The 90 - Day SEO Success Blueprint with Thomas Phillips

Andy Splichal:

Welcome to the Make Each Click Count podcast, where we dive deep into strategies and insights that help e commerce businesses thrive. I'm your host, Andy Splico, and today we have a special guest joining us, Thomas Phillips, the CEO of DTC SEO agency. Thomas is a true expert when it comes to mastering SEO strategies tailored specifically for direct to consumer brands and e commerce businesses. With a wealth of experience in SEO systems and processes, Thomas helps DTC brands attract high intent customers who are ready to buy. Get ready to learn some game changing tips and strategies for your e commerce business. Welcome to the show, Thomas.

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, thank you very much, Andy. Excellent intro. Glad to be here.

Andy Splichal:

So let's start. What inspired you to focus on SEO specifically for direct to consumer brands?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, so it all started when I was around 13 years old. I started my first ecom website brand type thing. I was basically making like miniature fingerboards, finger skateboards, like what you'd use as like a toy and yeah, started my 1st, 1st website, first store had a little PayPal button and sold to like 39 different countries in the first year. That was all through SEO and forums. And I just realized like, oh, okay, there's definitely a potential here and it's just, it's basically just grown from there really over the years. Just been in lots of different industries. We've built big affiliate content websites and everything like that and kind of come full circle. Background.

Thomas Phillips:

Ecomm's always been there and yeah, just focusing on that mainly now. So I know started many years ago.

Andy Splichal:

I mean, SEO has always been kind of like this mystery thing for e commerce store owners. What would you give them? Like the top three SEO strategies you give them that would help them improve their organic rankings?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, great question. First thing always is the technical side of things. Like the ecommerce store could look great on the front end, it could work nicely, but from a technical SEO Google Bot Spider perspective, there could be so many issues and errors and we see this on client sites all the time. There's a good few thousand errors that always pop up, whether that's like random pages have been deleted and Google's coming up against a brick wall in that sense, or there's apps that are fully blocking a whole part of the website so it just can't go in and crawl. So fixing up the technical side of things and building that solid foundation right at the start is one of the core key things that we do immediately and any ecommerce owner can do that effectively. Second thing is then keyword research and optimizing collection pages and product pages for those exact keywords. So it's a case of identifying what the highest ROI keywords are and allocating them to collections or product pages and then re optimizing those via SEO titles, meta descriptions, h one s, h two s, everything else that's on the page as well as meta descriptions for the images. And then thirdly is link building.

Thomas Phillips:

Like link building is one of the main things. It's effectively like the rocket fuel is like the fuel to a car. You know, you could have a beautiful looking Ferrari, but if you don't put any fuel in it, it doesn't necessarily go anywhere. You could roll it down a hill, but that's about it. So those three things are by far the main things, I would say.

Andy Splichal:

What tools do you use to, I guess, one, identify problems on the site, technical problems, and two, to do the keyword research.

Thomas Phillips:

Basically everything through Ahrefs is just an absolutely fantastic tool in my opinion. If we want to go one step further, then we use screaming frog if we really need to dive in and crawl a very, very large site. And then on top of that we use Google search console data as well. So a combination of those.

Andy Splichal:

And now you had mentioned technical problems. How important is site speed when it comes to SEO?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, it's a big debate, I would say, with things because we see some sites and we run them through gtmetrix or Google site speed test or whatever and they are so slow, but they're ranking first. So I do think it is a ranking factor at some point, but there's other ranking factors that trumpet. But I think regardless of the fact, you should always aim to have the fastest website possible purely from a conversion rate optimization standpoint as well as no one likes to go on a slow website.

Andy Splichal:

At the end of the day, SEO in general has always been. I still get the emails from companies in India where $1 and they're promised to get you on the first page of Google and it's usually for a long tail result. Now, your agency, what really struck me is that you guarantee results within 90 days or you work for free. How have you been able to get it down to such a point where you can guarantee improved results with SEO?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, yeah. So basically what we do is we are extremely picky. We are so picky with who we take on. We are actively vetting our clients massively. Like on one of our first calls, we'll be asking, what is your conversion rate? How many products do you have in stock? Can you actually handle everything? How old is the site? How long have you been running for everything like this? Because some of our clients, they have brands that are ten plus years old. And we can look at the website and see, okay, you have 1000 or so products. None of them are optimized. So that way we can come in and we are very, very confident that we can come in, start to link, build to specific pages and re optimize certain key pages as well as, and we can see they have a whole bunch of technical issues.

