The Dropship Unlocked Podcast

SEO Mastery for Ecommerce With Thomas Phillips (Episode 90)

• Lewis Smith & James Eardley • Season 1 • Episode 90

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📞 Ready to Take the Next Step? https://dropshipunlocked.com/training-watch-apply?el=podcast-90-seo-mastery-thomas-phillips

Find out how Thomas guarantees a 15% increase in organic search visitors within 90 days ➡️ https://www.dtcseoagency.com/

To learn more SEO fundamentals from Thomas ➡️ https://teach.io/group/dtc-seo-academy

🗣In this episode of the Dropship Unlocked Podcast, hosts Lewis Smith and James Eardley welcome Thomas Phillips, a digital marketing and e-commerce expert with 18 years of experience and founder of DTCSEOAgency.com. 

Thomas shares his strategies for scaling online stores organically through SEO, having generated over $70 million for his own and clients' brands.

👉 Prefer to watch this on Youtube? Check it out here  ➡️ https://youtu.be/nuYSV4oR68Y

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Topics Discussed:

★ Understanding SEO: SEO's role in driving organic traffic and its long-term benefits over paid ads.

★ Challenges with Paid Ads: The impact of ad blockers and ad fraud on paid ads. Higher conversion rates from organic search traffic.

★ Core Elements of a Successful SEO Strategy: Keyword research, content creation, technical SEO, and link building.

★ AI in SEO: Using AI for basic tasks with human oversight. Importance of human editing to avoid penalties for AI-generated content.

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Links and Resources Mentioned:

Pick up a copy of Lewis’ book: https://htabook.com 

Get Shopify for £1 a month for 3 months: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/shopify 

Get a free trial with a professional phone line: https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/circle 

Thomas’ Instagram: https://www.instagram.com/thomasmrphillips/ 

Thomas’ LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/tomphillipsofficial/ 

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Key Takeaways:

★ SEO Advantages: Drives reliable organic traffic with long-term growth. Higher conversion rates from organic search traffic.

★ Core SEO Strategy: Keyword research, quality content, technical optimization, and strategic link building.

★ AI in SEO: AI can aid in tasks but requires human oversight. Human editing ensures content quality and avoids penalties.

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★★★Dropship Unlocked - Lewis Smith★★★

🌏Watch Our Free Training ➽ https://www.dropshipunlocked.com/training?el=podcast-90-seo-mastery-thomas-phillips

