Harry Sanders: I love it because it is this beautiful blend of logic and creativity. As much as I like to think of myself as a bit magical, I don't really go to the electrician and be like, man, electricity is just magic. I'm going to be honest, Nathan, I was a total asshole.
[Voiceover]: Welcome to Add to Cart, Australia's leading e commerce podcast that express delivers all you need to know in the fast moving world of online retail. Every week, Nathan Bush from E Suite and an e commerce industry expert will share the news, research and insights that you need to know to keep you at the top of your game and of course keep your customers Adding to Cart.
Nathan Bush: Hello and welcome to Add to Cart. My name is Nathan Bush, host of Add to Cart and Director at e commerce talent agency eSweet. Now I don't know if you've noticed, but here at Add to Cart, as well as fun, engaging, smart, witty, sometimes a bit sweary conversations, we try to extract practical tips from our guests. Stuff you listeners can actually implement in the real world to make a difference to your business and to your careers. I mean, who doesn't need a free idea or two, right? Well, I can honestly say that today's episode is the family bucket of takeaway tips. Did somebody say SEO? Today's guest started the SEO agency Studio hawk at just 17 years of age. It is now the largest dedicated agency of its kind in Australia employing more than 50 SEO specialists with over 300 clients including well loved e commerce brands such as Officeworks, Flora and Fauna and Mecca. Founder Harry Sanders grew Studio Hawk into the multi award winning company it is today despite going through a period of
Nathan Bush: homelessness along the way.
Nathan Bush: In this chat, Harry shares how a video game started his love affair with SEO, which SEO metrics are BS and which ones really matter and why information architecture is crucial to effective SEO. We also find out what goes on at Camp Hawk. There are birds involved obviously, and if you love Harry's high flying approach to SEO, make sure you stay until the end to to get 40% off a lifetime pass to Hawk Academy, Studio Hawk's online SEO training platform. All right, let's make like a bird and fly into today's episode. Thanks to our partners Shopify plus and Paclio. Here's our conversation with Harry Sanders, founder of Studio Hawk. Harry, thanks for joining us on Add to Cart.
Harry Sanders: Thank you so much for having me, Nathan.
Nathan Bush: Mate, I was just saying that I think we saw each other in a lift at Retail Global a couple of weeks ago on the Gold coast, but we were in both our separate worlds coming Back from a full day of conferencing. How did you find those couple of days?
Harry Sanders: Oh, it was great couple of days. You know, as we're just saying, like catching up and socializing so much, I would have had my headphones on in the lift, just like either blasting an audiobook or some music, you know, I love it, but you know, you have to have your wind down time as well.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: Now Harry, we are here to talk
Nathan Bush: all about SEO because if there's a guru around SEO, you are it. Now let's start at the start. We won't do the whole backstory because I know our listeners really want to hear and they want to get some tips around SEO for their e commerce businesses.
Nathan Bush: But am I right in hearing that
Nathan Bush: you started or you got into SEO at the age of 13?
Harry Sanders: I sure did. I sure did. Playing a spectacular game called Runescape.
Nathan Bush: Runescape, what's that?
Harry Sanders: Runescape. It's an online video game. It's like a free game. Like I don't know if you know what an MMORPG is, but. Super nerdy grindy game. But that's how I got started. You know, I started making guides for this video game and then I realized, dude, no one's reading my guides. How do I make people read my guides? And so I started learning about SEO.
Nathan Bush: Brilliant. And where did you start?
Harry Sanders: So I started, you know, I did typical search. You know, I think a lot of E comm people would do it. It's like traffic to website and it's like, okay, you got paid traffic or free traffic? Huh? Paid. I don't have any money. SEO route. And back then that would have been 10 years ago. She's 11 years ago now. And it was all about, you know, private blog networks or PBNs as they called and all these black hat tactics and all this stuff and all these forums. Black hat World Warrior forum. Maybe if you've been in the game for a long time, you'll know a lot of these places. What year are we talking here? We're talking what, 11 years ago? 2011. Okay. You know, pre, like just around Penguin and all that kind of stuff. And I was just so immersed. I started learning and I, you know, started building SEO on this on the guide website. And then I got bored of the Runescape guide. So I started, I did this thing where I would, with my buddies that I'd play with all around the world. I'd pay them in the game to write blog posts about wherever they lived. So people would be in Mumbai, they'd be in, you know, all over the world. And they'd write like a locals guide and it would be basically 14, 15 year old kids writing these guys.
Nathan Bush: Best job ever at that age.
Harry Sanders: A hundred percent. And so I started doing SEO for that and then that got pretty big and actually got picked up. Not for a lot of money because I didn't know what I was doing. But yeah, really got into it.
Nathan Bush: Great.
Nathan Bush: And then fast forward to today and I feel like you've won every award under the sun from both an SEO perspective and a young entrepreneur perspective, and you're now the largest dedicated SEO agency in Australia.
Nathan Bush: How does it feel to come from
Nathan Bush: those beginnings to where it is today in a relatively short amount of time?
Harry Sanders: It's one of those things. I mean, if you ask any successful ECOM owner that's listening, you would listen and you'd be like, man, you hear this stuff, you hear it regurgitated back to you and you're like, yeah, it's so weird to think about, like, yes, we've got the awards and we've got that recognition, but there's still so much more I want to do, you know what I mean? Like, I want to be the largest in the world. I want to do these different affiliate projects. And so I think you'll never really stop and think about how far you've made it. But it is, it's awesome to see that vision come to life and to see, you know, SEO getting, I think, the exposure that it deserves and coming out of that era of being some kind of dark, mysterious art kind of thing and coming into this, you know, days of measurable insights.