Thomas Phillips:

So we're very, very confident that in the first 90 days we can see big, big changes and big results.

Andy Splichal:

Now, content creation is always another one, especially for ecommerce stores where I, you have your homepage, you have index category pages and you have product pages. How important is content creation and what type of content are you creating for ecommerce stores?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, great question. So mainly what we focus on in terms of content side of things is product pages and collection pages. Like at the end of the day, the business owner wants ROI. That's what we all want at the end of the day. So I would much rather focus on re optimizing and building up existing collections and product pages by adding more content and optimizing that content and then building out other collection pages and products that target other keywords that people are searching to find the exact same thing. In addition to that, we don't really lean on much is blog content. So we mainly use blog content to really drive relevancy to certain products that the brand doesn't have much an authority on right now. So that would be through internal linking through that side of things.

Andy Splichal:

You know, that's, you really took the next question I was going to ask, are blogs still important?

Thomas Phillips:

It's a difficult one. The way that I see it is I don't want to be spending a client's budget on building out boatloads of content when it's not necessarily needed. Let's say, for example, you had a cold plunge company and it's like, oh, what temperature should it be? You can find that question from any other store. You could go on to chat GPT nowadays and just find that, find that answer super, super quick. So it's like, why should we create content around that? It's not necessarily going to give us any benefit. I would much rather try and find keywords that actually have a kind of purchase intent, as well as being able to drive relevancy to the other pages. So it's a difficult one, but I wouldn't go gangbusters on it anymore.

Andy Splichal:

Do people read blogs or is it really for Google's, their spiders and them and Google indexing?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, yeah, people definitely read them. Some of the blogs that we've put up on our own sites and our client sites get a lot of traffic. But as I say, I really don't like to lean on it much, depending on what stage of the funnel, the kind of question or blog content is that. Because we don't just want to drive a load of traffic just for the sake of having traffic, we want traffic that equals the sale. At the end of the day, that.

Andy Splichal:

Seems to be a problem. I have a couple clients where they'll have a blog that has been indexed really well. They get a lot of traffic to it, but haven't been able to get users from that page into the website, into a, into a purchase, into a product. What, I guess. Have you seen that before and is there anything you'd recommend from that?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, yeah, we've definitely seen it before. Like, we took on a client a month or so ago, and one of their top traffic pages was a blog post that was talking about a particular clothing style. And they said, oh, we get a load of sales from this. And I went in and looked at the data and I was like, you have not made any sales from this, but when you look at the article, it doesn't necessarily have anything that's trying to draw you in and promote the product in that sense. So what we like to do in this particular case is to have integrated CTA's, like integrated call to actions on there. So hey, this is the product. Here's the title, here's a compelling image of it, potentially. Here's a discount, here's a button to then go across and, and look at that.

Thomas Phillips:

So we like to have that kind of quite high up, maybe 15% of the way down on the page. So we're pretty confident that everyone who's going to land on that page and scroll slightly is going to see that call to action and ultimately go across. And especially on mobile, having an integrated CTA, so much better than a sidebar, because you'll see it when you're at the bottom of the page and most people are mobile. So that would be my recommendation.

Andy Splichal:

Did that draw some sales on that page for that client?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, it would definitely drives traffic across. Whether or not it makes sales is another thing. But that's by far the best way that we found to try and do that. We found pop ups, people love to just click off them straight away. But an integrated call to action section, you can't get around. You have to look at it. So it's going to get x amount of eyeballs. It's probably the most effective way that we found.

Andy Splichal:

Now, you referred to backlinks, is tip number three or step number three and is the gasoline that makes the car go. How do you go about building those for a client? And I guess, how could they build them for themselves if they wanted to go that route?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah. So we love to lean in on digital PR. Like we have a whole digital PR arm of the business. And when you then start to create data driven stories around things or expert commentary or for DTC brands, some brands, it works to then get into certain gift guides and things like that. When you get links from huge publications like that, that is just the absolute rocket fuel. It's the earned media in that sense. We try and get as many of those as we can. So through like a whole digital PR campaign, it's like a three month process.

Thomas Phillips:

It takes a very long time, but the results that you can yield from that are huge. So it might be like one that we've just literally just running now is like sweet, obsessed states. So which state in, in the US is the most obsessed with certain candy. So our data scientist pulls all that information, puts everything together, and then we can then pitch that to certain journalists.

