Paul Shapiro gave this talk at the Revenue Marketing Festival in New York, December 2022. You can watch the talk (and others) in our On-Demand section.

Hey everyone. My name is Paul Shapiro, and I'm the Head of Technical SEO at Shopify. I specialize in technical SEO, as well as the intersection of SEO and data science.

I used to work at Condé Nast and was agency-side and GroupM, helping many many businesses with their SEO.

Today, I’m going to share some SEO tips and strategies to help you drive revenue with your website.

What is SEO?

As you may know, SEO stands for search engine optimization. That still sounds pretty abstract, so let’s take a look at what I mean.

Say you searched for jeans on Google, these are the results you'd get. Everything in red is an ad. The organic results are in green – that's what SEO is concerned with. There’s a list of websites, and generally speaking, your goal is to bring your website closer to the top of that list. That’s what’s going to result in more traffic, more conversions, and more money for you. That's all SEO is – simple, right?

How does SEO work?

To understand how SEO works, we first need to understand what a search engine does. Very simply, it carries out these four steps:

1. Crawling – There's essentially a bot that goes through the entire internet, clicking on all the links, discovering new pages on websites, and even reevaluating old ones that it might already be aware of.
2. Indexing – Once the search engine is aware of these pages on the web, it needs to catalog them, so it takes the content and metadata from those websites and adds it to its internal database, aka index.
3. (Rendering) – This is an unofficial aspect of what search engines do (hence the parentheses) and it’s come about because the web has gotten a lot more complex. After the initial indexing, Google and other smart search engines will come back and reevaluate all the JavaScript and other dynamic media on the page, and then that gets put into the index.
4. Ranking – This is the end result for the user. You type a keyword into the search box, then Google applies its algorithms and decides what goes at the top and what goes at the bottom.

So how do you influence that? These are the three SEO pillars that decide your rankings:

1. Content and keywords – If you don't have a piece of content with the keyword somebody is searching for, you won’t appear in their search results. That one’s pretty straightforward.
2. Crawling and indexing – If the search engine can't access a part of your website, then it can't serve it in a search result.
3. Digital PR and backlinks – Google uses a primary algorithm called PageRank, which evaluates all websites based on how many links point to that page. To put it very simply, those links are almost like votes of confidence.

Once you get to the ranking part, there's a lot you can do to improve your click-through rate (CTR) and user experience, which will hopefully improve your conversions too. We’re going to dive a little deeper into each of these areas later on, but first, I’m going to give you a few tips on getting started with your SEO strategy.

Opportunity sizing

Let’s dive into strategy and how to think about what you should go after. We’ll start with opportunity sizing. If you run a business where you can tie your online actions to revenue or conversions, then it's absolutely imperative that everything you do in SEO has an opportunity size.

There are a few ways to approach opportunity sizing – I'll give you an example of a formula you can use in a minute – but it’s important that you don't make the process too difficult or time-consuming. Often, a SWAG analysis is all you need.

Here’s one way to calculate the size of your opportunity:

• First, you take the search volume (i.e. how many times people search for a keyword; that data can be provided by Google).
• Next, you apply a click-through rate curve (more on that in a second) to estimate how much traffic you’ll get based on your position.
• Then I recommend using a competition-dampening tool (not all keywords are created equal; for instance, it's a lot harder to rank for “blue jeans” than it is for “Revenue Marketing Summit”).
• Finally, you should apply your average conversion rate, and that’s going to give you the opportunity size for a keyword.

You can take this even further and size a whole group of keywords or a whole topic, almost like a TAM analysis.

CTR curve

Ideally, you’ll be able to create a click-through rate curve using your own first-party data. It’s very easy to do with a free Google Search Console account. If your website is new and you don't have that data, you can use a public repository.

I really like this one from Advanced Web Rankings. What's great about it is you can look by the industry and vertical that you're in, as well as by segment. As I said, not all search results are the same. Sometimes you'll see more ads on certain pages than others. Sometimes you'll see different search features, like a definition at the top of the page. You can segment all of that and get the click-through rate curve in aggregate for the websites they're tracking.

Competition-dampening metric

You can also roll out your own competition-dampening metric. Usually, that will incorporate some aspects like how many backlinks all of the websites on page one get. If you want to make your life easier, use a third-party tool like Semrush rather than making your own metric.

Not all aspects of SEO tie directly to revenue

Now that we’ve taken a look at keyword targeting, let’s get into the parts of SEO that are harder to tie to revenue. Here are a few examples:

• Site hygiene – This includes things like how many 404s you have on your website.
• Brand awareness and impact – There's an inherent value in creating certain content, even if you can't just tie that to revenue directly.
• User education, customer service, and support costs – If you have a SaaS product, you’re going to need content and tools on your site to help your users.
• The cost of letting your competitors gain more visibility in search results.

Just because a certain element of SEO doesn’t have clear ROI doesn’t mean it’s not worth doing. Paying attention to all everything I listed above will not only serve your customers, it will serve your business too.

SEO needs to consider your audience

Let’s dive into the pillars of SEO we touched upon earlier, starting with content and keywords. A lot of SEO strategies tend to focus almost exclusively on search volume metrics. However, I want to drive home that you have to think about more than that – considering your audience is crucial too. I’ll give you an example.

A few years ago, I was creating a personal blog about horror movies. I was looking into which horror movie directors were the most searched for, so I could write about them. But, as it turns out, that may not have been the best approach. When I looked at the horror movie community on Reddit, which represented my target audience of hardcore horror movie fans, I saw that the directors they were talking about weren’t the ones with the highest search volume.

