full of content, the alternative is thinking of SEO holistically, which is I'm creating something, I'm putting it out in the world because I want search users to find it.

Eli Schwartz:
How is it differentiated? How is it unique that a search user would want to find it? And think of it as a product, and that's why I call it product-led SEO, which is it's not a piece of content that's optimized to 1,200 words exactly with a title tag that's 55 characters.

Eli Schwartz:
You think of it as, again, we're in the blue widget space here, what do blue widget users need? They need a well-designed page. So, how am I going to coordinate with a design team to build this? They need a page maybe that has some video description. So, how do I coordinate with a video team? So it's not, again, just a piece of content, optimize a piece of content. It's a product. It's something holistic, and even better than a product, it fits into the grand scheme of the entire company.

Eli Schwartz:
It fits with the goals of the entire company. And that's one of the biggest challenges I've had with the way SEO has done in too many places, which is, it becomes an individual silo. So across every other marketing channel, you're really rigorous. You're like, "Oh, I'm going to spend-" I'll say pounds for your listeners, "... spend a hundred thousand pounds on paid marketing. And I expect to return at a minimum of a hundred thousand pounds otherwise I'm losing money."

Eli Schwartz:
But suddenly when it comes to SEO, it's like, "Well, just write a bunch of content and it's going to drive some traffic, but hey, lookie here, we're number three on Google. Isn't that amazing?" So, like the metrics are not aligned. So, when I think of product, you're creating something, it has to have product justification, it has to have revenue justification and it has to be good for the user. So it's, again, it's more holistic than write some content, hope it ranks.

Richard Hill:
Okay. So, maybe let's take an example. So, for the guys that are listening in, I know we've got listeners that obviously said all sorts of things, but I know one listener in particular sales barbecues, outdoor barbecues, outdoor pizza ovens. So, in your example there, you're sort of saying obviously we're building a product, but let's say bottom line is our listener and all of our listeners have quite similar in that they obviously sell these physical products. So, I'm selling barbecues, I'm selling outdoor pizza ovens. What could they do? What would be the process for them to follow your process?

Eli Schwartz:
We'll go back to competing with Amazon there for a second. So, the thing to think of, and I apologize, it's been a while since I've been to the UK and I don't know what version of Walmart you have in the UK. But think of Amazon as the Walmart, it's that you buy everything there. If you are a barbecue person and you want a good barbecue, then you're going to go to a barbecue website.

Eli Schwartz:
If you just want a barbecue, you're going to want to go to Amazon and buy all your stuff. And you don't really care about anything, you want the number one selling barbecue, not even the number one reviewed barbecue. And there's too many reviews on Amazon that are even fake. So, now we're a barbecue eCommerce site and you can take a step back and say, "Who is the customer that's buying the barbecue?" This is someone that really, really cares, because if they didn't care, they would go to Amazon. They would go to the physical store.

Eli Schwartz:
So, what does that person that really cares one. Now you may know that answer. And if you don't know the answer, you approach it the same way you build any other product. You go talk to the customer. "What is it that you want? What makes you want to buy a barbecue? What tips you over the edge? What's the information you need to know? Do you need to know is it sealed for rain?"

Eli Schwartz:
Again, Amazon's not going to touching these things, because Amazon is doing everything at scale. Now, what you're going to do is you're going to go and find what are the commonalities between every product sold on your website that help people buy. There may be the best barbecue in the world, but that's not a fit for everyone.

Eli Schwartz:
There is something that every single person is looking for they want. Maybe somebody cares more about budget, so they'll buy that other one. But there will be a commonality between every single product. Identify those commonalities, and then you build your page around that. What's the feature you really want to promote?

Eli Schwartz:
So yes, it is a product listing page, this is an eCommerce page, but the way you structure that page is around that selling factor for your customer, not the selling factor for the entire world. That's the way I approach product, which is you're building something on SEO. Now again, too often when people do SEO the wrong way, the trigger and the driver of their SEO efforts are keyword search volume.