Nathan Bush: Was there any particular moment in those years where you went, oh, wow, this is actually going to be a big thing. Like, was there a particular moment, a client win or anything along those lines where you went, oh, wow, this is serious.
Harry Sanders: There's been several moments. Like one of them was when we were starting and we hired our first person because I was like, oh, wow, this is serious now. This is no longer like an SEO little hobby kind of thing. Like someone's like relying on me for rent. And another big one was when, you know, three years ago, three and a half years ago, we won the officeworks account. And when we won that and we didn't have any enterprise experience experience, we're just a bunch of nerdy people coming together doing SEO. We didn't have a salesperson or anything like that. We still don't, you know, we, we were basically in this pitch against, oh, say names. People appreciate it, you know, Like Dentsu and those kind of big, big agency networks that traditionally when those accounts that would walk out with two, you know, beautiful women, you know, the whole sales process. And then we walked in and of course officeworks was all female. So they were not so impressed. And yeah, I mean that, that was a huge moment where we realized, wow, we might be onto something big here because like our model was always, you know, we wanted to create an SEO company without salespeople, we wanted to create it without account managers. So it'd be like we will you work straight with an SEO specialist. And so I don't think we realized how big that model could potentially be and how much people wanted that and how much people were maybe sick of the traditional agency model until we won that account.
Nathan Bush: I'm not sure I want to endorse this one, but here goes. COVID 19 sparked a huge demand for homewares. Very aware of this, but it's not a user experience that is easy to get.
Harry Sanders: Right.
Nathan Bush: Sarah, my wife, seems to have no trouble. That's why Crate and Barrel Singapore replatformed over to Shopify plus with Shopify POS to deliver a seamless customer experience, they upgraded to enable virtual consultations, real time inventory and ERP integration. The result for Crate and Barrel, a 350% increase in loyalty sign ups and an experience ready for expansion through Southeast Asia. But seriously, let's just keep this one on the lowdown. Hey, to read more of Crate and Barrel Singapore's story and see other case studies, visit the customer section on shopify.com.
Nathan Bush: In terms of that model, I can see it from a client's perspective how great it would be to speak to someone who knows SEO really well. Is that hard from a team building perspective to get great SEOers who can also speak client language?
Harry Sanders: Absolutely, Nathan. It is so much training and so much work. We're not a high grossing profit margin agency. We might make 10 to 20%, which for us is fine because you know, I love what I do and SEO is a big part of that and given me so much. It's given me everything essentially. But it is very hard to train, acquire and do all those things with SEO specialists. Especially in Australia. We've got a office in London and we're picking up incredible talent. Whereas someone in Australia with, you know, three, four years experience, you'd be looking at 144. You know, over in UK you might be paying, you know, equivalent of 100,000. So there is a huge talent shortage in SEO in Australia and it's just it just goes to show by the amount of job listings. If you look on Glassdoor for an SEO specialist, you know, in house, positions that are paying a fortune will just not get people because people are like, well, I don't want to work in house one brand, I want to do multiple brands. And so, yeah, it's an instrumental amount of work training people on how to talk to a client but do SEO. And look, we're rough around the edges, but I think clients appreciate that, that they're talking to some weird, geeky SEO person on the other end and they can appreciate we're maybe not the slick salespeople that, you know, they might be used to working with.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I love on your website where you say that you find organic search opportunities that others miss just by specializing in SEO, what do you mean by that?
Harry Sanders: Well, it just comes down to the business model people think like. And I'll say this, SEO does not have a secret formula. Right. And I have searched. I've been in industry for over a decade and I've worked on affiliate projects, I've sold affiliate projects, I've worked with some of the biggest brands in the world. I've worked with all the best SEO specialists in the world at conferences, in places. And the one thing that I will tell you is, is there is no magic formula. There's no, I've caught up with modern split from Google over beers and all these people and they don't know anything more about the Google ecosystem.
Nathan Bush: You're going to lose us listeners now.
Harry Sanders: Yeah. So they probably know less about the Google ecosystem than more sophisticated SEO people. SEO ultimately comes down to good technical onsite ability, good search intent. So matching what people are looking for with providing content on your website and good authority in terms of the links you've built and the credibility you have behind it. But yeah, that's probably the biggest thing. Like there's no magic formula there.
Nathan Bush: And in terms of SEO in 2022, as opposed to say, what SEO was three years ago, I'm not even doing it from a Covid perspective, but just how fast the world's moving, especially in the e commerce world, what are you seeing as the major differences in how you go about SEO in that shift over the last three years?
Harry Sanders: Well, I think the big shift is because more and more people are realizing the magic formula. I think there's a massive movement to, okay, if there's no magic formula, what are the SEO people actually doing and measuring the hours of what's happening and measuring those outcomes better as well. So you know, organizations are forced to kind of follow that change and adapt to models that show clients where the hours are going and build an hourly model rather than some kind of results based, wishy washy can outcome and actually demonstrate what they're doing. And so that's a big change for the industry because it means more transparency for clients, which is ultimately what people want. They want to know where those hours are going. In terms of the SEO landscape itself, nothing really has fundamentally changed. There's more focus on expertise and authority, but outside of that, it's more. The landscape of SEO is really changing rapidly because agencies are forced to change. And when agencies are forced to change and landscape changes and when you talk
Nathan Bush: about agencies having an hourly model versus results based model, which model do you lean towards?
