Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

[00:01:44]
Arlen:
Welcome to the e-Commerce Marketing Podcast everyone. My name is Arlen Robinson and I am your host. And today we have a very special guest, Joshua George, who is the owner and founder of ClickSlice, an award-winning SEO agency based in London. He has been involved in the SEO industry since 2015 and has quickly made a name for himself as an established global lecturer who pioneers making SEO education more accessible across the globe. Welcome to the podcast, Joshua.

[00:02:14]
Joshua: 
Hey, man. Thanks for having me. 

[00:02:16]
Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, no problem, man. And I’m, I’m really excited to talk to you man about s e o because. You know, as you and I know, it’s a, it’s a huge area.

[00:02:24]
I mean, we could probably talk about SEO for like days and days because there’s so many areas that you can kind of go into relating to for sure, you know, e-commerce and, and you know, SEO for e-commerce company. But today, you know, we’re specifically gonna be talking about how to build powerful back links that are gonna supercharge your store’s visibility and just increase your sales.

[00:02:45]
So that’s, that’s the topic of today. But before we do get into all of that, Why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and you know, specifically how you got into what you’re doing today?

[00:02:54]
Joshua:
Sure. So yeah, as you already said, my name is Joshua George, probably the most British name you could ever have.

[00:03:00]
Iran, an SEO agency called Click Slice. Although we are an SEO agency, pretty much 95% of our clients are e-commerce. So, well, pretty much an e-commerce SEO agencies, and I’ve been doing SEO since 2015, so eight years now. I initially got involved in the SEO industry as an EM result of eBay drop shipping, so in 2014 slash 2015 as well, I used to own one of the biggest eBay accounts.

[00:03:24]
In the UK and we was just basically drop shipping items from Amazon over to eBay. It was going really, really well. But if anyone have sold on eBay before, you will know pretty much anything you sell. You have to pay a fv F a final value fee. So if you sell a steam mop for a hundred pound or a hundred dollars, you have to give eBay 10% of that.

[00:03:41]
So our store was going really, really well when we was paying thousands every single month in eBay fees. So I said, Hey, I’m gonna pot that to the side. Gonna make my own e-commerce website and generate the sell as my steal. So I did that, built out the website, had all my products to sell, actually spent months building the website, and then guess what?

[00:03:58]
Site went live. I had no traffic, no sell. So I did what any e-commerce store owner would do. Going to Google how to get my website ranking at a top of Google, discovered seo. And pretty much my future took a different direction. I started to kind of obsess of seo, learn it within two years, and now I offer it as a service to other eCommerce businesses.

[00:04:16]
Arlen:
Gotcha. Gotcha. That, that’s awesome. And I, I appreciate you sharing that and I love that you know, how your company was really based out of what you learned to help grow your business. You know, you mentioned, sure. You know, you left eBay, started your own site, you know, direct to consumer sales and you know, had no sales and then, you know, just did some, some research and got into s e o and we were successful growing your sales and then, Said, okay, why don’t I help other businesses do the same thing?

[00:04:43]
So that’s, that’s, that’s some good stuff, man. Now Yeah, I, I’ve had so many people that have come on the podcast that have told me about how their company was birthed out of, you know, a need that they had themselves. Yeah. And then, you know, that was the result of that was the business that they then developed to help others.

[00:04:58]
Joshua: 
So it’s, it’s so powerful. Like, I’ve done SEO for a lot of my family members businesses as well, and, you know, just literally revolutionized themselves like they’re generating through the website and. Yeah, they managed to quit their jobs, nine to fives and then, you know, all in online. So it’s a really massive skill to have, especially in this digital age.

[00:05:15]
Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. For sure, for sure. Well, great. Well, you know, as I mentioned the top of the episode, we’re gonna be talking about back links and, and and, and, and everything around that with, with regards to an e-commerce business. So I guess where we wanna start is really if you can just explain just what are the concept of a back links or what are, what’s the concept of back links and their importance in e-commerce?

[00:05:37]
Joshua:
SEOs? So, you know, for people that may not be familiar with the term. Sure. So I would say, before I touch on the backings, I think it’d be good to explain probably two of the most important things that your website must convey to Google, to rank number one. And the first is what we call relevancy. So if Google doesn’t deem your website to be relevant to a topic, then it’s not gonna rank your website for your keywords related to that topic.

[00:05:55]
For example, imagine you sell wireless mouses, right? If Google believes your website has nothing to do with wireless mouses, then whenever someone carries out a search for wireless mouse, Google’s not gonna return your website as it doesn’t, as it doesn’t deem it relevant to that topic. So relevancy is a really big factor.