Eli Schwartz:
If you're selling barbecues for people that love barbecues, there may not be a ton of keyword search volume. But if you find that term, you find that topic that they're looking for, your conversion rate will be through the roof. So you identify that, you build around that as a product, you build around those people as a user, that's what you focus on. There will be search volume.

Eli Schwartz:
You know how you know there's search volume? Because you go and you've talked to users and they've told you that that's what they look for. And if it doesn't exist, if there's no search volume yet in any of the search keyword tools, then you know what? You found what I term in my book as a blue ocean. That's a place where no one is. They know they want it, they're just not looking for it because when they look for it, it doesn't exist so they go look for that other thing. So the keyword research tools don't capture that nobody's looking for it.

Richard Hill:
There's a lot of stuff there, Eli. Let me just rewind. So, there's no search volume in the tools, so it's a potential blue ocean, but what if it's not and there's actually no searches? How do you really know? You've gone to your tools, you've searched for specifics, tools are saying zero volume.

Richard Hill:
But I think what you're saying is obviously if you've gone to your users, you've gone to your existing customers potentially and ask the questions, then you're going to have data on newer trends that are just starting, potentially newer keywords that are just coming through, or newer, not even keywords, actually searches around different phrases, whatever it may be.

Richard Hill:
I mean how do we define or differentiate between that blue ocean and actually, no, it's an absolute car crash?

Eli Schwartz:
I love that. Okay. So, you're talking to users and users will tell you that they're looking for something in particular. You kind of want to hear it from more than one or two users. The way to do it at scale is of course is to put it in a survey. So again, barbecues I'm a little weak on. I own one. I chose it because the price made sense and it fit in the backyard.

Eli Schwartz:
But there is something for the people that love barbecues, and remember, these are your customers. Your customers are not going to [inaudible 00:13:01] they could just buy from Amazon. Where our expectation is that they don't care for those specific type of barbecue, they'll buy it physically, or they'll buy it somewhere.

Eli Schwartz:
I guess you have the website in the UK, but I'm sure you don't have the physical store or no one has a physical store, actually, B&H Photo. I'm sure you're familiar with that.

Richard Hill:
I'm not, no.

Eli Schwartz:
All right. So B&H Photo, it's a large store in Times Square. It's one of the largest online resellers or sellers of anything related to photo and audio online. They are obviously competing with Amazon and I know people like they do podcasts and they would only buy from B&H, because B&H is not the Amazon of that. They're the place that those people care about you, and they're massive, right?

Eli Schwartz:
So like barbecue might be a little bit smaller than the photo video space, but those are the folks that you're going after. The ones that don't just want to go and say, "Well, Weber's top rated and it's cheap enough, I'll just buy it and I'll have it in two days." Other people are, "Okay, I want the grill that's tested in extreme rain. I want the grill that makes the perfect steak. I want the grill that has a smoker attached." Like those are the people that are not going to buy from Amazon. Those are your customers.

Eli Schwartz:
So you're talking to those customers. You want to know what helps those customers buy. Now, keyword search volume is only captured when it's done at scale. So, if you can find those customers, those are your people. And if they search it, you will be found. And that's great because it's non-competitive. If there's no keyword search volume, you don't have all the SEO people going and creating content around it. You create that content. You will be visible. Yes. Again, search volume might be low, but your conversion revenue will be very high.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I love it. I love it. I think so many takeaways there. So maybe it'd be good if you jumped into maybe a product-led campaign that you worked on over the last... I know you obviously you've been working on a lot of big projects over the years. What would be a sort of standout project for yourself? Talk me through some of the things that you did that potentially a mid-size eCommerce store may be able to take some inspiration from and be able to do some of the things that you did.

Eli Schwartz:
I can't say I've done a lot of work with eCommerce. There's an eCommerce store I worked with, they've been able to see, I think it was 10,000% growth, and they already had a very high base and they used that to get to series Z and a multi-billion dollar recent raise. That wasn't as product-led as I like to say it is. That was really about being strategic about exposing the website to search, which is also good SEO.