Harry Sanders: We sell our labor like skilled labor. So, you know, I just think it's the fairest model. Like there's no SEO company that's going to guarantee you an outcome and if they do, it's awful. We have done, you know, again, I'll leave this on the podcast. I don't often talk about this stuff, but you know, we have done results stuff in the past now that is so skewed in our favor because there's a good chance that like what we deliver is ours. At the end of the day, we're paying someone a salary that's skilled and trained in SEO, no different than paying an electrician to fix electrical work in your house. Now they know what they're doing, they're going to be able to fix it. The question of how long it takes is depending on like a million different variables, like anything else. So that's what we do. We'll go in and do it. If someone's a guarantee on some kind of results, here's what happens. We go through, we take, we analyze the risk profile of like what the probability of it not happening is. So let's say there's a 40% probability of not happening. We will just double our price. We will do the exact same amount of hours and just double our price. And the reason is, you know, because the 40% risk, you know, balances out on the ones that do work. But as someone that's buying SEO, you know, I buy a lot of studio Accessio for my own projects. You just want an hourly rate like they're doing the same stuff as a business. You take that risk on being a business.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, and I assume there's a lot of trust at the outset there because you basically are getting into a relationship. Because SEO takes time it takes hours to see those results.
Nathan Bush: How do you develop that trust? So if I take us back to
Nathan Bush: the officeworks example, what won you that business over others that may have a slicker sales process?
Harry Sanders: I think it's just trust again, coming back to the model. It's like trust that I'm working with an SEO specialist. I can Google these SEO specialists. I can see they're working on other projects. I trust that they're working on great stuff. Like they can talk about the other projects they're working on, they can tell you about the SEO stuff they're doing. Because you're not dealing with someone in the middle. You're not talking to a salesperson, you're talking to the nerdy person doing the work. And so that's huge in terms of building trust. Because if I hired an electrician, they came in and they're like, sorry, mate, I actually don't know anything about the electrical work, but I'm going to get my mate Greg in and Greg's going to come in now and Greg's going to go do electrical stuff. Immediately you're like, oh, damn. I kind of like Simon. But now I've got Greg and like, I don't know if I can trust Greg and it ends up imploding the whole communication. So, yeah, that's. I think we build that trust by doing good work and letting people talk to technical people.
Nathan Bush: So a lot of our listeners will be sitting here going, I need to get on top of my SEO and I might be a bit stuck in SEO and I don't know how to re. Kick it or restart it or even start at all. What are the typical kind of briefs that you get? And as a follow up to that question, what are the best kind of briefs you can get?
Harry Sanders: We do get a lot of not great briefs. And if you're doing any of the things I mentioned, you know, don't be offended. Just it is what it is. You know, I've. I've been trying to renovate a house recently and so I've gone through this whole process in a different industry and I've realized how naive some of my questions can be. Because I want to, you know, you have this situation, Nathan. We don't want to sound like you don't know what you're talking about to the builders because, you know, you think you'll get taken advantage of. So you end up saying things that are probably not that great. So some of those things in SEO are people that say, I want to improve my domain authority by 10 points. How are you going to do that? Domain authority is an absolute BS metric, meaning nothing, do not worry about. It's a third party metric. Google does not use it. It's about your traffic, your positions and your ultimately leads. So when people start a conversation with that, when people start a conversation with how many backlinks, like what we're going to get? Currently getting 100. We need to get 100 again. Again, absolutely irrelevant metric. What is the quality behind those backlinks briefs that just totally missed the point and they kind of like, you know, we're, we're wanting to engage an SEO specialist to have a look at our content development. You're like, okay, great, we can look at your content development, do like some research behind what we need to develop. And then they come back and they just like, actually we thought SEO content was more, you just put the keyword in and call it a day. So what a good brief looks like when you're looking at SEO is really trying to get to the crux of, of what you're trying to achieve. What are the verticals? Not necessarily just keywords, because it's not like how I'm going to rank a keyword number once. What are the verticals you're after? What are the kind of customers that you want to convert and do you have? What resources do you have? So an SEO specialist, we can obviously provide technical resources, but you might have a developer that you want to use. Great, we can brief the developer as an SEO. We want to develop content, but you might have a content person. Great, we can use them. So it's our understanding what you want to do and what resources you have available that's going to educate us and allow us to quote the right amount to do the different things that need to be done.
Nathan Bush: Makes sense. So basically stay in your lane and brief us on the business problem that you're trying to solve and we'll, we'll
Harry Sanders: apply this a hundred percent. Don't worry too much about like, you know, worrying about saying the, saying something or not sounding smart, like we'll be able to pick that up in like, you know, minutes anyway. Because you'll say something like, I want to improve my da that will go no SEO personal say that. Or some of my favorites have been I'll get big enterprise briefs that are like, what machine learning, SEO, AI technology use you. And you're like, I don't know if I could fit any more buzzwords into that if I tried. So don't try to do that. Just say, hey, As a business, I need to do this. I want to know how you're going to do it and ask for a plan.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. And what does a plan typically look like?
Harry Sanders: Kind of like a roadmap. What are the different things in those verticals, those kind of three key verticals that I mentioned that are going to happen? What technical things need to change, what content needs to change or be created, what links need to be created and how we're going to go after those. What strategies you know, are we focused on quality, quantity, all that kind of stuff. Is that going to move the needle for us? That's what will go into a roadmap and ultimately what you sign off on.
Nathan Bush: Yeah.
Nathan Bush: And on those three verticals, because I
Nathan Bush: love how you've divided those out. That's really easy to get your head around. Technical search intent and authority. Where do you see the immediate low hanging for a lot of brands? Under each of those verticals, are there any things that you typically go.
Nathan Bush: I know that, you know, most of
Nathan Bush: the time we can go in and adjust this and we'll get, you know, some great results because it's often ignored a hundred percent.