[00:06:10]
That’s probably the most important thing when it comes to seo. The second thing is what we call authority. So how a. Formative your website is. So this is where I’ll touch into backlinks, and this is really important to note because one of the easiest ways you can increase your relevancy is by publishing lots of blogs on your e-commerce store.

[00:06:25]
So again, you can publish 10 blogs on wireless mouses, the pros and cons of wireless mouses, how much do wireless mouses cost, and you know, anything to do with that topic, right? However, all these other e-commerce sites can also do that. So when you’ve got five e-commerce sites and you’ve all got 10 blogs all saying the same thing, the relevancy is pretty much the same, right?

[00:06:41]
So which one does Google rank above the other? And this is where backlinks come into play. So the way you can increase the authority of your website is by building what we call back links and. A backlink in layman’s terms, is simply a mention of your website on an external website, and a link is essentially a vote of confidence when it comes to seo and Google looks at how many backlinks you have to determine essentially how trustworthy and how popular your website is.

[00:07:04]
Backlinks are still and will always be one of the biggest ranking factors in Google. So essentially it’s about going out there and conveying to Google. Your website is authoritative and other websites actually vouch for your content by linking to your store. 

[00:07:18]
Arlen:
Great. Great. Yeah, thank you for that, that breakdown for people that aren’t familiar with it and yeah, it’s really interesting, like you said, it’s, it’s one of the main factors that Google does use that that hasn’t changed for, for quite some time now.

[00:07:30]
And you know, I’m just really wondering, is that gonna ever change? You know, there’s a lot of things going on these days. We’ve with. The, the ais of the world, the chat GPTs, and you know, there’s a lot of speculation as to where search is going to go. And so yeah, it will be interesting to see if that ever does change with regards to Google’s algorithm for sure.

[00:07:49]
Joshua: 
Do you know what? I actually see backings becoming more important. Okay. Especially now, people can generate content very easily and there’s so many AI tools out there. And if all these sites are. Bit out content. Content, like nonstop content, then what is going to be the thing that you know, makes you stand out from the crowd, so to speak, and right.

[00:08:07] It’s going to be making sure your site is authoritative, because yes, you can publish a hundred blog posts in your e-commerce space and get that topical relevancy that I spoke about. Really important to build relevancy. Mm-hmm. However, that’s just one part of the picture. You need to make sure your site’s authoritative.

[00:08:19]
So the sites that are building backlinks now, and I invested in a solid backlink profile. Yeah. Those are the ones who are gonna be winning by the end of this year and pretty much every year to come. 

[00:08:27]
Arlen:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. I think you’re right. You’re very true because, Yeah, they, they’ve gotta use some other factor because there’s gonna so many tools these days, so many people are gonna start putting out all of this content and, you know, it’s gonna be good content.

[00:08:38]
You know, there’s certain things of course, that, you know, the, the, the speculation now is that Google is gonna be looking for AI generated content. So you do gotta be a little bit careful because they are indicators. That it, it can pick up on that to tell that if it was a AI generated content. So you gotta be careful, but for sure it, it can definitely give you a leg up when you’re doing research, when you’re trying to come up with just some points for an article.

[00:09:01]
It really does accelerate the content creation process. Definitely. Um, so now with, with backlink in mind though, as that being, you know, kind of a critical factor, at least in this day and age, how does one evaluate the quality of. A backlink source and really, are there any specific metrics or indicators that you should look for?

[00:09:20]
Joshua:
Sure. Yeah, so we actually use a seven step process at the agency when we’re building back links for clients. Three parts of that seven step checklist is to do with a high level overview of the website. So remember when it comes to getting back links, you pretty much wanna get links from sites that are vouching for your content, right?

[00:09:37]
And you know, if your site is about using the same example, wireless mouse is, right? So your e-commerce store is obviously in the computer online space, right? You saw wireless mouse is probably wireless keyboards and stuff like that. The ideal back link you should get would be from a site that is relevant to your niche.

[00:09:52]
So maybe a blog that speaks about the best, you know, the best key, the best keyboards on the market, or the best. Wireless mouse is in the market. That is what we call relevancy. So again, kind of linking back to one of the two biggest ranking factors, relevancy and authority. So if you can get relevancy from your authority backlink as well, that is like a double whammy, as I like to say to my whole team every day.