In today's episode, we are very excited to have Thomas Phillips with us, a digital marketing and E commerce expert with 18 years of experience. Thomas is the founder of DTC SEO agency.com and has a wealth of knowledge on SEO and driving organic sales for E commerce businesses. That's right, Lewis, in this conversation with Thomas, we're going to be diving deep into SEO and how that can cut our ad budgets while increasing our E commerce sales at the same time. So you can think about how much impact this can have for the profits of our business. So Thomas is going to be sharing practical strategies today that you can implement immediately after listening to this episode to see real results. Yeah, it's gonna be a good one. I'm sure many of our listeners will be excited to take action after hearing about the possibilities available to them. After this episode, we're gonna be exploring the facts behind why organic search is dominating and why now is the best time to invest in SEO. So prepare to gain insights that can transform your online stores performance. Let's get started. Welcome to the dropship unlocked Podcast. I'm Louis Smith, the founder of dropship unlocked, and with me is our Client Success Coach James Eardley. Now when we're not recording the podcast episodes, we're running our own e commerce businesses and helping aspiring entrepreneurs launch their own high ticket drop shipping businesses. Keen to build your own six or even seven figure business? My book, the home turf advantage is your blueprint for launching a profitable online store. Grab your copy at HTA book.com today, and let's get you started now, sit back, relax, and let's unlock your potential with the drop ship unlocked podcast. So today, I'm excited to be joined by Thomas Phillips, a digital marketing and E commerce expert with 18 years of experience, Thomas has generated over $70 million for His own and His clients brands. So Thomas is the founder of DTC SEO agency.com and he's here to share strategies for scaling our online stores organically. So Thomas, first of all, it's fantastic to have you with us here today. Yeah, much appreciate it, James. Thank you. No pleasure to have you on so let us know a little bit about your journey and how that's brought you to what you're working on today. Yeah, roughly when I was around 13 years old, I'm 32 now, I started my first online business. I was basically building miniature skateboards in my dad's garage, like, little Tech Decks, three wooden ply versions and whatnot. And yeah, built my first website. It's called Vision decks. Put everything online, yeah, and it just went like gangbusters. It went crazy. I had a little like PayPal button on their HTML. Coded website, and that was my first experience with SEO. I sold to 39 different countries in the first year, and I was ranked super high for like, finger boards and all these different keywords associated with it. And it got so busy in my first year of school, in year seven, I had to close it down after a year, I just couldn't keep up with demand. I couldn't, I couldn't, I didn't know about hiring people or anything like that. So yeah, it went crazy. That was my first experience. And then I bought a motocross bike with the profits. So that was kind of my first experience with SEO and everything online and basically building a product, e commerce side of things. And then it just went from there, really. It just took off. And I've just been into had so many different businesses exited, like 16 different brands online. And now we're kind of at the point where we're building out our own different brands and also building out the the agency. It's got to point so many people are asking us, Hey, can you do our SEO that we're like, All right, okay, we'll actually build it into something proper instead of just the background thing. Now, so it's kind of where we're at. Amazing. What a story so entrepreneurial drive straight in you from the age of 13 is clear, I mean. And also you're well ahead of your time. So that must have been what 2006 we talking to when he first started that initial business, something around then, something like that. Yeah, yeah. Year seven at school, yeah. And the tools that we have at our fingerceps now, like Shopify, Google ads, they wouldn't have been anywhere near as mature at that level. I mean, how did you how did you get started? Do you have mentors around you? No, not at that age. It was a case of like, okay, I've got this idea. I've seen someone else is doing it online. I think I could actually do it better. And it was a case of like, okay, how do I build a website? All right, you start at square one, like most of your students, I'm sure, like, how do I do this? Okay, I need to learn that right now. I understand that to a point. Cool. Okay, on to the next thing. What else do I need to know? Oh, payment processes. Okay, what's like? The only one I can do this one so it just kind of starts out. You achieve one thing. Cool, okay, I'm. To the next thing. How do I do that? Okay, I now know. Onto the next thing. But back then, it was literally just a HTML website coded with tables. But now you've got Shopify. It's just boom, out the box. Happy days. Everything's integrated. It's mad in comparison, yeah, the difference now with the market, where we've got it to where it's so intuitive now to build a website and any any coding experience, but yeah, back then, it's fascinating. You're right. You go through such a high learning curve when you first get started with any business. You obviously had that mindset from the start, that no matter what obstacle came up, you knew that there would be a way. Did you know where that came from? Or did you have like, family around you that taught you that obstacles are there to be overcome? Yeah, potentially, like my, my dad was a chartered accountant, so he he was always basically away working from from early till late at night. But he used to work on on his cars at night, and I used to then go into the garage and see, like, the dedication of like, two, three hours a night, you know, just building a car for seven years, like an old American car, you know, and then seeing the end result and being like, Oh, wow, okay, if you go steady at something, you know, and you and and you continue to build it, then it's going to result in something. So I'm sure that wore off on me, not really realizing it at the time, but not necessarily so entrepreneurial, but I think they just