Harry Sanders: Off the top of my head. I can give you like a big one for each E comm brands. If you're doing international SEO, for the love of God, please fix your href langs. They do they what? A hreflang. It's a script that goes on a site and make sure you've you localize that content and gone through your redirect strategy properly. So often I see brands like we need to be in the UK pronto and they set up their UK site and then they end up killing both their traffic sources because of that. Other technical things that brand need to do is look at your overall like this more, you know, e commerce brands, people listening. Look at your overall crawl budget and what you're trying to do. So you aren't Amazon. You cannot just put like a million URLs on and hope that Google crawls them all. Google is going to crawl a finite amount of URLs so figure out which ones you want them to index and sell and then canonicalize others or get rid of them from some kind of index. Otherwise it just gets too messy and too bloated unless you have the authority to carry it.
Nathan Bush: Is there a guide on optimal amount
Nathan Bush: of URLs to be to be optimizing for?
Harry Sanders: Well, you can do a really quick trick in Google search console. You can basically pull up your site and see how many of your URLs are indexed. Let's say you have 100,000 URLs and only a thousand being next. No rocket science to figure out what you need to do. But, you know, it's just those kind of things. It's too often people, people like, well, Amazon does it. Why can't I do that? Right? Because Amazon has so much SEO authority behind it that it's going to take you time to build up to them. Not saying that you can't. I'm just saying that, you know, Amazon started with books and group. Find out what your vertical is and what you're really going to own and do that. Like Appliances Online is a great example. They owned white goods and they completely scared Harvey and Good Guys and all these big retailers by owning their space.
Nathan Bush: And if you're going after a space that's as big as that, so white goods, that wouldn't be an easy one to win. Right? When you're talking to clients, how much effort and time do you usually advise that you need to give yourself?
Harry Sanders: Yeah. So how much effort and time? Again, you go through each of those verticals and try and establish how much effort and time needs to go into each. Honestly, we try and start small. So a lot of brands will come to us, be like, we want to put 20 grand into our SEO per month, that we want to do ten grand or whatever. And we say, actually, you know what, put two grand in for now. And what you're going to do with that is because it's a, you know, it's going to get returns, but it's going to take 612 months and it's going to, you know, accumulate on top of itself. You're going to be better off putting 2k in for a year than you are 20k for 2 months and then panicking, how am I going to continue putting 20k in this channel develops. So you just got to be smart with your resources like any E commerce business does. And then, you know, coming back to, like the search intent stuff like, make sure you've got content on your category pages. People do not have content on their category pages. Officeworks got about a 30% uplift in their organic revenue just by adding content to category pages.
Nathan Bush: And when you talk about, Sorry, I keep cutting into this because I'm like, I'm so, like, intrigued.
Harry Sanders: And I want to know more.
Nathan Bush: When you talk about content on category
Nathan Bush: pages, obviously most category and subcategory pages have lists of products and heaps of thumbnails of different products. What kind of content are you talking, you're not talking the big slabs of text.
Harry Sanders: I'm talking little slabs of text. I don't want to see a big slab of text. I want to see some above the fold content that makes sense. And please, for the love of God, do not think of it as SEO content. Don't make it cringy. Like, go buy our fridges. We have the best fridges in Melbourne. Like, do not please ever do that. Make it engaging content and then use it as an opportunity to internally link to other brands or products that you have on your site. So a brand we work with was, you know, Nathan, you would know Phil from Retail Global organizer. So he started a company called medcut. They did 10 million in revenue through Organic in a month over the course of a year because they started ranking in the top for disposable face masks. They did that because no one else had content on their page for disposable face masks. And he had great internal linking from other sections of the page to that. So the whole site was pushing up his disposable face masks. So if you're trying to sell dresses or something, you can internally link those different categories to the dresses page and then uplift that whole page.
Nathan Bush: It's a question I've always wondered, I'm not sure if you've got the answer, but why does Google give authority when you internally link? Because it seems like the easiest win ever to link to yourself.
Harry Sanders: So easy Google doesn't really know what you're trying to do with your site. Google, instead of always assuming positive intent, they just pretty much assume negative intent. And most sites don't have a very clearly laid out what we call information architecture. So Google's not really sure what you want it to index or what priority it is. So by putting in category pages and linking or internally linking to pages, you're literally saying to Google, hey, these are important pages to me. I would like you to rank these high. Google's not necessarily a bad operator. It's going to look at that and be like, well actually, yeah, those face masks, in that example, they are a great page and it looks like a great product. We're going to give you some more visibility on that and see how people like it. And then they put you up higher in the search results. And if the click through rate's good in the search results and people aren't pogo sticking back to the search results and looking at other pages, then Google's going to keep you in that position.
Nathan Bush: How much does Google look at things like bounce rate and exits and all that kind of engagement metrics.
Harry Sanders: So this one's super confusing. So I'll answer and then explain. Google doesn't look at bounce rates. So your bounce rate in Google Analytics or GA4, if you're, you know, on the trend and transitioning over to there means nothing. That is just for you. Google looks at something we call pogo sticking. So it's different than a bounce rate. So Google looks at that. So the ctr, the click through rate, I'm using so many acronyms here on the SERPS page, which is the search engine results page. When you Google something, basically the click through rate is what you click on on that page and pogo sticking. So let's say you're in the third result, someone clicks on that and then they go back to the search results and click on the fourth result. Google can and does track that and they understand that very well. So people are landing on your page and you're not answering their search intent or for whatever reason, searches are not getting what they want. When they land on your website, then yeah, that's a massive negative signal. But first you need to focus on getting into those top five results before you worry too much about that pogo sticking. Most of the time that's just user experience, the pricing, all that kind of stuff. But yeah, that's what we mean when Google doesn't look at your bounce rate. So Google will say they don't look at their bounce rate. Absolutely true. They're not lying. But they do look at when someone bounces back to the search end results and goes somewhere else.