[00:10:11]
So the number one thing we look at is how relevant the website is. If you can get a link from a relevant website that’s like, 10 out of 10. It’s not always possible to get a link from a relevant website that is a direct match. So you wanna at least make sure the website has a relevant category to your website.

[00:10:24]
So that’s the number one thing you’ll look at. Relevancy. The second thing is you wanna make sure the site has organic traffic. This is really important. There are a lot of shady SEO agencies out there who will go and build you 10 links. And they’re actually building you 10 links on sites that they own.

[00:10:37]
They have all these sites in the name cheap account, and they’ve just created these random domains that sound good. They look great on the surface level, great website design, but the sites get no traffic, right? So if you are getting links from a site that has traffic, that’s a good signal that Google actually likes that site.

[00:10:51]
Cause it’s ranking it for keywords, hence why’s getting traffic. So that’s another thing. When I look at organic traffic, you can check the organic traffic using tools like SimilarWeb, AH, RFS or SIM Rush, or Premium tools. The third thing you look at is what we call dr, which stands for domain rating.

[00:11:04]
Similar to da, which is domain authority, which MO uses DR is a metric that a h s uses, but pretty much we like to get links from sites that have a minimum domain rating of 20 and above. This just, this just kind of gives us a better idea of how a authoritative this site is. Remember backlinks all about acquiring that authority and you know, boosting your rankings on your own eCommerce store.

[00:11:23]
So that’s three things we look at from a high level overviews. The relevancy of, of the domain, the organic traffic and the domain rating of that site. We then go a little bit further and I do believe that additional four points we actually look at is a reason why our clients are getting so much good results, and that is related to the traffic.

[00:11:39]
So I mentioned it needs to have 1000 organic visitors a month, but what you want to make sure. The traffic isn’t declining. Often you’ll see sites of like 1000 visitors and they’re just, you know, plain sailing for years to come, and all of a sudden over time, the traffic’s going down and down and down.

[00:11:53]
Yeah. If a site is getting less traffic, then that means it’s less visible for keywords than it was in comparison to the last one month, two months, three months. Right? Right. So why is that traffic declining? Has it got a Google penalty? You know, is it doing something shady? Any black hat SEO techniques? If it is, you don’t wanna get a link from that site.

[00:12:07]
Cause that can have a negative impact on your campaign. So checking the traffic isn’t declining is a really like kind of extra bullet point you can do just to go above and beyond. Mm-hmm. This the fifth thing, I’ll say The second thing, the second part of our fervor analysis, which is the fifth thing, is checking the keywords that the site ranks for.

[00:12:22]
Again, another shady tactic that a lot of the SEO agencies are doing is the building out their own websites, what we call a pbm, a private blog network, right? They’re putting out all these articles that look great on the surface level. They’re then buying this expired domain and then redirecting it. To the blog, and it looks like it appears for lots of keywords, but in reality, all those keywords are coming from the other domain they’ve redirected.

[00:12:41]
So again, another check you can do, the sixth thing we look at is what we call obl L outbound links. So you don’t wanna be getting links from sites that are linked into so many other pages in the same backlink profile. Mm-hmm. So for example, if you’re getting a backlink from a site, again using the same example of wireless keyboards or wireless mouse, You can go onto that website, check the last 10 blog posts, right?

[00:13:01]
If in all of those blog posts, they’re linking out to 10 different sites, like they’re linking to the site 1, 2, 3, you don’t wanna get a link from that site because what happens if they’re link to you? It means all that link juice is then diluted across all of those sites. So ideally, you wanna see blog posts that have two links to outbound sites.

[00:13:15]
That’s a good, that’s a good thing to look at. Yeah. The seventh and final thing we look at is, again, this is only if you wanna go above and beyond, which we do for all our clients anyways. You wanna check the site in what we call way back machine. Mm-hmm. Again, another shady tactic that a lot of the SEO agencies are doing.

[00:13:29]
It’s actually crazy how many times I’ve said shady agencies on this podcast and that that is actually the reality, you know, is a lot of. Snake, you know, snake hole salesman in the SEO industry. But yeah, what they’ll do is, again, they’ll buy an expired domain. So a website that used to exist back in the day, you know, they’ll just buy it for like $500, a thousand dollars or whatever.

[00:13:45]
Mm-hmm. And then they’ll go and change the site. So the site could have been about, you know, painting for example, like decorating, and then they’ll have a client that works in the solar panel industry. So they’ll literally take the old site and then forget all the history and make it all about solar panels and then link to the client site.