Andy Splichal:

Got it. So you have a list of journalists that you've worked with before that you can pitch to. Or, I mean, I know, you know, a long time ago with backlinks, you would, you would just send stuff out on like PR web and, you know, anybody could do that and it would be a link, right? Google would. Would take it from PR web. But I don't think those are worth much anymore.

Thomas Phillips:

No, no, 100% correct. We actually had to tell a client the other day to please stop doing that. Because what you'll see with ones.

Andy Splichal:

Can it hurt you?

Thomas Phillips:

No. Yeah, definitely. Yeah. Because basically it's syndicating out to 100, 200 websites that's like ABC, seven dot, whatever the random URL is. And they're just getting thousands and thousands and thousands of these press releases going up every single day. And what you'll find is there's a big spike. You're on 200 or so websites and then after three months or so, you have massive link drop because basically these websites just delete the press release. So when you have a link loss, especially in SEO, there's a huge negative signal.

Thomas Phillips:

It's a great way of black hanging someone's site. As a side note, I've heard through the grapevine. So yeah, interesting one with that. So we love to lean in on proper earned media. So we have databases like Rockshill, Muckrack, very expensive databases that are kept up to date of where the journalists are at, the different publications, so we can contact them accordingly.

Andy Splichal:

So that sounds difficult for an individual business owner to do. Are there anything. What about Haroezen?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, yeah, definitely. Haro. Haro is getting a lot more difficult these days. Like we like to call that expert commentary and that works really, really nicely, especially if the brand owner has really good expertise in whatever they're pitching for. So for sure, yeah, that's a really, really good one to go for. I would say more so of like local press is way, way, way easier to get. So if you're a founder and you have a brand and you want to be the face behind it, obviously that's the key part to this. Then, then contacting the local news and things like that, like smaller newspapers, online ones, they need stories at the end of the day.

Thomas Phillips:

So if you can then craft something that is compelling around that, contact them and say, hey, can I be, can I assist in any way for this? In exchange for a link, then there's definitely potential there.

Andy Splichal:

So how do you go about measuring? And I've always found the difficult, I specialize in PPC and it's a lot easier. Somebody clicks on an ad, they buy it, you could tell. But how do you measure the success of an SEO campaign, especially as it relates to your guarantee, your 90 day guarantee?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah. Yes. We pull most of our data from Google Analytics. So Ga Four seems to be somewhat accurate. When you're selecting Google. Sorry, when you're selecting organic search specifically. So we like to go through landing pages and then we look at all the different landing pages and how much revenue they're then generating from organic search. That's been by far the best way from a traffic point of view.

Thomas Phillips:

We look at Google Search console from obviously Google side of things also bing as well. Then looking at their own search console from that side of things as well.

Andy Splichal:

Now, do you have a favorite success story of a client that you've worked with and what SEO might have been able to do for their business?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, yeah. We had a bit of an anomaly a couple of weeks back, which was an awesome one. I've literally just written up the case study. So that's on the DC SEO agency website. But basically there was a client that came to us, they had, their website was ten or so years old. So we're like fantastic. There's a lot of previous history with Google. They had 1000 or so different products and collections that were just not optimized in the slightest.

Thomas Phillips:

Like there was hundreds of products where they had the exact same product title, SEO title, things like that. So that's basically where we then came in. We fully optimized the site from the technical standpoint. They had so many different errors that had popped up over that many years. They'd also changed to Shopify. So that adds a whole bunch of extra errors if it's not done correctly. Then we basically went in and optimized every single product and every single collection page. Then we link built to very specific collections that we saw were in striking distance.

Thomas Phillips:

That is something that is ranked 6th or below on Google and the results within a two week period were nuts. Google went through crawled. The site could then understand this product is about this, this collection is about this. Okay, your link building over here and here and the site just popped up like crazy. So the results that we saw were nuts, which was fantastic. So that was a bit of an anomaly. But it's always fun to see so much green so quickly.

Andy Splichal:

What about AI in SEO? Do you guys use it and do you recommend? I mean, it seems to be a lot of people are using it for content.

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah. So we have seen AI based sites rank insanely well and then rank not insanely well. So just basically getting slapped by Google. So we try and stay away from it as much as possible. And we also recommend our clients too, as well. There is a lot of, a lot of people who create a straight output from chat, GPT or whatever and they go upload it to the site. There is no like editor, there's no specialist editing the content or anything like that. So I think at that point that is, that's dangerous.