had I had something in me from a young age. I had the classic story, as well as obviously, like, uh, selling sweets at school. My mom used to run the brownies. So I used to buy freddos from bookers and take orders on MSN the night before, everything like that. So pre order, I knew how much stock to bring in all that kind of stuff. The big operation, yeah, exactly at 13. I mean, you had it nailed down with a the MSN operation. It was a, yeah, definitely, those traits have come through and being able to see your dad work on something for years and not necessarily see the outcome or fruition of all that hard work until later down the road, delayed gratification, essentially. Do you think that's played a big part in the businesses that you've been able to grow ever since? Yeah, yeah. I mean, it's always a I'd say that's a really tricky one to to try and do you know, especially nowadays, everyone wants everything. Now, I want the successful overnight business and everything like that and and you always think maybe I could achieve it with this one, but then it's always so much more work than you actually think. And I think that's really the reality of it. Is, like some things seem like they're very easy, but I think every single thing that you go into, if you want to become really, really, really good at it, it's gonna take a long time, which is really worth noting. You know, upfront, do I want to be in this for the long term? Yes or no, if you do, then, yeah, dedicating all those hours and time to it is is going to be worth it in the long term? Exactly. Yeah, it's committing and having a big enough vision that it makes it all worth it, the time and effort that you're putting to creating something brilliant. So bringing us up to nowadays, SEO obviously plays a huge role in the brands that you've been able to build. I just want to break it down for people that are watching or listening today. So SEO, what is it? And if you can sort of explain, why do you think it's so important for E commerce, businesses? Yeah? So effectively, SEO, search engine optimization, it effectively helps people find your products and your website from from whatever they're searching for online. So, yeah, if you had a website selling, yeah, let's say miniature skateboards, right? I would want to be first on Google for miniature skateboards. The intent of someone searching that for that item is is so high that they might buy that. That's the kind of traffic I want. So it's great because SEO converts SEO traffic, organic search traffic converts at such a higher level than something like Facebook ads, meta ads, because someone is mid scroll, doing something else, looking at something, and then you have to try and capture their attention, get them to click through, get them to be super interested, and then purchase. That's pretty difficult, but I've always liked to go, Okay, here's an idea. Here's a potential product. How many people are searching for it? Can we rank for it? If we can, it's a case of putting the product in front of the person who's already searching for it. The intent is there. It's a high purchase intent. It's a high conversion. Happy days. You know, there's tools online that already tell you, Okay, this is getting 10,000 searches a month. Is it something you can rank for, yes or no. So I like that, because it's the traffic's already there. I don't have to try and create the traffic. Yeah, you don't have to disrupt people from their online experience. If they're scrolling Facebook or Instagram, we're not disrupting them. Instead, we're looking to get in front of the people that are already searching. Already clearly in the market. So that's what SEO is really optimizing for, I guess, is to get in front of people that are already in the market for the products that we're selling. Yeah, exactly. And yeah, SEO is like, well, organic search is like 53 or something percent of all the website visitors and paid is like 27% or something like that. So there's crazy, long term benefits associated with it. It's just so much better. Your costs stay flat. So when your traffic goes up and increases, the profitability on that traffic is crazy. You know, overnight you can have huge upticks in traffic where you then start ranking top of google versus paid ads, it tracks with your revenue, so your margin is always squeezed throughout the whole time, unless you have an absolute killer ad that you can scale with a high row as but it's tricky. So the scalability is sort of built in with the organic element of of SEO, and it's interesting to compare the two. So the paid ads that we we put together, whether that's through Google or Facebook, we're paying to make sure that people are clicking or seeing our ads, whereas with organic, it's a game of actually optimizing our websites to ensure that they are naturally and organically so for free, showing on the first page or as close to the first page as possible. So with the with the difference between paid ads and SEO, do you think that the main benefit of optimizing your SEO efforts? Do you think it's the scalability aspect? Do you think that's the biggest benefit of spending time working on SEO compared to paid ads? I'd say it's the profitability and the the consistency of that profitability. So we also do meta ads for for our own brands. Don't get me wrong, good understanding of it. What I don't like is the volatility. You know you you really have to get way above your fixed costs to make profit. But then if one day, your your ads don't perform for whatever reason, which happens a lot, then your your CPA, your cost of acquisition suddenly skyrockets because you're spending $150 and your average order value is 100 and now you're out of pocket, plus your fixed costs. Versus with SEO, if I'm ranking for a keyword that has enough people searching for it every single month, and I know that I can place it up very high in the SERPs search engine results page, and I know, okay, that might cost me for my entire website. Might cost me a few 1000 a month, but I'm making 15 grand a month, and it's consistent, then I'm constantly getting a huge profit margin. So it's much closer to to your cost of goods percentage, as opposed to cost of goods. Plus, I don't know, 40% on Facebook ads, and I'm left with my 20% at the bottom, or 1510, whatever it might be. That's the interesting point. So you sort of look at the investment in an SEO strategy quite differently from the way you look at an