Nathan Bush: So they effectively just didn't get an answer. Yeah, worst result for Google.
Harry Sanders: Exactly right. I love that.
Nathan Bush: I hadn't heard the term progress thinking before, so that's a learning for me. Before we move on, actually, any other quick wins that came to mind because I kind of interrupted you.
Harry Sanders: Oh yeah. The last one would be on the authority piece around the links. There's massive quick wins around if you can get suppliers to link to you. That's a very easy one. Or you could start one of the really cool things that's happening and you'll hear more and more about over the next year. Two years is this concept of digital primary. Instead of trying to focus on really cheap links which do nothing for you these days, any link that ends up costing less than $200 is basically worthless. So doing digital PR where you're like, we're doing a few great examples, there's Daily Jocks is one that comes to Mind and we're doing the underwear capital of Australia. So we basically create an interactive data widget and then create data from their sales, customer surveys, all that kind of stuff to find out what's the most popular, you know, underwear in Brisbane, for instance. And then we go to the media and pitch this story and they have to link to us because the data widget stored on our website. So that's a huge, huge, huge piece that's going to become very popular next couple of years. It's already huge in the uk but that's a great kind of thing. It's involved because you have to develop, you know, a story, you have to pitch journalists, you have to create data. But it is great bang for buck
Nathan Bush: and is follow and no follow links, are they still a thing?
Harry Sanders: They're still a thing. Unfortunately. I wouldn't stress too much, like if you have a good link profile, you want at least 20% nofollow links. There's now rail sponsored and stuff that Google's introduced. They still haven't gotten around to doing anything with that yet. So it's too hard to kind of get gauge what they're wanting to do. I don't even think Google knows what they want to do with those. They just introduce them, figure it out later. And it's not the first time they've done that. They've done like they had rel and previous if you're a bit SEO nerdy, you remember this on pagination on E commerce and they said you have to do rail next on all your pagination and then two years later it came out that they never actually implemented that and everyone just wasted their time. So. But yeah, the nofollow do follow still makes a difference. But as a basic answer, I wouldn't worry about it too much as an in depth SEO discussion and debate. Yeah, we could talk for hours about it.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, Another podcast.
Nathan Bush: I was fascinated before when you said
Nathan Bush: that domain authority and number of backlinks don't carry any weight. And I know a lot of people, including myself in the past have used tools like SEO Rush and things like that to be able to use the metrics that they publish and they obviously hold da really high there as ways to measure your SEO effectiveness. What tools and metrics do you use apart from overall traffic growth to measure if SEO is effective?
Harry Sanders: Yes. So outside of like Google search console analytics to kind of track leads and traffic, you know, I do absolutely use tools like Semrush and Ahrefs. They're probably the two leading tools SEMrush certainly in terms of getting an understanding and an overview of what your website doing from an SEO perspective, what competitors are doing from an SEO perspective. But don't be fooled by the little simple, quick kind of metrics. Semrush has got an AS score or an R score that you might call it. MOZ has got a D. When acronyms go bad, that's it. When acronyms go bad, AHREFS has got a doctor score. Everyone's got their own little score. They're just an indication or a rough guess. I would look at the traffic in Semrush as your best estimation. So if you're getting a backlink, I'd look at the traffic of the backlink for an estimation of is this a good backlink or not? You know we will still do it. We'll still put like a score of a backlink, like a doctor score of the backlink just to make it easier for clients. And there's nothing inherently wrong with that. The biggest problem is if you're like I want to increase my doctor score. It's like unless you're a link vendor or something, that score is completely irrelevant to you. It does nothing for you. So don't worry about trying to increase that focus on like what quality links can you build and to where that's going to have an impact.
Nathan Bush: You've refreshed your website. The new range is about to drop. You've never had more customer service options. Hey, but take a look over there. That boring pile of packaging boxes?
Nathan Bush: Ugly.
Nathan Bush: Time to give that some love. Luckily Paclio is here to bring some joy to your customers. Delivery and unboxing it experience. It's been ignored for way too long. With vibrant colors, cool designs and eco friendly credentials. There are no more excuses for boring boxes. Even better, Paclio is Australian owned and operated with same day dispatch and 14 day returns. There's nothing boring about that. Check out the Paclio range of E commerce packaging options@paclio.com that's Paclio P A C K L. Are there any other
Nathan Bush: free or low cost tools that you write as worthy that are here or emerging that you like to use?
Harry Sanders: Yeah, so those. You're right. Probably Semrush Nahiv's pretty expensive tools. You know I think we spend something like 8,000, 10,000amonth on Semrush alone. So you know, if you're a small business it probably still costs you a few hundred bucks a month. There's some great. There's Keyword finder which is a Great tool. On looking at keyword data and trends, you know, there are always tools popping up. There's a thing called Mango Tools which is great and we recommend for people trying to get into it. To be honest, I don't know a lot of the free or low end tools mostly because you know, it's mostly using like the best in market kind of tools and software because you know it's worth the money. But you know, I understand there's limiting factors as you're starting out. That's it.
Nathan Bush: Oh, great stuff. There's some good tips in there.
Nathan Bush: Thank you.
Nathan Bush: Over the last few years, we've obviously seen a big changes and a lot of brands putting a lot more focus on Google Shopping and we've seen it go from just a page, well, from an organic channel to a paid channel to a mix of organic and paid. What's your take on Google Shopping at the moment? Do you think it can be effective as an SEO channel itself?
