Discussing Ecommerce SEO with Julian Goldie, Founder of Goldie Agency

Cloudways: Hello Julian! Thank you for joining us for the interview. Could you start but telling us a little bit about yourself?

Julian: Sure, so I’m an SEO link builder from the UK, currently based in Bangkok, Thailand.

I’ve been helping thousands of websites increase their Google rankings for over 5 years now. I have my own SEO YouTube channel, podcast, and published the book “Link Building Mastery”.

I’m also the owner of Goldie link building agency – helping websites get more traffic, leads and sales with backlinks.

Cloudways: Your association with SEO. Was it a love at first sight or did you start liking this field over the course of time? What is the most interesting thing you find about SEO?

Julian: Good question! So I came across SEO because I had my own cryptocurrency website, whilst travelling and working online in Asia.

I’d publish a lot of blogs and articles – that’s what I spent 90% of my time doing! I had the philosophy that “if you build it, they will come!”. Sadly that wasn’t the case – and I didn’t get much love from Google. In fact, my website got NO traffic – and no matter how many articles I published, I couldn’t rank on Google.

That’s when a few friends I met whilst travelling taught me about SEO, and how to use it to get better rankings and more traffic.

From there, it was pretty much love at first sight! As soon as I started seeing results, I grew a passion for it and learned more and more – spending hours reading, researching and hiring the best SEO coaches.

In terms of what I like about it, I’m not a natural salesman. In fact, embarrassingly enough I was fired from my first job in sales!

So I looked at the internet as a solution – and found SEO as the perfect way to get more customers. If your marketing is good enough, sales is 10X easier.

Cloudways: What work is being done at Goldie Agency Ltd.? Please share details about how it all started, where it stands today and the type of clients it is catering to?

Julian: So after I started building out and seeing results with my own affiliate websites, I realized that I could do the same for clients as a service. And there was a huge demand from website owners!

Since then, I created an SEO YouTube channel, podcast, course, published an SEO book and literally helped thousands of websites rank with SEO. We mostly work with SaaS sites, ecommerce companies and SEO agencies (a lot of them hire us for white label SEO).

Cloudways: How important is SEO for an ecommerce store? What advice would you give to ecommerce store owners who want to optimize their stores for better rankings and get organic traffic on their websites?

Julian: SEO for ecommerce is crucial because it’s a free, passive way to generate customers on autopilot. The beauty of this is that unlike ads, where if you switch them off the sales stop instantly, SEO can drive traffic to your website for years to come.

Plus you can increase your profit margins when you’re getting free traffic from Google. Whereas with Facebook or Google ads, you’re constantly struggling to be profitable because of the costs involved.

SEO gives you a lot more breathing space when it comes to profit margins and it’s an easy way to reach your customers!

Here’s 3 actionable tips that almost any website owner can implement quickly:

1. Reverse engineer what your customers are searching on Google – and what keywords will lead to product sales. If you’ve run ads before, you probably already know what converts!
2. Create content that matches exactly what keywords your customers are searching for. Publish as much content as possible around your keywords. The more you scale this up, the more results you’ll see from SEO.
3. Build backlinks to your website. Ahrefs actually did a study of over 1 billion websites – and 91% of those websites got ZERO traffic!

Why? The #1 reason was no backlinks.

Backlinks are the biggest differentiator between you and your competitors:

And if you don’t have backlinks then you’ll struggle to rank.

Learn All About Ecommerce SEO in This Definitive Guide!

Cloudways: Google’s algorithms are always changing. What advice would you give to ecommerce SEO professionals who want to keep themselves updated and ultimately stay on the top Google Search Results?

Julian: When it comes to Google algorithm updates, there’s a lot of them! Which means it’s almost impossible to adapt to every single one. But here’s the good news:

The philosophy of SEO doesn’t change, no matter how many times they update. Google just wants to give their users the best possible experience. So with SEO, it’s not about hacking your rankings, cheating the system or manipulating algorithm updates:

SEO is simply about delivering the best content to your website visitors and creating the best possible user experience for people searching on Google.