Thomas Phillips:

You know, it's, it's not something that we would recommend by any means. You know, we want to build a website that and a brand that is going to be there for a long time. You know, something you can exit out of and you can't exit out of something that is scaled up and scaled back down again. It's a lot harder. So yeah, we try and stay away for sure right now anyway. We'll see what happens next year. It might be totally different.

Andy Splichal:

I know AI is probably the biggest thing going right now, but are there any other emerging trends that you've seen in SEO that direct to consumer brand should be aware of?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, I think the main one right now is SGE in Google. So the search generative. Oh my God, I've forgotten what the experience. So it's basically the top section in Google where they are summarizing more of the content. And basically what's happening now is it's pushing down more of the organic spots. So it's never been more important to be in that top three section because everything below that is, is, you know, going to have way less clicks. So having a fully optimized site that is technically sound and linking as link building as much as possible to get you in that top three space is super, super important. And I think that going back to the whole point of what we were mentioning about the blog posts, like now that Google is creating the answer for you, it's like why would you go and click on another website, potentially be bombarded with ads and everything like that when you could just get the answer up at the top? So again, that's really why we don't want to be leaning in on that kind of content creation because of the way things are going now.

Andy Splichal:

You guys work exclusively with direct to consumer companies?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

Or.

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah.

Andy Splichal:

Okay. And how does your fee structure work?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, so we do everything based off of deliverables. We've just found that is by far the easiest way. So you can either start low and go slower or you can be extremely aggressive and go a lot faster. So it's all based on the deliverable.

Andy Splichal:

Side of things, like how many pages are optimized, how many links are created, what deliverables do you go off of?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, exactly that. Yeah. So each package, as always, gets onsite optimization, keyword research, content audit. Yeah, and content side of things. And then in terms of deliverables, it's how many pieces of content, how many links. Digital PR, expert commentary, digital PR campaigns, re optimization of certain pages and each of those have a different deliverable number associated with it. So you get 50 a month. Here's what we recommend to invest in this month.

Thomas Phillips:

It might be okay. We really want to double down on content this month to get all of these built out and re optimized, or the next month it might be, hey, we really need to focus on this page because it's within striking distance and we can see from your Google Ads that that makes you a ton of money. So let's focus on that and drive that up. So we're very fluid with suggestions of where to spend.

Andy Splichal:

And you had mentioned that you're very picky with what clients you accept. What is the ideal client for your agency?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, definitely revenue over a mil a year and a long enough history that we can build off of. So we do have clients who are literally starting from ground zero, but they have the investment and they understand the product and it's already proven to then obviously come up from there. But our ideal client for sure is high average order value, already has a great conversion rate. They can handle a lot more sales. They have the stock, they have the history. They already have some kind of reputation with Google. And if they're within striking distance for some of their big keywords, then that is absolutely ideal. If they're running Google Ads as well, that is fantastic.

Thomas Phillips:

Especially if they've previously run search ads, because then we can take that data, see exactly what converts best, and we can then double down on that so that we're taking up extra digital real estate. That's really what we want to focus on.

Andy Splichal:

And how can an interested listener learn more about working with you in DTC SEO agency?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, so you can either head over to the website, literally dtcseoagency.com, or you can follow me on YouTube, Instagram, Twitter. I think it's all the same handle. Thomas. Mister Phillips. Yeah, shoot me a DM. I'd love to hear, hear what people think if they want to learn anything.

Andy Splichal:

Well, this has been great. Is there anything else you'd like to add before we wrap it up today?

Thomas Phillips:

Yeah, I think just, yeah, I would love to hear other people's thoughts on things. What do you want to know about SEO? What don't you understand? What do you want to see out there as videos or content or different kinds of things? It'd be fantastic to get some feedback from that, for sure.

Andy Splichal:

All right, well, for listeners, remember, if you like this episode, please go to Apple Podcasts and leave us an honest review. And if you're looking for more information on DTC SEO agency or connecting with Thomas, you'll find the links in the show notes below. In addition, if you're looking for more information on growing your business, check out our podcast resource center available at podcast dot make out.com. we have compiled all of our different past guests by show topic and included each of their contact information. In case you would like more information. Any of the services discussed in previous episodes. Well, that's it for today. Remember to stay safe, keep healthy and happy marketing and I'll talk to you in the next episode.