Eli Schwartz:
It was not about let's optimize title tags and eCommerce. They have millions of pages, they can't do all that. My favorite product-led example is I was working with a company in the car rental space, and in UK you call it the car hire space. So, they're competing against companies that have been around as long as Google. Hertz and Enterprise and Budget.

Eli Schwartz:
Those companies are really, really old. They are never, ever going to rank on car hire rental in airport, car hire rental in a city. Right? However, the reason that they existed was because they were a neighbourhood company. That was the key value proposition of the company. That's why they got funded. That's why they have customers. Not because they are in airports. However, they were going after just airports.

Eli Schwartz:
So the product we created was how do we feature that they have unique cars within neighbourhoods? How do they feature the unique value that just this company creates? We restructured the entire approach to SEO, which by the way, was the approach they were using to paid marketing, but somehow there was that... And I find there's always a disconnect. On paid marketing no one spends stupid money.

Eli Schwartz:
When it comes to SEO, suddenly it's just like, "Well, the way you do it, is you follow these 10 steps and that's called SEO." We had to restructure the entire website to really build after this approach. So our categories, instead of the categories becoming the typical categories within car rental space, which is the type of car, is it a sedan? Is it a truck? We restructured around the type of neighbourhood, the type of key value proposition.

Eli Schwartz:
Can you get a car with a ski rack? Can you get a car that has an extra seat? Can you get a car that you could put a deer hunting thing on the back, right? Like that is the value proposition of the company, so that became the value proposition we went to market, we went to SEO with. So, that is one of my favourite examples, because once they did that, there wasn't necessarily search volume for each neighbourhood, but there was search volume when you rolled up every neighbourhood in the entire country.

Eli Schwartz:
And this is a company that is actually global. But when you rolled up every neighbourhood around the entire world, yes, there is search volume. So, my personal neighbourhood might not be a top converting neighbourhood, might not be a top search neighbourhood, but if you take an entire city, that's a different story.

Richard Hill:
Yeah. So many options, isn't there? I think that's where, when you look at, just as you say, you may look at the navigation on sites, you've got a typical navigation, but people are always just looking for the sub cat, is like the use of it. We go back to the barbecue example, you've got brand as a normal category structure, but no doubt when we do the research, there could be categories out there and areas out there that are around smoking your food, or baking it, or I'm not that au fait with it, although I see barbecues, because I'm actually looking for a barbecue, that's why. But there's obviously different ways to filter other than the traditional, whether that's brand, price, size, there's others that combine can add up to obviously quite a decent search volume.

Eli Schwartz:
Well, I think it's important to really, and this is the most important part of product-led SEO, it's to be real with yourself about what your actual likelihood of ranking on what you think you're going to rank on. So if you think about the eCommerce space from two ways that websites will typically go after SEO way. Way number one is they're just trying to out-hustle Amazon.

Eli Schwartz:
Come on, that's that's not going to happen. Let's be real about that. You may bleed off a couple of searches, but you're not going to own your category against Amazon, unless it happens to be that category amazon does terribly. The second thing that the eCommerce sites do, they do a lot of content marketing, which my challenge with content marketing is you've created a blog post that's good reading. Is that the blog post that's going to help sell? Again, be real with yourself.

Eli Schwartz:
Typically the ROI on those blog posts and the conversion metric that you're going to get from that blog post is they're going to read another blog post. They're reading for the sake of reading. Now, if there is a conversion intent from the reader when they read that blog post, unfortunately the large media properties know that also. So, I don't know how it is in the UK, but I know like CNN makes these listicles of top barbecues to buy.

Eli Schwartz:
And wouldn't you know it, there's affiliate links to Amazon in those articles. So maybe they do it in the UK, maybe they don't, but they certainly do it in the US. So, you have CNN playing this game, you have the New York Times playing this game, you have all these authoritative websites. Is someone really going to find your blog? If you write like the top 10 barbecues you need for summer 2021, are you going to out-hustle CNN and New York Times? Probably not.

Eli Schwartz:
so like, again, it's about being real with yourself that the old way is probably not going to work for you. So, you really want to be creative and find what's going to work for you. It's like, again, like you said, barbecue with a smoker. So, I think it's really important to underscore that.