investment in a paid ad strategy. Don't necessarily have a specific cost per acquisition. It's more a fixed monthly cost that you would generate into an SEO strategy. Is that? Is that sort of the way that you view the investments and the differences between paid ads? Yeah, absolutely. It's a case of, like, either working out, okay, what is the cost to get there, get to the point of where I'm, like, ranking number one or top three? How long is that going to take, and how much, how much investment do I need to roll into that? Basically, because with SEO, especially with a brand new website, like, don't expect to see anything for a good six months. But obviously, with paid ads. You know, it looks great because you can get people in the door the next day, but you might not be profitable for three or six months still. You know, especially when you're looking at it's important to look at the total time, not just, oh, I made profit today. Sweet. You know, Facebook ads are doing great, but it's like, how much have you spent on all your creative and all your ads prior that needs to take be taken into account, and that's the way I like to look at it with SEO as well. It's like, okay, I'm gonna need to invest for at least six months on a brand new website, and then we then start to build trust and authority with Google, and I'm building my reputation with Google so that then Google's like, great. We're now going to place you up higher, cool and higher and higher and higher, and then we go from there. So it compounds, which is the beautiful thing about it, if I hit pause on my ads, you bet you can bet your ass that your sales are going to pause with it. But with SEO, it's a compounding thing, which is beautiful. It is it's the long term approach, which is what we we have, and we teach with the E commerce businesses that we build. So I failed the traditional drop shipping business. And part of the reason I think I failed, or I didn't see it as a long term thing, is I had to continually refine a new product or a new website. And. Build a new website. And each time I did that, from an SEO standpoint, you're starting from scratch. When you build a business around a product that you know is going to be selling for the long term. Okay, like you say, there's going to be a period of time where there's not a lot of SEO juice that you'll you'll see back for at least the first six months. But beyond that, every month, we're getting more and more organic clicks to our website. But it's not costing us necessarily anymore, unless you're investing in an agency to really skyrocket that that growth. So, yeah, it's, I mean, the compounding nature. If you want to build a long term business, I think SEO has to play a part in your strategy. Do you see that trend continuing in terms of the the the benefits of SEO compared to paid ads, yeah, 100% because, like, Google is not going anywhere. I think that that, like all of these, like SEO tools and AI tools rather, you know, like chat, GPT and stuff. I mean, it's great for answering basic questions. And, you know, yeah, you might still find certain things with it. But at the end of the day, Google and Bing and DuckDuckGo and Yahoo and all these other search engines, they drive so much traffic. Still, it's absolutely insane. So it's such a profitable model, like I'll give you an example, like one of the brands that we work with, they do around 500k a year, and about 70k of that comes from SEO, but the SEO side of it makes up 45% of their entire profit. So yeah, it's just like, yeah, ads are fantastic for growth, but not necessarily for profit. So, you know, there's a lot of people online like, why revenue is huge. I'm like, What's your profit margin? Though? Yeah. And if, if you know that their marketing campaign is specifically from pay downs, then we can get a good guess that the margin is going to be a lot more squeezed. And if they have a large SEO strategy in place, and if they're getting a lot of their traffic and customers from from SEO, would you say that's a fair statement to make that if people are getting more traffic from SEO than they are from paid ads, it's likely they've got a higher profit margin, oh, 100% Yeah, yeah. Because, like, once you kind of breach that the point of where Google then views your website as an authority, you just get a hockey stick in terms of traffic, and that's really where the profit comes in, because you might be getting like, 100,000 people to your site a month, and you're spending five grand a month on to acquire that traffic. And at the agency, we're only interested in ranking keywords and pages that are your products. I'm not interested in trying to invest money into ranking blog articles or any of that stuff. Yeah, it might generate a lot of traffic, but that traffic is not really going to convert I would much rather be first for leather wallets than how to make a leather wallet or how to clean a leather wallet, like I don't I don't care about that. That's not what generates a return on the investment. So that's what we've gone for. Yeah? About having a commercial intent, essentially to the type of pages that are ranking interesting? So yeah, I mean, you just think about our own journeys as buyers. The amount of times we start our customer journey on Google, it's, it's, it's so many times. And sometimes you'll even, I know I do. Sometimes you'll scroll past the ads at the top of the the search engine results page, because you think that the first organic one is probably more likely to be more relevant. Certainly my my understanding or the way I shop, often, unless the ad is perfect for what I'm looking for, then I'll look for the first organic result, because it's often more more relevant. So that's a big plug, isn't it? But I guess the importance of SEO, yeah, I do exactly the same thing, yeah. And, and I also find that on the Google Shopping side of things, like, you scroll through and click and accidentally click and click some others and stuff, and it's like, I've just cost someone like, 345, dollars there, whoops, you know. But with SEO, you know? Yeah, click, click, all, click, all you want, that's just going to help out the site war. Yeah, exactly. It's reversed on its head. So, yeah, cool. I think we, we've created an idea, a picture, of why it's so important. And of course, I think still believe SEO plays its role, and paid media also plays his role, especially for getting off the ground initially and getting