[00:13:58]
Mm-hmm. Google knows that’s not a solar panel related site. It was all about painting. How can it change, right? Yeah. So you can actually. Spot this in a tool called Way Back Machine. And what it does, it shows you what a website used to look back way back in time. So this is like a seven step analysis.

[00:14:12]
Again, quite detailed, quite far up, but this way we know that every link we are building is gonna be high quality and it’s gonna be sustainable as well. Cause there’s nothing worse than building links ranking and then all of a sudden disappearing from Google the following month. 

[00:14:25]
Arlen:
Yeah, yeah,  yeah, that’s, that’s great.

[00:14:26]
I’m glad that you’ve. Broke the, broke it down like that. And that’s very good that you got, you guys have that whole seven step process. Cuz there, there’s a lot of things that you have to check. It’s just not a matter of, you know, a lot of people get kind of whole caught up and kind of hyped about, let’s say the, the da, the domain authority or the, the dr Yeah.

[00:14:42]
You know, the, they like, okay, wow. It’s a, it’s a DR 50 or DR. 70, whatever the. The case may be, and they look past all of the other things, the other signals there, like you mentioned, uh, the traffic, have they had the, the declining organic traffic. You know, there’s a lot of, a lot of things. All of those things you definitely have to be careful in doing for sure.

[00:15:02]
Now, naturally, the next. Kind of question that an e-commerce business is probably wondering is, you know, they see that this is a very important aspect of e-commerce s e o building these links and getting these high quality links. And so the next question is gonna be, you know, how do you, how do you build these links and what, what really is the concept of link building outreach, cuz it’s really gonna involve a lot of outreach. You’re gonna have to go to these other sites, approach them in a way to try to convince them, you know, to allow you to get a link on their high quality sites. So if you can let me know a little bit about what you guys do or what’s the typical method of building high quality links and doing the outreach for that.

[00:15:41]
Joshua: 
Sure. So there’s obviously lots of different link building strategies out there, niche edits, tier link building, guest post social, like there’s so many out there, right? But the ones we find to be most. Effective is the guest posting, which involves a lot of outreach. Okay? So for those who are unaware, guest posting is literally as it sounds, you are a guest posting on someone else’s website.

[00:16:00]
Now, most people, what they’ll do is, let’s imagine you’re working with a client who sells electric bikes, right? So you know the client is in the electric bike niche. If a typical agency wants to find a list of sites you can guest posts on for this client, they will literally just Google sites. That accept electric bike guest posts or guest post sites for electric, anything, anything generic.

[00:16:20]
Right? And that’s where most people go wrong because, because everyone is doing that, what happens is you end up getting the same mediocre links as every other agency that is doing the same process. So what we do, which is a little bit different, is we search for informational related keywords related to what our client sells.

[00:16:35]
So again, if our client sells electric bikes, we will search on Google the. Pros and cons of electric bikes. And typically what you’ll find is when you search for information related keywords around the topic, you’ll find lots of niche relevant websites and websites that a lot of people won’t find because they’re not directly advertising that they offer guest posts on their website.

[00:16:53]
So because, because we have this approach in mind when we approach these websites, we never do what most sites say. And just say, Hey, I wanna post on your website. How much is it? How much is it gonna cost? How much you gonna charge me? Because in reality, it is a, you know, a monetary exchange. You send them content, they upload it, you know, they have a high Dr.

[00:17:09]
Are and they give you a back link. So a lot of it does come down to just pay in these sites. However, our post is more custom bespoke. So what we do is we say, Hey man, and we let you say, Hey man, we never say, Hey, site owner. Cause we like to be as conversational and natural as possible, right? Yeah. We say, Hey man, we just finished reading your post on X, Y, Z.

[00:17:26]
We obviously list out the post from scene one, the recent blog posts on the website. And we’ll say you would totally agree with what you said in A, B, C. So making it really custom and bespoke. We then go on to talk about family. I know it sounds a bit weird, but we say, me and my family are a big fan of electric bikes and I believe I could write a really cool post for your website.

[00:17:43]
Here’s some tight examples that I think work really well for your readers. I. Let me know if you think any would be a good fit. And this works really well. Cause we’re not just saying, I’m gonna write a blog post about electric bikes. Like we’re actually saying, Hey, me and my family are massive fans of electric bikes.

[00:17:55]
And when you are a reader or a site owner and you read that, it gives you a perception that, hey, maybe they’ve got a different insight that no one else has. And you know, they see you as now you know you are bringing value to them. And it’s not just you giving values, it’s not just them giving value to you by, you know, featuring your blog content.