If you can do this then you will be miles ahead of most of your competitors.

Cloudways: Holiday season is globally a low-traffic season. What can ecommerce store owners do for their clients and stores respectively, in order to keep a steady flow of traffic during that time and maintain their SEO rankings?

Julian: It’ll take a bit of time for Google to rank and index your content, so if you can start publishing more content and building backlinks now you’ll be in great shape for hitting your sales targets in 2022!

And if you do see an drop in traffic during the holiday season, you should also do some conversion rate optimization (CRO):

The higher your website’s conversion rates, the more revenue you’ll gain (even with lower levels of traffic).

Plus when your traffic bounces back you’ll be much more efficient! CRO will also improve your SEO on-page metrics too:

Faster site speeds + more engaging content + better UI = Higher conversions and better results with SEO.

For ranking your store’s site, focus on evergreen topics:

If you go after seasonal topics, you’ll get seasonal results. So instead, it’s important to make sure the topics you rank for and the keywords you target will rank well all year around! That way even during holiday seasons, your traffic levels are more reliable.

Cloudways: Do you think having a good web hosting provider plays a part in your overall website traffic? If yes, how crucial is it to host a site on a reliable web hosting platform?

Julian: Absolutely, it’s crucial because if your website is down and Google sends traffic to your site, then users are going to “pogostick” straight off your website and back to Google.

This is super harmful to your rankings and your sales:

Not only will potential customers bounce off your site, losing you valuable revenue…

…If Google sees something wrong with your website, your rankings will tank. You’ll undo all the hard work you’ve put into your site. It’s just going to cause a lot of stress and problems in the long run.

Also, site speed is a ranking factor:

And if you have an ecommerce site, you want your page to load as quickly as possible to increase your conversions. That’s the benefit of a good web hosting provider – it literally pays for itself!

So it’s better to invest in a reliable web hosting provider now – rather than regret it in 6 months when it’s too late to switch.

This is one of the reasons why I switched to Cloudways because they’re just so reliable.

Cloudways: Running an agency, creating courses, helping clients, you do a lot. How do you find the time to balance it with your personal life? What are your favorite leisure activities?

Julian: I’m lucky enough to have the right people around me, the right systems and an amazing team! This saves me a lot of time so that I can focus on improving the business, the service and getting my clients better results.

I also find that most of the time it’s what you do outside of the office that will impact your performance inside the office! So if you can keep learning, improving and building the right habits, then you’re so much more effective at work.

My 2 favourite hobbies are:

1. Training Muay Thai – I live in Bangkok and this teaches me a lot of discipline, keeps me humble, plus I meet some great people along the way.
2. I also love music – I play guitar and sing which gives me a bit of breathing space from work plus it’s very relaxing.

Cloudways: Please share some valuable advice for individuals who are just entering the digital marketing field.

Julian: My top 3 tips for new individuals would be:

1. Build an audience: If there’s one thing I’ve learnt from publishing YouTube videos, posting on social media and publishing a book, it’s that building an audience and helping others will always lead to good things. This is one of the best ways to differentiate yourself from your competitors
2. Pick a niche and stick to it: The marketing world is highly competitive! Plus if you’re speaking to everyone, you’re speaking to no one. So the earlier you can specialize and become an expert in one field, the easier it’s going to be for you to stand out, help others and become better at what you do.
3. Never stop learning: Most people get too comfortable – especially when things are going well in their career. I feel that you always have to be continuously adapting, learning and dedicating time to improving your knowledge. This way you can make better decisions, keep moving forward and growing as a person.

Shoaib Israr

Shoaib is a passionate digital marketer who believes creativity is everything. His interests lie in content, digital marketing and he loves to help agency and ecommerce business owners in growing and expanding their businesses. In his free time, Shoaib loves to play football or binge-watch some interesting shows on Netflix.

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