For example, Alfred Hitchcock may have been one of the most searched-for directors, but the horror movie community on Reddit wasn't talking about him as much as George Romero or Guillermo del Toro. This showed me that writing about Alfred Hitchcock probably wouldn't convert well or result in many email signups because it wasn't representative of my audience’s interests.

This was a useful reminder that while search volume metrics can be helpful, they shouldn't be the only factor to consider when creating content. You also have to take into account the interests and preferences of your target audience. When you do this, you’ll create content that is more engaging and likely to result in conversions.

Not all content has the same impact on conversions. You have to think about where the content fits in the sales funnel and what your audience’s needs will be at each stage of that funnel. Sure, content at the bottom of the funnel will convert better, but it'll have a lower search volume than content at the top of the funnel. To get the best results, you need to find a balance between the two.

Crawling and indexing

Remember how I said if Google can't access a part of your website, then it can't serve it in a search result? Let’s look at why that happens and what you can do to avoid it.

Common problem areas:

• JavaScript implementation – Search engines like Google are getting way more sophisticated, so this is a little bit less of a problem than it once was, but it can and does still cause issues.
• Broken links
• Changes to URLs
• Improperly implemented redirects
• Nofollowing every link – You can add a snippet of code to a link called a nofollow. I've seen websites with these code snippets all over the place, which causes major issues.
• URL blocking – In like the metadata, you might find explicit directions (like noindex and robots.txt) to prevent search engines from crawling your website; sometimes they’re used improperly.

Internal linking

Another big part of SEO concerns your website’s internal links. Thanks to Google’s PageRank algorithm, every link matters even within your own website – not just links from external sources. Making sure that everything's well linked between pages will aid user discovery, improve traffic, and can improve search engine rankings.

Digital PR and backlinks

There are a lot of bad ways to do digital PR and backlinks, and a lot of good ways to do them too. I want to highlight the spectrum of good and bad, starting with the best.

• Best state: Content that serves a strong user purpose creates natural network effects, and will naturally generate backlinks. This is what you want to go for. If your content is useful and serves multiple purposes, people will want to link to it.
• Acceptable state: This is where you have some content that generates buzz and natural backlinks but doesn't have a deep product tie-in. You’ll probably find that the buzz is quite fleeting and doesn’t do much to drive conversions.
• Unacceptable state: If your content is either so boring or so disconnected from your product that you have to rely on outreach, it’s not going to be effective. You don't want to have to beg journalists for links. You can do outreach if the content resonates with people and has a strong product tie-in, but if the content is completely unrelated, that's going to cost you a lot of money and it’s not going to help your SEO efforts.

SEO strategy

When it comes to SEO, you want to focus 80% of your efforts on big bets – strategies that are tailored to your specific product and are harder for others to replicate. For example, if you were Facebook, and you wanted to expand into commerce, you might create a directory detailing different product verticals like board games or toys and make it available to Google. This would hard for another company to replicate because they don't have access to the same data as you.

You want to put the other 20% of your efforts into short-term, tactical plays, such as creating blog content. These kinds of plays are easier for others to replicate, but still valuable. A mix of both short-term and long-term strategies will help you to get the best out of your SEO efforts.

Best practices and testing

Just like in other areas of marketing, testing is incredibly important in SEO. The SEO industry has an overreliance on best practices, but often when you run SEO tests, you'll find that the results contradict those best practices. The algorithms used by search engines such as Google are not fully transparent, so real-world testing is crucial to understanding what truly works.

SEO testing is a lot harder than other types of testing. It’s not like CRO testing – you can't just show Google a control and a variant and see which one it responds better to. Still, you do have a couple of options.

One option is to conduct a pseudo A/B test by tweaking one aspect of a website's templated content and comparing the results with a control group. It’s not a true A/B test, but it gives you a sense of how those changes might impact SEO. There's a library that Google created in R called CausalImpact, which is useful for analyzing this type of data.

Another option is to rely on a pre-/post-test, which involves gathering baseline data before making any changes, then comparing the results to what happens afterwards. While this method is not as scientifically sound as a true A/B test, it can still provide valuable insights that will inform your SEO efforts.

Testing resources

Because SEO testing is quite difficult, I wanted to leave you with some resources.

• SEO testing ideas: SearchPilot is a software that helps people run A/B tests. They also have a great newsletter, which is really useful if you're looking for SEO testing ideas.
• Managing pre-/post- testing: SEOTesting.com provides really easy-to-use software that helps you manage and analyze your tests.
• Analyzing data from pseudo A/B tests: CausalImpact is very useful for SEO testing. It's also ported to Python and some other programming languages if you're not using R.

SEO: A never-ending story

In conclusion, technical SEO is an essential aspect of driving revenue for any business. By understanding how search engines crawl and index web pages, you can ensure that your website is easily discoverable and accessible to your target audience. When you implement create content that resonates with your audience and use testing to optimize your SEO efforts, you’ll drive more traffic to your website and ultimately increase your revenue.

However, it’s important to remember that SEO is a continuous process. Search engines are constantly updating their algorithms, and you need to adapt your SEO strategies accordingly. By staying up-to-date with the latest trends and best practices, you’ll make sure your business remains competitive and continue to drive revenue through SEO. The key is to continuously test your SEO strategies and use data and analytics to inform your decisions.