Richard Hill:
So, obviously creating these, I guess, pretty substantial product pages, category pages, it's a lot more than just copy content. We've got a whole creative team there. What advice would you give to people listening in when they think, "Well, it's just me and my two guys on my small agency," how can they do it? Or trying to create maybe a lot better than a standard product page might be a little bit more complicated out of the box with Shopify and Magento, a lot more development input, or where's the line there, and what advice would you give to people that are thinking, "Well, that sounds a bit too much work?" Or obviously you've got to do work to get the benefit, but what sort of people would you get involved or how would you attack that from a smaller, maybe a 10, 15 man team as a whole company with two or three people in the digital team? How would they sort of attack that?

Eli Schwartz:
So, I think there's a Ferrari version of this, and then there's the compact car version of this. If you're chasing the user and you know the user wants something specific and unfortunately you're not able to do the three dimensional views and the deep dive into the barbecue to see what's there. Say You can't do that, but you can offer that better content, you can create a product description that highlights what your buyers want, rather than the product description that came just from the company.

Eli Schwartz:
I know in an eCommerce space, because everyone's trying to out-hustle Amazon, what they do is they take the company's description and they bulk it up. Google can see that. They're like, "Oh, you bulked it up. Let's just remove the bulk. Oh, it looks like it's the same as Amazon."

Richard Hill:
Same as everybody else.

Eli Schwartz:
Right. So, you need to be creative about that. So, I think everyone can be creative regardless the size of the team. But what I will say is to your point about this is expensive and difficult. There was a company I was working with, unsuccessfully. Many of the companies I work with, they decide they don't want to do this and they don't achieve the rest of their goals. They continue to do that old thing and they grow five to 10% a year, and they don't really unlock this 1,000% growth.

Eli Schwartz:
This company I was working with, they said, "You're suggesting is going to take six months. And what you're suggesting means we need a developer assigned just to this. We can't do that." I'm like, "Well, if you were to do that, you would be at least six months ahead of your competition, who probably also wants to do this."

Eli Schwartz:
And actually this particular company, their competitor did it first, because they sat around saying, "No, it's six months and it's a developer." So yes, this is hard. But if you do it, you've created a defensive moat around yourself. You can be within that space, and Amazon will chase you. And again, you probably know this better than me with the eCommerce, but there are places Amazon doesn't win and Amazon is chasing the competition.

Eli Schwartz:
So, do you want to be in that space, or do you want to just be the one that is like, "Well, we're doing the same as Amazon and we'll just hope whatever people somehow accidentally didn't click on Amazon will click on us."

Richard Hill:
No, I get it. I get it. So, let's say the listeners have convinced their management, or they've convinced themselves to go down this new route, what tips would you give them to really dial it in? So, they've gone down the route, they've invested more into the product pages, the research, and the different types of content, and the user generated, et cetera, et cetera.

Richard Hill:
But then that potentially can become and will become the new norm point, or maybe within that business. So, then really just to go to that last little, the 80/20 of the 80/20 of the 80/20, that last two, or three, or four, or five percent that can really make the difference. What are a couple of tips you would give to our listeners?

Eli Schwartz:
Don't worry about 100%. So, if you're doing SEO and you've built these really good product pages, and you've heard from the user, move on to something else. Their SEO is not an instant gratification channel. And many, many times when I talk to smaller companies I tell them, "Do not hire an SEO, do not even focus on SEO. Go straight to paid marketing, go straight to creating this flywheel of customer value. Go straight to building customers rather than investing in this channel and just hoping that it will continue to return users to you, because it won't."

Eli Schwartz:
It will take a long time to really build that up, especially if we're competing against Amazon here. So, I think the mistake that many will make is they'll hire an SEO person on staff, and now that person needs 40 hours of things to do. I don't know how many hours you work in the UK, but at least 40 hours of things to do. Now, what we've just talked about may take a few months, but once you're done, if you're only selling barbecues and you don't sell something else, there may not be anything to do, realistically.