people onto your onto your site, but I think that the beautiful marketing strategy that we could create would be a combination of both, so dialing down now into like a successful SEO strategy that you would put into an E commerce business. What do you think are the real the core elements of a successful SEO strategy? Yeah. So for for someone starting out, the first thing that I would definitely do is to look at all the different products that you have, maybe start with, like the highest priority being the ones that sell best right now, open up a spreadsheet, list them all out, and then have a bunch of different rows and. But then have keywords that you think people might associate with it. So let's say it's like a leather wallet, right? Does it do a special thing, you know? Does it have like a the apple tag in it? Is it an apple tag leather wallet? Is it a black Apple tag leather wallet? You know? What are all the different combinations that I could possibly think of that would be associated with each product. And I think that's one of the best things to do, is just to start doing that. Do that for every single product that you have. And then I would get like a, I think you can get like a $1 free trial for a H refs or Ahrefs, however you want to say it, it's basically an SEO tool. I would then just dump all the keywords into that, into the Keyword Explorer, and it would tell you how difficult it is if it's actually a search term people search, and how many people a month are searching it. And at that point, I can then grab those, put the data back into the spreadsheet, and then I can start to work out, okay, no one is even searching for this, all of these different products. I'm not even going to focus on that from an SEO point of view. But these ones, oh, you know, 2000 people a month are searching that. 3000 1000 It might even be just 200 but that's 200 potential people who might then click on your website. And again, it's just it's so worth doing. So that's really the first thing is just understanding which products gonna rank, which keywords to people search, and then applying those keywords to your page, so adjusting and tweaking, like the meta title, the meta description. So this is in Shopify at the bottom, when you click edit right at the bottom of each product page. Is the URL structure optimized? Does it mention the keyword in there? This is still quite short. You don't want a really, really long one. Now, is the content on the page enough? I know that there's a lot of the kind of easy thing, especially with drop shipping, is you might import a bunch of products from somewhere, and it just has, like, a quick five point bullet point that might be pulled from somewhere else. Maybe you rewrite it with AI, and you go, Cool, yeah, that'll do. But you really want to try and develop out your product pages, you know, provide a lot of detail, provide a lot of information, and especially if you then go back to Google and search those main keywords, have a look at the pages that are ranking one, two and three. How much content do they have? Do they have much more images, different things like that. You want to try and gather up all of that data and put it onto your site as much as possible. And once you've then got, like, a website that is technically sound, it works, it functions really nicely. Your pages are well optimized in terms of which keywords you're going to try and target. The final thing is link building, really and this, this is where you know the cost comes in, because it's, it can be either costly in terms of your time or costly in terms of, like, acquiring other links. So, yeah, best thing to do, I believe, is to, if you want to do it yourself, and it's like manpower, go and find a whole bunch of different blogs or websites that are in a similar niche, reach out to them and say, Hey, can I write an article for your your website, we'll probably have 99 out of 100 saying, No, you might be able to grease the palms a little bit to speed things up. The other side of things is then you could then go to like a broker and and buy links because they already have all of the previous connections. And then the final part is digital PR, like, if you can afford it, digital PR is is one of the best ways of getting links and driving that power reputation as fast as possible. So if you view it as like it's the fuel for a car. You could have a beautiful Ferrari. It's already built out well optimized in terms of your keywords and everything. But if there's no fuel, it's not going to go anywhere. It just looks pretty so, so really see links as the fuel to power that up, and why? Why are links the fuel for our website's performance? Why are they so important? Yeah, I mean, it's one of, one of the main ways that Google can then associate like. Is this site reputable? Or is it not like I would see, see links as like votes of confidence. So the more votes of confidence that you have, the more your the bigger your reputation is in Google, right? So it's kind of like, if you go to trust pilot and you see a store has five trust pilot reviews, you're like, Can I can I trust it? I'm not 100% sure, but then you might go to another store and it's got 2000 reviews, and you scroll through them and they're all legit, and you're like, Huh, okay, I can trust that. It's a similar kind of thing with Google. You know, who's Google gonna trust who's Google gonna wanna put first? Is it a brand new store that has basically not. Of content on there, or is it like a very well developed store that has a lot of other websites linking to it, saying, yeah, here's where you need to go for leather wallets. So when you think about it like that, it's it's really that that's the case of things and and it's that compounding of building more and more links each month, the power and the authority compounds on top of each other to the point of where Google's like, Ah, sweet. We can see you're an authority. Now we're now going to push you up super high, brilliant. So it's a way to kind of hack their algorithm to understand, Okay, if that's what Google sees as an authoritative website, then we need to do whatever we can to get those links on other websites so that your website is then going to is going to get higher up on that search engine results page. So it's a great framework to lay out for people when we can just get started. And you mentioned AI in there, because oftentimes, with the Drop Shipping businesses that we