[00:18:09]
So, Our approach is very custom and bespoke, and it works really, really well. But the whole process is, I must admit, there’s a lot of back and forth. You have to find the website. You then have to find the email address, reach out to them, probably send them two different edits of the content, get ’em to approve it, wait for them to upload it.

[00:18:25]
Then they send you the u r URL back then you’ve got your final U URL to show the clients. It’s like a lot of steps back and forth. Yeah, it’s probably the most challenging part of seo, if I’m completely honest. And I also believe it’s the reason why a lot of agencies kind of cut corners because they know how much hard work it is.

[00:18:38]
And unfortunately, you know, this is the one thing you can’t be cutting corners on, cuz SEO is all about quality over quantity. 

[00:18:44]
Arlen:
Right, right. Yeah, very true. It’s, even though it’s a process that is heavily involved, there’s a lot of back and forth. Worth, like you said, drafting these guests post, having them, you know, prove it.

[00:18:56]
Maybe there’s some changes. So there’s a, a lot of that, you know, getting your writers to do something quality and then finally getting that posted and then getting the link back. So it’s, it takes time, but definitely is, is worthwhile. I mean, another beauty of. The guest post, and depending on the arrangement that you have, and depending on the site that you’re posting it on, it can also allow you to get multiple links.

[00:19:18]
So let’s say you do have multiple properties and different sites that you wanna link back to. You can definitely include multiple links in there. So it’s, it’s more than just kind of a one-off thing as opposed to just sure. You know, negotiating just, you know, one link this. Gives you the ability to get multiple links in just one article.

[00:19:35]
So yeah, really, really good stuff there. One of the things that I guess I wanted to kind of touch on as well, cause a lot of the, I think the e-commerce businesses that are gonna be listening May, let’s say they don’t use an agency, they’re doing this all in-house. Maybe they’ve got a digital marketing person that you know is gonna go ahead and go through and do a link building campaign and you know, maybe does a fair amount of due diligence.

[00:19:57]
But he ends up getting some links on some sites that, you know, just are no good. Maybe they fall under some of those categories that you mentioned where somebody just purchased a site where it used to be branded to something else. They totally switched it. Maybe they’ve also got a site where the traffic is good now, but the, the traffic is declining.

[00:20:16]
And so I know all of these things are gonna affect your s e o and maybe you, you take a hit. As far as your traffic is concerned that maybe you get a penalty on Google once that happens. How does a, you know, how does a business recover? Like, what would be the steps to, to kind of get back where you were and to overcome either a Google penalty or just, you know, de declining traffic because you’re linking to some, you know, shady, shady websites for, for lack of a better word.

[00:20:43]
Joshua: 
Yeah, that is a really, really good question. And we actually just. Dealt with that literally three weeks ago. So we do like what we call quarterly campaign review call. So every quarter, so March, pretty much now the end of end of q1, right? We do all of our clients and just give them an update on how the campaigns go in and what we plan on doing in the next coming quarter.

[00:20:59]
Right? And the client we took on was actually in November. They are a dentist. In London, I won’t name them, but they ended the contract with their previous SEO agency in October, I believe, from the month before. You know, they pretty much came on board of us and we was doing every, everything we knew, which was right, right.

[00:21:15]
Building the high quality battlings, doing the relevancy through the blogs, fixing the technical audits, technical everything. We’d done everything perfect, but we were struggling to get results. And normally we get results quite quick because we’re following a proven process. Right. However, when we looked.

[00:21:27]
At the site in a bit more detail. I looked at the client’s backlink profile. We noticed they had so many spammy back links. So I said to the client, Hey, do you mind sending me the report that the previous agency sent you? I just wanna see what type of links they were building. Mm-hmm. Of course I can see it all in ah hs.

[00:21:40]
But I wanted just to see the work that’s been done in the past. Right. He sent me across the PDF document and the other agency built 20 back links in one month. Mm-hmm. Or to the same url. Oh wow. And every back link had the same anchor tech. So for those who are unaware that Antech is pretty much the hyperlink text, The clickable text used to link one website to another website.

[00:21:57]
So yeah, that is very spammy and unnatural. And I will say to clients, like, if you think about it, what are the chances of your website acquiring 20 links in one month and all 20 links are going to the same page, and all 20 links are linking to you saying the same. It just doesn’t happen. Yeah. So the traffic unfortunately for us is when we took them on board, the traffic was declining.