Eli Schwartz:
You're not going to go iterate on the page before you have data. You may have set up all your analytics. There are a lot of things to do, but once you're done, don't add that extra 20%. I don't know where you feel on core web values and page experience updates. I think fast pages are very, very important for users. I think page experience is very important for the users.

Eli Schwartz:
Should anybody spend hundreds of thousands of pounds on improving their page experience because they think that their visibility on Google is going to go up? No, that's insane. So don't do that. Take that money and put it into another channel. Now, if your page experience is so low that users are actually dropping off, of course you fix it. But if your page experience is good enough, then good enough is good enough.

Eli Schwartz:
And that's what I would say about all of SEO is like once you've achieved this, there isn't a reason to come in every morning and spend eight hours a day doing something which isn't necessarily going to return value.

Richard Hill:
Okay. Love it. Love it. So, those that are listening that are thinking, "All right, you know what? Let's give this a go. Let's give this a going." But then they start to approach the management, approach the person with the purse strings. What advice would you give them to convince, to persuade their management about shifting from this traditional SEO structure, which no doubt they've spent years and years building, to the new product-led way?

Eli Schwartz:
Well, first of all, you always want to use data. So, you want to say, "Here's what we've achieved to date." Now, assuming that this makes a lot more sense when a company is older and has existing traffic, if a company is brand new, it's hard to convince anybody to do something different.

Eli Schwartz:
But say a company is older, you can look at all... And it depends who this is. If this is the SEO person, it's never going to happen, they're never going to go prove that they didn't do anything in the last year. But realistically, if this was not the SEO person, this was a director of marketing that the SEO person reported to them, they can say, "For all of the 40 hours a week, or for all of the effort we put in, how much did we really grow on conversions?" Again, traffic is the totally different story.

Eli Schwartz:
I know that if you've done a lot of content marketing, you may have grown traffic 50% year on year, you may have grown traffic 50% week on week, but did you grow conversions from the SEO channel by that same number? I find with larger companies that are going concerns, it's really hard to increment that number. You've created this baseline, you're doing what you're doing on barbecues, you're going to grow at sort of the speed of the internet.

Eli Schwartz:
You're going to grow at sort of the speed of your own efforts, but there isn't that 50% to 100% growth unless you do something completely different and unlock new value. So, I'd say the first thing you want to do is look at the old way and say, "Is that really working? Are we driving positive value?" The second thing I would say is look at the new market and start using different terms. Instead of keyword search volume, look at total addressable market.

Eli Schwartz:
How many people could buy a barbecue in the UK that don't buy from Amazon? How are we going to achieve that? We're going to build something to go after that. Now, SEO isn't necessarily going to be the only way, but that's what you're going to say. "Well, there's this amount of people that buy per year, and this is what we should invest based on that, and this is our expectations of that."

Eli Schwartz:
And when you measure, you're going to measure based on that, of here's how many sales we could have, here's how many sales we're making, instead of like, "Hey, lookie here boss, we're number four on Google for this term." unless, again, you generate value just from being number four on Google, that's not the metric you should use. So, switch your way of looking at this.

Eli Schwartz:
Look at this exact same way you look at every other channel, which is for paid marketing you look at here's how many searches are having. Here's how many people are clicking. Here's our lifetime value. For brand, and I don't know if companies that you work with do brand advertising, but you don't do brand advertising if there's no potential users. So, you look at what are the potential users? Approach this channel the same way. There may be a lump sum investments you're making, what's the return we're going to expect from this lump sum?

Richard Hill:
Yeah, I love it. I love the TAM side of things as well. That's not something that gets mentioned ever, I think. It's total available market, understanding what that is out there, and in the UK, in the US, or obviously if you're shipping worldwide. And if you know that 20% is Amazon, hang on a minute, there's still 80% out there. Well, like you say, it doesn't mean that we're going to get 80% on SEO, but it means that the whole strategy, which SEO can be a part off to get a percentage of the 80%. That's really good. That's actually given me quite a few things to think about myself, actually.