are growing, we'll sign a supplier, they'll send over their product descriptions and their product images already, and so we'll upload product images, product descriptions. Okay? And that's fine to get started, especially if we've got 1000 products initially to upload. But a month down the line, two months down the line, we can start to see the best selling products, the best selling connections and the best selling brands. We decide, okay, I'm going to spend some time now optimizing those products to get higher up in the search engine results page, because clearly, they're in demand. Now, there would be a temptation to see the keywords that are performing well and ask chat, GPT, or any AI tool to put all these keywords into my product description. Now, do you see that as a viable method to get those keywords onto the product description? Or what do you think will be penalized for, for going down the AI route in that way? Yeah, great question. Yeah. So, so Google was kind of flip flopping around with this. They kind of said at the start, like, when chat GPT really kind of blew up, it was still like, this is a big no no for us. It needs to be proper, real people creating the content. Then they kind of did a 180 and said, actually, it's kind of okay. So then people took that literally and built big, big websites purely based off of AI. Then they then reverted it and and so many websites got penalized for basically just having AI content. And it makes so much sense. You know, like, you can tell it's AI, you know, the amount that chat GPT says, Embark. I'm going to embark on this journey to buy this product, or whatever it might be, you know, it's, it's such a giveaway. Ultimately, Google wants to serve up the best content and the best answer for that particular query. So I would say, I wouldn't even risk it, like we don't use it at all on on our stuff, and it's just, it's so much better if you can write it yourself, especially if you know and understand the product you know, you can take parts of of that existing product description and then just go to the next level of things with it. Just build on it as much as you can. And, and as I said, like, go to Google, search your top products or top keywords, look at the top sites that are ranking and and basically build on what they have in terms of, like the structure or the amount of text, but write it in your own way, obviously. But I think it can be a good tool. And if you're really, you know, struggling on time, then you could generate, you know, you could write the content out using it, and then really go through it fine tooth comb and really, really, really edit it yourself. But that is not my recommendation. It's not worth the risk. In my mind, if you want to build something long term, you know, do it right, do it right, and you'll get the long term benefits. I guess, as I say, with so many things, isn't it? Anything worthwhile is often going to be some work involved with it. So I guess it doesn't come as too much of a surprise that if we're taking shortcuts, then often that will lead to the the old, the end results. So I'm keen to really illustrate, like some of the the success stories that you've seen, perhaps with your agency or your own brands, but when you really focused on an SEO strategy and really getting people to have their products ranking high on the search engine results page, what sort of results can we expect to potentially see? Yeah, yeah. So we've had a few different sites now. So one of them, we did around 27 mil in ship to revenue in one year. Another one was around 13 point something mil. I've got all these screenshots on my site as well, but, yeah, significant revenue. And this is what we've always we've always just worked on. Basically, I've always just been in SEO because I never wanted to spend money upfront on ads or try and scale it with ads. So it just makes a lot of sense, really. So when you start to dive in, and you, if you really want to learn SEO and dive in a lot more, you'll really start to find like, oh, wow, there's some huge websites that are purely running off of organic search, which are wildly profitable, yeah. And it just makes sense, you know, if you're if. If you're doing 27k 27 mil in ship to revenue, you know, and you have your cost of goods, but your actual cost of SEO is like 10 grand a month, significant margins. Yeah, it's huge. I mean, there's not gonna be too much difference then, between the gross margin that we like, the cost of goods that we agree the supplier, and the biggest expense, between your gross margin and the net margin is always the cost to acquire. So how much you're paying on ads to acquire that customer? So yeah, if you can bring that down to zero or an ongoing retainer of how many, how many 1000s a month, is appropriate for your size of business, then it means there's a lot more margin to play for, to play with. So with, with your your agency, how do you actually get these results? How, how would you get, how would you work with a company or an E commerce brand that comes to see, how would you work with them to start to get these results for them? Yeah, so it's, it's pretty much what I laid out before. Really, it's, it's a case of following that process and as and optimizing things as much as possible. So our kind of perfect client, you know, they're already doing significant revenue online, and we can then just build on top of that. So most of the time, they might have previously had a little bit of digital PR, they might have been featured in a couple places like organically, and that kind of serves as a great baseline, and especially if their store has been around for for a good few years, then it's already it's already got some kind of authority in Google, which means that when we come in and we start to do some heavy link building, we start to implement our digital PR team and really go in and optimize the website, we can see significant gains in the First 90 days, which is part of our guarantee significant gains in in the first 90 days. And basically our our strategy is to drive them up as quick and as high as possible in Google and then defend that top position. So, so really, that's, that's our main thing is drive up as fast as possible and then defend for as long as possible, because the retainer and the cost is down here, and and their profits are up here, you know, their revenues up here. So it's pretty significant. But the thing is, with SEO is obviously