[00:22:16]
Right. And for us, it didn’t look. Great. It’s like, you know, we’ve, we’ve come on board with click slides, our traffic’s going down, what the hell? And I was like, well, we’ve actually done a fair analysis. You know, we’ve identified the problem. So what we did do to rectify this, and I’m glad to say it’s been really good.

[00:22:29]
Now maybe I can send you a screenshot. You can put it below the podcast notes or something like that, but Sure. Pretty much what we did, we submitted a dis of file, so, okay. A dis of our file is a far use submit to Google and you basically tell Google to ignore these back links and, okay. It’s a really good practice to do because.

[00:22:43]
If you have anything shady linking to your website, you don’t want to be associated with that. And of course, sometimes a spammy site can link to you and you don’t own that site, so you, you, you have no control whether the backlink stays up or goes down. Right. What you can do is say to Google, Hey, I don’t agree with that.

[00:22:56]
Can you please not count that when evaluating my site’s ranking? So I see that’s pretty much what we did. We disavowed 422 domains, not backlink domains in total. So yeah, over 400 domains. Some domains linked to the clients site multiple times. I think there’s about 3000 back links in total. But yeah, we’ve pretty much done that at the end of February.

[00:23:14]
Okay. And already now we’re seeing really, really good results in Google. They’re ranking back on page one for what? The London dentist? Best dentist. Best Dentist London, all the variations. And haven’t done that in like literally months before. You know, I think last, last year’s summer was the earliest they’ve been ranking for those keywords.

[00:23:29]
So it’s been really, really impactful. It’s made a massive impact on the business and it’s really nice to see. And the reason I mentioned why we’ve just gone through this is because there was a Google update that came out last week, March the 15th, 2023. I dunno how and how often you follow Google updates.

[00:23:43]
Probably not as often as me. I’m quite sad I’m checking it all the time, right? But a Google update came out last, last week, a core algorithm, a core algorithm update where Google pretty much just, you know, retweet the algorithm to make sure they’re serving the best results. Okay. They obviously identified that we submitted a disavow file and saw that what we are doing is really high quality work and okay, now the client is winning.

[00:24:02]
So yeah, SEO is, is amazing. It does take a while to kick in sometimes. Yeah. And if you’ve had bad SEO done in the past, you do, you know, sometimes have a hill to climb. Mm-hmm. But I do believe it’s definitely worth, you know, if you can get an expert, even if it’s a, even if it’s on a consultant basis, just to quick, you quickly run his eyes over your site, his or her eyes over your site and give the input because.

[00:24:20]
Sometimes you may think a backlink is bad. Mm-hmm. And you might disavow it, but that backlink may actually be giving you a boost and, you know, doing you good for your SEO efforts. 

[00:24:28]
Arlen:
Yeah,  yeah. Yeah. Good stuff. It is, and it’s good to know, like you said, that even if you g do get into trouble, like the one client that you had, there’s, there’s ways to recover from that.

[00:24:37]
And so Sure. The whole disavow process is something where it’s, it’s good to know because it would, it would seem like you’re kind, it’s outta your control. Like if you’re linking to a site, it’s a bad site. They’ve run some spammy stuff. Like you said, they’re linking all to the same. Site with the same anchor text, you know, how do you get from under that?

[00:24:53]
And so that disavow file is definitely a great way to to do that. And one quick question about that. I guess it’s on up to Google and their whole I guess, team or however they process that to determine if they’re going to acknowledge the all of those requests. Is it in your case or your experience, do they typically acknowledge all of those disavowed requests, or is it just kind of a case by case basis?

[00:25:15]
Joshua:
Yeah, no, so they typically do actually they, they typically do actually acknowledge everything you submit. They never used to do Back in the day, you’d submit like 10 domains and you know, they say Google will, you know, consider this next time we next time, next time we evaluate your rankings. And it’s like you just sit thinking, has anything happened like gone up as my impression’s gone up?

[00:25:34]
Well what’s going on? But Right. No, I could definitely say your confidence. Yeah. Right now Google at at this time, cuz Google change what they do every single literally day. You know, there’s always tweaks that algorithm and how they work internally. Right? Sure. But, Pretty much, you know, right now it’s definitely working really, really well.

[00:25:47]
I will say if you do power on sub and dis file, never get too aggressive. Always start off quite cautious. Maybe if you think, you know, if you think you’ve got 10 spammy links, don’t go and submit all 10 straight away, unless you’re actually convinced that these are all spamming. Start off with like five.