Harry Sanders: If it's the only thing you're doing for SEO, no. If it's a supplementary part of it, absolutely. Google Shopping is determined by your overall kind of SEO presence, by the same things we mentioned. Your search intent, your authority, your technical SEO. It's all very intertwined and it's just about feeding that in. Like using your paid feed to have your shopping feed in there and ranking it will deliver you some sales. It's not going to be your saving grace channel just simply because Google Shopping mostly just prioritizes the the cheapest product at the top. If you're the cheapest product, great. But I guarantee you might not be the cheapest product forever. And you definitely don't want to be competing solely on the price and you
Nathan Bush: don't want to be the cheapest product bidding the most amount correct.
Harry Sanders: Because, and this is something that holds true and something I always say at conferences I speak at and stuff, whatever you're paying for ads right now is not going to get cheaper in a year's time. It is only going to go up. And this is a lesson that good guys learned because they were very like anti SEO because they were just like, well, we pay for ads, we might as well just keep doing that until other brands were able to pay more because they had better quality scores through their SEO or a variety of different factors. And all of a sudden it's a race to the bottom. So you want to make sure you're diversifying your channel. Google Shopping as a page and it's great. Using it for organic is also great and there's definitely wins. You can do there to get that, but just don't put all your eggs in one basket.
Nathan Bush: Yeah. And have you seen a shift over the last, say two years as we've had huge growth in E commerce and we've seen Facebook change their algorithms and become more expensive and obviously that has a flow on effect to Google paid results. Have you seen a shift in investment the way companies are investing in their marketing channels?
Harry Sanders: Yeah, there's certainly has been a shift like, you know, traditionally, you know, I do a lot of work with a lot of my friends through the business side of things, stepping outside the SEO hat for a second or like VCs and private equity investors. And there's been a big shift from just like give brands paid money to we actually need to own a brand. Anyone like Nathan I can start up a Yu Gi oh card collection company tomorrow and just pay ads on it. It's great. But we don't have a brand. We need to actually build a brand and a name and all the reputation behind it. There's been a real shift to that. And SEO, I think, plays a part, big part in building a brand. When you go to sell your business, if you go to sell your business, investors will absolutely look at your organic channel because that's what you own. It's called owned media for a reason. Anything else, they can go out and bid on themselves. So there's been a big shift to the SEO channel and understanding it a lot better, I would say owners are still a little bit, most E commerce owners are still a little bit in the dark around it because it's just traditionally, and I get it, like I'm guilty of it too, and with my properties, just easier traditionally to just pay for ads than it is to do all this kind of work in SEO and then see the results like six months later. But it is becoming more of a sticking point. It's like, man, my ads are getting more and more expensive. If I don't do something, I'm in real strife.
Nathan Bush: As someone who's grown up with SEO effectively, is there anything about it that surprises you anymore? Or can you kind of see the writing on the wall and what's coming?
Harry Sanders: I think the most surprising and exciting part about SEO is more the people and what people are able to achieve and do. Yeah, I've been around it for a long time and I love it because it is this beautiful blend of logic and creativity. You know, it's logical in how things flow and follow because it is a mathematical algorithm, but it's Creative in how you can come up with these ideas. Like, I can say, hey, Nate, the algorithm looks at high quality backlinks and you're like, great. And I say, but how can you be creative and get those? And that is up to you to figure out. And that's so exciting. And so the exciting part for me is what wacky ideas do people come up with? Like our team pioneering the digital pr that excites me and surprises me so much because I'll come in and someone's doing a digital PR campaign or they're pitching ideas to Love Honey or something on some wacky campaign they could do. And you're just staggered by how much SEO has become just such a great expression of that human creativity. And so that surprises me. And that's probably what I love so much. And why I don't think I'll ever fall out of love with SEO is the people side of it that's really cool.
Nathan Bush: Obviously the people side of it is brilliant. But it's not often you hear SEO touted as a creative discipline. I love how you position that. Have there been any examples or any trials recently where you've done some really cool creative SEO executions that you've learned or has surprised you?
Harry Sanders: Yeah, I would say that's probably the digital PR stuff. Like, coming back to that is like, it is so surprising. Not every campaign lands and that's the risk of that kind of stuff. But the campaigns that land, it's great for brand, great for expertise, great for authority. The other things that we've done experiments about that really have, whoa. Is just how big we were big in core web vitals. You might have heard about that. And so we did a lot of experimenting there. We're very disappointed it didn't have that much of an impact, or still doesn't have as much of an impact as we thought just yet. So I think Google's going to absolutely make it more and more important. But they didn't flick a switch. Kind of like I think most people expected. Eat, on the other hand, completely different. Google's rolling out to this proprietary thing they call Mum.
Nathan Bush: What's eat.
Harry Sanders: Sorry, sorry. Expertise Authority Trust, which is a big initiative that Google's pushing around, understanding brands better. So if you're in the medical space, like MedCart, obviously you have to have a lot of expertise and authority and trust in the brand now for them to rank. So you have to have what we call author bios and stuff like, who's writing the content on this site? Like, is. Are they a Doctor, are they someone from an expert opinion? Because I can start a medical blog tomorrow. I can start one up and start writing content. But using eat, Google's able to discern this is Harry Sanders guy. And so if they Google it and I have like a profile, what you'll find is, you know, Google, it'll come up as like entrepreneur or SEO specialist. And so they go, if Harry's writing about SEO, great, that's going to carry authority. Or Harry's writing about, you know, business, great. But if Harry's writing about medical stuff, no, I don't know, man. And so that's where they're really building this presence. That's a big emerging thing as well. And we call that entity structure or entity data. And that's about, you know, what entities are known for and what people are known for, because people are entities as well. So if Nathan's talking about E commerce, great. Again, if Nathan's talking about legal advice, they're probably like, sorry, man, definitely don't follow that. Exactly. So that's a really cool development as well.