there is a cap. Unless there's more people searching for that particular thing each month, it is going to cap out somewhere. So you could see bigger gains in terms of revenue growth through paid ads like social, because you can create the demand, but at the same time, the margins might be a hell of a lot lower. So I do believe, as you said, James, yeah, a holistic approach, you know, all rounder implementing multiple traffic sources is 100% the way to go to bring up your profit margins overall. Yeah, absolutely. I agree. I think especially getting started with the paid ad strategy to get up and running. And I think that has a well, it shows Google as well that, you know, you've got some initial traffic, and in the time where we're waiting anyway for the SEO performance to increase, we want to be getting businesses. We want to be getting revenue in the business, even if it's not as profitable as when we are really able to put the foot on the gas with the the SEO strategy. So and one thing you mentioned, just want to clarify as well you mentioned. So we can do the link building, we can go into ah, refs, get the keywords. Start putting those into the product descriptions of the most the highest performing products. And we need to make sure we've got a website that is going to be liked by Google because it's work. It works, it's functional. There's no technical issues. Do we get that with Shopify alone? Or is there any test that we need to do on our own website to make sure that it's going to be viewed positively by Google? That was a great question. Yeah. So, so out of the box, Shopify is pretty good at it, especially if you're using collection pages to your advantage. So what you might also find is that the collection pages actually rank really well. So if you have five or more products that could fit into a collection, let's say it's like, you know, I had black leather. I'm just looking at my wallet, black leather wallet, a red leather wallet, and whatever it might be, those would go perfectly into a collection of leather wallets as an example. So leather wallets, in its in its own right, is also a keyword that people are searching. And because it's leather wallets, it's not the singular that means that there's multiple within there. So that is someone who's searching for leather wallets they're not entirely sure what they want yet. So that's the perfect place where you can then optimize your collection page specifically for that. So when you start to use Shopify and in like a SEO friendly way, shall we say, it can be very, very effective. There's not really much that you need to do. There are a couple kind of technical bits, but I wouldn't really worry about that until you're a lot bigger. But it's mainly like simple things like keeping your image sizes small. You know, I know a lot. Lot of people love to have like the 2000 by 2000 pixels as their gallery image on their product. And they got 20 of them, you know. So if you think about how many megabytes is having to load up on someone's 4g 3g connection, it takes a long time. So Google doesn't like that because that's not a great user experience. Users don't like that because it's not a great user experience. So it's things like that, I would say are very important and having like image alt text and stuff like that. So when you upload your images, you can then edit the image and then enter in an image alt text. If you just Google like, what is an image alt text, it will tell you and give you a bit more information about that, but that is like critical as well for driving google image searches. So that's another way that you can get more traffic. That's relatively easy as well. If someone's searching for, I don't know, it might be red leather wallet with Apple tracker connected or something. If you have then optimized that image with that alt text, and someone searching for an image of it, they could click through, click through to your website. Bam. And now on your your product page has more traffic from someone searching for that specific thing. So, yeah, to answer your question, it is pretty much out the box, just as long as you're using it in in the right way. Yeah, Shopify gets us a lot, a lot of the way there, and compared to your days when you first started your your finger skateboard business, luckily, it's a lot more out of the box than it would have been there all those years back. So yeah, it puts us into a great position. And there are some great apps as well now to add alt text to images, I believe, and also to reduce the pixel size of images as well to resize it, to increase your site speed. So all part of the equation to have a really great SEO strategy that people can can take away from this episode today. Thomas, so thanks so much for these insights that you've shared, and a great, great chat for people that are perhaps up and running, they've implemented some of these strategies, and they want some professional help to get to the next level with their SEO for their website. Where would you recommend that they go? Yeah. I mean, either go over to DTC SEO agency.com shoot us an email, or, you know, schedule a call, or, yeah, ping me. Ping me a message on LinkedIn, just go, you know, search my name or Instagram. Thomas M, R Phillips, shoot me a DM, and then, yeah, we can have a chit chat about things. So either, you know, if you want to become a client, or just finishing up, like a full video course of pretty much everything, I know, it's turning into be, like a good few hours, because there's so much to it. So yeah, I can, you know, we can sort something out if someone wants to, if someone's interested in learning that. Interested in learning that in detail, yeah, go from there. Amazing. Thank you, Thomas, yeah, really, really valuable resources there shared, and we'll make sure they're all linked beneath the video in the description and the show notes. You can head straight over there. So thank you very much for your time today, Thomas. Appreciate it sweet. Thank you, James, much appreciated. Well, Lewis, I really enjoyed that conversation with Thomas there incredibly insightful. I think the strategies that he shared for leveraging SEO to drive organic sales were eye opening. Yeah, really were. And what stood out to me was how Thomas emphasized the long term benefits of SEO over paid ads. Paid ads are great for an immediate result, but SEO is really the foundations of a long term traffic strategy. So implementing