Eli Schwartz:
Yeah. And that's the important thing. SEO is just a part of that. And this is, again, we're I think this is a huge mistake that many make, and I think it's potentially the agency driven model that agencies only are focused on one aspect. But SEO is one part, it should not be exact same metrics and KPIs that the rest of the business has. And you don't want to just say, "Well, SEO is different. It's a black box. So, we're going to create new KPIs and new metrics."

Richard Hill:
Yeah. I was going to ask you about metrics, but I think we've covered it off pretty much. Is there anything else you would add around measuring product-led SEO strategy?

Eli Schwartz:
Conversions. It has to come down to conversions. And the conversion is anything that you think is justified from SEO. It doesn't have to be a dollar or pound conversion into a sale. It could be if you're selling barbecue grills, it could be that it's people signing up to get your newsletter about how to grill. Because maybe people don't buy grills during the winter.

Eli Schwartz:
So, an SEO conversion might be, "Let's get someone's email address, and then we can send them a promotion when it's time." So, it just has to be conversions instead of, "Hey, look, we got clicks or we got a ranking." It has to align to the business. If that's what you would do on a brand... Influencer, I think influencer gets a bad rap, but influencer does make sense in a marketing mix if you have the right customer there.

Eli Schwartz:
So, by now many have figured out how to use influencers, figure out the same for SEO. Like, again, if you're using an influencer, unless it's a celebrity and you just want to be affiliated with a celebrity, you want to make sure there's ROI on that investment. Make sure there's ROI on the SEO investment, and don't just chalk it up to like, "This is something we must do."

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. Well, Eli, it's been an absolute pleasure. The time has flown by. I always like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. Obviously your book, we will recommend that till the cows come home, but if you were to recommend any other book, have you got any of the books that you would recommend?

Eli Schwartz:
It's my favorite book. It's not really an SEO book at all, but it's from Chris Voss, Don't Split the Difference.

Richard Hill:
Don't Split the Difference.

Eli Schwartz:
He's a former FBI hostage negotiator, and I'd say his approach to conversations I've used with my kids, I've used with my kids' teachers, I've used in business and everything is really a negotiation. And I've read many negotiation books. The reason I love his approach is because other negotiators always approach win-win. But when you're negotiating with terrorists, there's no win-win.

Eli Schwartz:
Terrorists want to kill everyone and you want to make sure everyone comes home safely. So, you're negotiating to only win, and I love that. And that's really what his book is about, never split the difference. You can't do a win-win. So, I love that way of thinking about it, and I love the behavioural aspect to it. So, of course buy my book, but check out that book too.

Richard Hill:
It's one that has been bought for me, yet I haven't actually read it yet. So, that's been a big jog for me, because a very good friend of mine recommended it and got me it, and I've still not-

Eli Schwartz:
I listened to it. I listened to it twice, and then once you've listened to it, like every good book out there, there's the SlideShare on it. Like here's the 10 ways to negotiate. So, once you've listened to it or read it, then you could look at the SlideShare and be like, "Ah, that's a good reminder of how to do just this." But you need the stories first.

Richard Hill:
Well, thanks Eli. For those that are listening and want to find out more about yourself, what's the best way to do that?

Eli Schwartz:
So, you can find me on LinkedIn. I accept all LinkedIn connections. Just look for Eli Schwartz on LinkedIn. My website is elischwartz.co. Admittedly I haven't kept it updated in a while, because I put all my writing effort into my book, but I'm going to start writing more. And then the website for my book is Product-Led SEO, and Wix was so kind and to build a really, really beautiful website. So, check out that website, and you can buy the book and get links to buy the book there.

Richard Hill:
Fantastic. We'll link all that up. Thank you so much for being a guest on week number one, and I'll speak to you soon.

Eli Schwartz:
All right. Thank you, Richard.

Richard Hill:
Thank you. Thank you for listening to the eCom@One eCommerce podcast. If you enjoyed today's show, please hit subscribe and don't forget to sign up to our eCommerce newsletter and leave us a review on iTunes. This podcast has been brought to you by our team here at eCom@One, the eCommerce marketing agency.