Nathan Bush: That makes a lot of sense, especially as Google evolves in doing the hard work for the humans. We've talked about DA and we've talked about follow links. Is there any just legacy SEO practices that you just go, I just wish it would go away?
Harry Sanders: Yeah, the biggest of things, like keyword stuffing, like, you know, I just wish people, when we say we're going to write like SEO content and stuff, the first thing people think is like, they're gonna write like that content you see on the side that like, just looks like absolute garbage.
Nathan Bush: And they're gonna put 20 links in the footer.
Harry Sanders: Correct, Correct. That needs to go away. That's been done for a long time when people took SEO optimized content. Now what they're talking about is we've researched the topics that we're going to discuss. So we're not just writing topics that we want to discuss. We're writing topics that we know have volume. We're writing about topics that we know have trends, and we're writing about topics that we know have content gaps on our site. So that's what we call SEO content in terms of reading it. If it's done well, you would not be able to tell that it's written for SEO at all. It should read for humans. It should even evoke emotion if it's really good. So, yeah, that's one thing that annoys me. You know, quality, like quantity of backlinks. You know, if I have another person that says, you know, we're getting four links, but these guys say we're gonna give me 200. It's like, yeah, but you know, I can get you 200, I get you 20,000 on the fiverr for 10 bucks. Right? Is that gonna help you or hurt you? So it's understanding, you know, again, I don't, I love the technical side. Don't die too deep. But like, the mean distribution of the traffic of, you know, of those different backlinks is something we look at. Like, what is the average traffic of each of those links you're getting? Because if it's 0 or 1 or 3, then they're absolutely useless. Sorry. Whereas if they're high traffic websites, then they're very useful backlinks as long as they're in your niche and they're relevant. So these are the things we look at. Like when I'm building affiliate brands or doing all that kind of stuff, because I, you know, I do a lot of that stuff. Have one in the employee culture space at the moment that I'm building and I'll make sure that, you know, when I'm getting backlinks and I'm working with studio to do that, I'm focused on those high quality traffic links. I'm not focused on like the quantity. But yeah, there's, there's still a lot of those myths and misconceptions that I really, you know, do hope will eradicate over time. Even just the whole idea of like, oh, SEO is just magic. You know, as much as I, you know, like to think of myself as, you know, a bit magical, I don't really go to the electrician and be like, man, electricity is just magic. Like, I don't understand how electricity works. I'll be the first to admit it, right. I don't get it. And that's okay. But it's not magic. There's science behind it. So he would just give me a funny look. And so I'd like to see SEO people start to do that when clients, ah, this is obviously a magical dark art. Just go like, not really, man. It was like pretty agreed upon concepts that we know work.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, no, I love that analogy. It's so good. Now, if you were sitting down with people who say you're sitting down with a 13 year old Harry in 2022, there could be a number of conversations you'd have with him. But what advice would you have for him getting started with his SEO career in 2022?
Harry Sanders: Most of my advice, weirdly wouldn't be so much about SEO because that changes and you learn and adapt and, you know, over years of knowledge, you pick up different things. The biggest thing I would say about being in the industry and being in what we do is I would sit next to 13 year old Harry, I'll say, look, buddy, you keep playing runescape, I'll talk for a bit. And I would say, you can be really talented and you can be very successful, but one of the most important things that you need to be is humble and not have an ego about it. When I was 16, 17, I was working an agency at that stage. I left that to start Studio Hook. And I'm gonna be honest, Nathan, I was a total asshole. You know, I treated the people I worked with poorly, my team, all that stuff, because I was, you know, referred to as some prodigy SEO specialist. I thought I was God's gift SEO or something. And it wasn't until I went through what I went through, you know, couchsurfing, all that kind of stuff, that it took for me to realize like, you know, ego is the biggest thing that holds businesses back and holds great people back. If I hadn't gone through that, I might have been a great SEO specialist, but no one would know about me because I was just too much of an ass to work with. So I'd say to 13 year old self, hey, mate, you might be great at SEO, but there's a lot of things you're not great at, you know, and everyone has their skill. Find what your skill is. For me, that was business and SEO, but find what your skill is as someone listening to the podcast and stay in that lane and own that lane and become the master of it. You don't need to become the master of everything. You don't need to go through everything and feel like that. You just need to know what you're good at, stick to that and leave the ego behind.
Nathan Bush: Yeah, I love that advice. It's so good. And be good to the people around you because they'll lift you up and you'll lift them up, correct?
Harry Sanders: Absolutely, absolutely. And no one likes someone that, you know, just thinks that they're incredible.
Nathan Bush: One last question for you, actually, before I get to the standard question, but you've got an awesome photo of yourself with a big hawk on your LinkedIn page. How did you get that?
Harry Sanders: So one of the things we do is part of the culture, Studio hawk is when so we, you know, I won't bore you too much with the intricacies of like the system of studio, but we basically have juniors Mid seniors and then like a managerial team. So everyone in that system is an SEO company? Yes. It's pretty much like an RPG from a video game. Probably inspired through the too many video games I play. But you go through like different, like L1 to L3, like level one to L3 in each of those apartments. Now when you get to an SEO specialist, so you've been with us for six to 12 months, we can actually start you on client stuff because you've gone through all the training material, you've demonstrated, you know what you're doing. Kind of like an apprenticeship, if you will. We send you off to Camp Hawk and Camp Hawk is a retreat we do where we teach you about like working in a team and working with clients and what to say and all that kind of stuff. And on Camp Hawk, you get to go to a falconry range. And so that's me, the falconry range with a big hawk on me. Maybe I do look at, maybe I don't. But I was so scared. Those birds are big, man. And I'd never seen a hawk. That photo was probably four or five years ago, you know, when we first started doing. I'd never seen a hawk before. I just called myself and those things are huge and they got these big talons and that thing's right next to your neck, man. Yeah, look.