these strategies can genuinely transform your stores performance. It will save you money, it'll boost your sales. And if you can run profitable ads on top of that strategy, you're going to be in a really good place. Yeah, Thomas made it really clear, it's not just about reducing ad spend, although, of course, that's a significant advantage. If we can do that and still raise the amount of sales that we're generating. It's more so about building a sustainable traffic source that keeps growing over time exactly, and combining the insights that Thomas shared today with the structured approach that I lay out in my book, the home turf advantage, which you can get at HTA book.com, those two can provide you with a comprehensive strategy for success. If you can leverage SEO while also ensuring your business foundations are solid, then you're going to be in a really good place to succeed with E commerce. So if you're looking to apply these foundational strategies effectively, head over to H, T A book.com, and get started enjoying the podcast, we'd love to hear from you leave a comment or a review, and we might just feature it on an upcoming episode. Also for detailed show notes and resources. Head to dropship unlock.com forward slash podcasts. If you found value from any episode of this podcast, please take just 10 seconds to leave us a quick five star review on your podcast app of choice, it helps us more than you could imagine, and who knows, you might just hear your comments on the show. Thanks for being part of our community. Your support helps us keep delivering a new episode every week. Now it's time to answer a question that we've had in from a listener of the podcast. So thank you very much to Walter, and remember, if you have. A question that you'd like to be answered on the podcast. Very simple. All you need to do is comment beneath the YouTube video version of this episode and ask your question. So Walter F has asked, I have watched loads of videos. Lewis has told us so much already what additional info is in the master class. It's a great question, Walter, and Yeah, glad that you you asked it, because if you like the content that we've shared already in the podcast and on YouTube, that really is tip of the iceberg, you're going to love what's in the master class. So the master class is very much a full step by step approach, going into way more detail than what we could ever possibly share in these videos or podcasts. It focuses on the how you actually do these things. We're talking about, the what and the why in the podcast, but the how, where we get into step by step, over the shoulders, tutorials, detailed, click by click, building of your store, how to get the suppliers products uploaded, how to set up your ads. It's all there so you can execute really well and achieve tangible results. One of the key benefits of the masterclass is the coaching calls. You'll spend time directly with, James and I, who are running seven figure e commerce businesses now, that level of direct access to our experience and the insights that we can provide into your business is going to be so valuable for your growth, because it's not just taking action, but you can learn from the trial and error and the mistakes that we and the rest of the community at the masterclass have made and really execute on those tasks required to move the needle and start generating profit in your business along the way, you will have questions. You're going to need support. We know that from the hundreds of members that have been through the program, so we help you on those twice weekly calls. In addition to that, because sometimes digital is fine, but you can't be meeting community of people in person. We also hold live meetups for masterclass members, which then increases the strength of the community so that you can make those lasting connections with your fellow drop shipping and E commerce entrepreneurs. The master class includes the twice weekly coaching calls. It has a very positive community. You've got step by step modules, tutorials, 30 hours of content that you can walk through step by step. Then we have a library of all of the recordings of all of our previous calls that we've ever had, all the modules, everything's in one place with a vibrant community. It's a really, really valuable place to build your business so you ensure that you've got the guidance and the encouragement that you need to succeed. Yeah, great question, Walter, thank you for your answer, Louis, clearly getting lots of value from the podcast, which is great to hear Walter, but certainly what I found when I joined the master class was that it was a shortcut to success, because you've got it all laid out in front of you, you just need to follow the step by step guidance, and you'll achieve the same success that we see in there from hundreds of members already. Okay, so for a listener review now which you like to share on the podcast, so a big thank you to car crazy Ben for the Apple podcast review, car crazy Ben has said this podcast speaks volumes to me. The way they articulate their ideas and background knowledge is extremely useful and easy to understand, even without fundamental business knowledge. Five out of five would definitely recommend that is an awesome review. Car crazy Ben, thank you very much. We really appreciate it now as we wrap up for today, one question that I have for you is, who do you know that could benefit from hearing this? Open up your phone, find someone that you think would benefit from this, and then click Share on this episode, send them a link to this episode on WhatsApp, and just say thought you might enjoy this, that tiny gesture could be the thing that changes the direction of their life for the better. Thanks for joining us on this episode of the dropship unlocked podcast. We hope you walk you away with insights and inspiration to kick start your E commerce journey. Grab a copy of my book, the home of turf advantage at HTA book.com it's a distilled guide based on real experience to help you build your E commerce venture. Don't forget to hit the subscribe button for more strategies and success stories. And if you like what you heard, a five star review would mean the world to us, and you might just get a shout out on an upcoming episode. And finally, thank you for deciding to spend your time with us today. We can't wait to bring you more insights on the next episode of the drop ship unlocked podcast you.