[00:25:59]
See how your rankings are doing, you know? Are going in the right direction. Mm-hmm. You can add, if you’re seeing no impact, then you can add way more. If you’re seeing the opposite, it’s going even worse. And maybe you disa out something that you shouldn’t have done so. Right. This, that is definitely, you know, definitely a tricky thing and it just, you know, it just comes with experience.

[00:26:13]
The more sites you see, the more you can really spot that’s bad, that shouldn’t be there, and, you know, tweak your processes. 

[00:26:18]
Arlen:
Gotcha, gotcha. Yeah, that’s, that’s, that’s good to know that you kind of start small and then just kind of, kind of go from there. And it’s good to know that they’re a little bit more responsive now than in the past.

[00:26:27]
Sure. Yeah. For sure. Well, Joshua, as we get ready to wrap things up, I wanted to see if you can, um, kind of on the other side of things, share a case study more of a kind of success story from your own agency or just in general that you’re familiar with, where, you know, powerful BA back links played really a significant role in improving, you know, an e-commerce stores overall visibility in their sales.

[00:26:48]
Joshua: 
Sure. So what I’ll do, I’ll share one of our clients in the US cause I know a lot of your audience is US based and your US based as well. So that, that’d be nice. I work with a client called Cutthroat Club. You can, you know anyone listening can check them out. You can google them yourself. Cutthroat club.com.

[00:27:02]
Today, obviously a DDC brand that sells men’s shaving products. So the guys behind this brand are actually e-commerce investors. So they acquire sites, they add them to the portfolio, increased traffic and revenue, and then often sell them for more money. So they were already doing well with all the other econ brands they had, but they were struggling to acquire targeted traffic to this store in particular.

[00:27:21]
And there’s nothing worse. Then owning the eCommerce store, not generating sales. Right. Trust me. I know. I’ve been there before. Right? So they actually, they actually found us online as our site actually ranks, I think number three already now for eCommerce SEO services. Again, just go to show how important SEO is, even for us as an SEO agency, right?

[00:27:38]
So they found us online, they booked a call with us, and they pretty much went through all the problems they were facing and what they wanted to achieve, right? Which is, Pretty much just more visibility for all their men shaving products and generating more organic cells. So we listened to them. We put together a bespoke SEO campaign.

[00:27:52]
The key word in there is bespoke, not a generic package of just one blog, two links. And you know, based on what you thinks work well, based on what you think works well, we actually analyze the competition, see how many back links they had, and then put out a plan, which we knew, Hey, if we build 12 links a month, four months, we’ll have 48.

[00:28:06]
And then we’ll be in a similar ballpark with the top ranking sites. So you put together a bespoke campaign for them and you know it was heavily based on back links, which is good cuz the whole podcast is about back links. These guys already had decent content, right? You know, they know men’s shaving products inside out.

[00:28:19]
They had a full-time writer. The content was really, really good. As you’ll see, if you check out their website, the only piece of the puzzle they’re missing was the authority from the back links. Relevancy was very well full established. So what we did is we built them 48 links over the course of four months, 12 links every single month.

[00:28:33]
And now the client is ranking on page one for over 60 different keywords that I’ll give you some examples. Like if you or any of your listeners, Google cutthroat razor blade, you guys be ranking number one Cutthroat Club. Search for cutthroat razor cut. Straight razor straight razor set. Again, another different keyword, like you know, this dozen different keyword of like products they offer.

[00:28:52]
Right. You know, bar Barbara, blade, razors, all the different keywords were targeting. Then now breaking onto page one, this is actually really good cause I was speaking to the owner last week as part of our weekly campaign review calls. Mm-hmm. And order up 73% compared to the previous period and revenue is up 400 and 14% compared to the previous year. So Wow. The client is really, really happy. Yeah. And we’re actually already in talks to handle SEO for more of the econ brand, so Yeah. Really, really nice campaign and just goes to show again, just how powerful backlinks are if you build them correctly. Yeah. Yeah, that’s, that’s awesome.

[00:29:23]
Arlen:
That’s a great testimonial and thank you for sharing that. I mean, it just really. Kind of definitely goes to, to show how this wa it all works, you know, if, if you do the work and you follow, you know, some of the steps that you mentioned as far as, you know, identifying the right back links and then, and being really kind of method methodo methodical about it and, you know, getting the right ones, it can definitely work out.