Nathan Bush: I mean, you couldn't call it Studio Budgie or anything like that.
Harry Sanders: No. It would have been a lot easier. Maybe Studio. Studio Fish or something. Fish don't, you know, whatever. But yeah, that's awesome. The whole idea behind the Hawk was obviously the vision narrowing in on the one thing we do well. Yeah, that's cool. Yeah. So that's where the photo comes from.
Nathan Bush: I wasn't expecting that story. What's next for yourself and the team at Studio Hawk? Where are you focusing?
Harry Sanders: So Studio Hawk is kind of now like in Australia. They're doing great stuff. We're obviously still so focused on revamping everything we do. We're really focused on building out content more, building out that digital PR offering. There's very few people in Australia that offer that and we would love to be pioneering that space in the sense of digital PR for SEO. I think what's next is continue growing that team. I'm largely not so involved in the day to day operational stuff of Studio Hawk Australia. They've got a great thing going and they keep that running and every time I touch it, I break things, so I leave them. You know, I'm very much involved in UK where we've got specialists and they're growing really rapidly as well. Similar thing. And we just share those learnings across. There's so many things we learn in the UK that they do so exceptionally well because they're on average way ahead of the game than most Australian companies. And so we take those back. And then there's things that we Aussies do. And I'll tell you what, we could do some cool stuff and so we can share that over to the UK for our UK clients. And, you know, that's really cool to have those sharing. So I'd love to be doing more of that, maybe the US and the horizon of next year or two, we'll see how that goes and then otherwise, Nathan, I just love doing my own SEO projects, you know, so I'm working on a couple affiliate projects at the moment. I'm working a lot in like, you know, that kind of employee culture space that I mentioned. That's a big passion of mine outside of SEO, you know, people loving what they do. And so that's really what I'm focused on. Doing a lot of traveling and actually off to the UK tomorrow. So, yeah, nice.
Nathan Bush: The world's open again.
Harry Sanders: That's it.
Nathan Bush: Now, Harry, if people have heard this and they go, I love what Harry's talking about. I think we're kindred spirits or I'm interested in getting in touch with the Studio Hawk team. What's the best way to get in touch?
Harry Sanders: Best way to get in touch with me personally, if you have a question and I'm very good on email and I'll reply is harryudiohawk.com whether I'm on the plane just smashing away emails. I love to hear from people. I love to kind of, you know, chat. Best way to get in touch with Studio Hawk, obviously go through like contact Studio Hawk or something if you're wanting to, you know, chat about that. You're best off chatting to like an actual specialist there who will walk you through that. And yeah, that's probably the best way to reach me. Otherwise you can add me on Runescape, Harry the Hawk. But no, you don't see this email.
Nathan Bush: I bet that's where the best stuff goes down.
Harry Sanders: 100 get my discord, get my Steam account, Harry the Hawk. Send me an invite there. If you're up for a game of Dota, come shoot me a message. Yeah, that's it.
Nathan Bush: Harry, thank you so much for sharing your story and your SEO tips on Add to Cart.
Nathan Bush: We really, really appreciate it.
Harry Sanders: Thank you so much, Nathan. And thank you so much for listening.
Nathan Bush: Take a breath, eh? That's a pretty good summary of SEO for E commerce right now. If you like Harry's lessons in under an hour that you heard here today, you might be interested in Studio Hawk's Lifetime Pass to the Hawke Academy, their online SEO training platform. Harry has very kindly given add to cart listeners 40% off the lifetime pass. Simply head over to Hawke Academy H A W K Academy, HawkAcademy Co and enter the code. All one word wind beneath my wings. Enter that at the checkout. Apparently. Apparently there's a bonus if you sing the coupon while entering entering it. Give it a go. Tell me how you go. All right now the tricky job of narrowing Harry's SEO lessons down to three top takeaways is my go number one. No more Cringy SEO Content SEO is a game of smarts, not keyword stuffing. Think creatively and write smart, engaging, even emotional content. Use it as an opportunity to internalize linked to other brands or products that you have on your site. If footer links and category keywords won SEO, we would all get participation medals. Be creative, be better. Get on top of your URLs, use Google search Console to see how many of your URLs are indexed and get
Nathan Bush: rid of ones that aren't worthy.
Nathan Bush: The trick isn't to index the most URLs, it is to make sure that the most value valuable ones are indexed. This will help you cut through the algorithm. And number three, probably my favorite, don't be an asshole. Yeah, didn't expect that in some SEO tips, did you? But Harry's story of how he was a child prodigy with an attitude problem really hit home. No point being the smartest person in the room if no one wants to
Nathan Bush: be in the same room as you.
Nathan Bush: To get the highlights of today's episode, head on over to add to cart.com and sign up for our free newsletter each Tuesday. We will send Monday's episode summary links and discount codes for you to go next level on. And if you're looking to explore your next e commerce opportunity, come and visit us at E Suite. We're a dedicated e commerce talent agency connecting the best e commerce talent with the fastest growing brands in Australia. Head on over to esweettalent.com au where you can download the free Ecommerce salary guide and sign up to our weekly ecommerce job emails. Thanks for listening and until next time, keep those customers adding to car.