[00:29:43]
For sure, for sure. Sure. Well, yeah, that’s, that’s awesome. Well, thank you for sharing that, Joshua, and I’ve definitely learned a lot, you know, this whole. SEO world is ever changing, as we all know. Nobody really has a crystal ball as to how Google’s algorithm is gonna change. But you know, we do know that there are some key things that are always, uh, have always been in place and are always gonna be ranking factors and fact links is gonna, is one of those.

[00:30:08]
And like, You said, even in this whole world of ai, it’s probably gonna be more relevant than ever. Absolutely. I really totally agree with that for sure. So it’s good to know we have some, some solid strategies to mm-hmm. To create, you know, some solid back links for our, for our businesses. Well, I’d like to always close things out just so our audience, you know, can get to know you a little bit better.

[00:30:27]
If you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think. We’d be interested to know.

[00:30:32]
Joshua:
Sure. I guess it’s probably not that fun, but I guess it’s interesting. So my birthday is on Christmas Day 25th of December, and my fiance’s birthday is also the 25th of December. So I mean my have the same birthday and his Christmas day.

[00:30:45]
So I mean that’s probably not that like interesting. It’s more like, wow, that’s weird. But I mean an interesting, in fact, related to seo, right? Yeah. Again, I’ll give you some SEO ones, right? So like I’m currently the number one ranked SEO consultant in London. So if you Google SEO consultant in London, you’ll see click slash ranks number one.

[00:31:00]
Again, just evidence of what we do and something that no one else can say in the UK is that I’ve actually been hired by the British government for SEO training, so Oh wow. That was Okay. Very interesting. I think that was a very interesting day and they actually found us online. They googled SEO training in London.

[00:31:15]
Again, we do lots of SEO for all of our pages. They found us on page one. Yeah. Got in touch and yeah, went to the office in Canary Wolf, which is a place in London and yeah, hosted the whole training for the whole team. That was, that was quite cool. Good stuff, man. 

[00:31:27]
Arlen:
Well, yeah, you, you definitely mentioned some three solid fun facts.

[00:31:30]
I mean, I, I, I wouldn’t look, I wouldn’t make light of the fact that, yeah, both you and your fiance have the birthday on Christmas. I mean, that’s, that’s huge in, in and of itself. I mean, when you think about it, I mean, that’s like a mega, mega celebration. I mean, it’s, I I, I’m sure it’s gonna be difficult to figure out.

[00:31:47]
How do you, how do you kind of capture everyone’s celebration into that day? Or you probably gotta, you knows, spread that out over like a week. 

[00:31:55]
Joshua:
I probably would imagine it is crazy. Every year it’s like, happy birthday. Happy birthday. Like, oh, okay. Yeah. We need to make sure when we have a kid that the kid doesn’t come any round, any anywhere around the mob December.

[00:32:06]
Cause I can’t have a kid on the same birthday as me and my fiance. That’s the worst thing ever.  

[00:32:12]
Arlen:
That would be pretty crazy too. But great fun fact though. And yeah, thank you for sharing that. And congrats on the success, like you said, being able to write for those keyword and be successful in London.

[00:32:20]
That’s, that’s, that’s some good stuff. Well, you know, if our listeners wanna now pick your brain anymore and kind of reach out to you and see either how they can help, how you guys can help them out as a business or, you know, you can kind of impart some wisdom to them, what would be the best way for people to, to reach out to you?

[00:32:37]
Joshua:
Sure. So yeah, if you’re an e-commerce store owner listening to this podcast and you’re serious about growing your store’s revenue, Then I invite you to book a free SEO strategy call with us. What we’ll do, we’ll jump on a Google Meet call with you just how we did with our other client Cutthroat Club.

[00:32:51]
We’ll learn more about your business and your goals, and we’ll put together a custom SEO campaign strategy for you that we know will allow you to achieve those goals. It’s pretty much a mini seo, all it will do of your website. Right there in real time on the call, and we can, we’ll literally show you exactly where you’re going wrong, right?

[00:33:07]
You can either work with us and get all that stuff fixed, or you can take the strategy and go in, implement it yourself either way, as long as we’re helping your listeners, you know, I’m, I’m happy with that. 

[00:33:16]
Arlen:
Hey, great. That’s, that’s awesome. Yeah. Thank you for offering that. We’ll be sure to include the, uh, the necessary links for people to take advantage of that in our show notes and yeah, good stuff.

[00:33:23]
I definitely encourage people to. To take you up on that for that free consultation. You really can’t beat that well. Well j well, Joshua, it’s been great talking to you. I’ve, like I said, I’ve definitely learned a lot and know our listeners have as well, and we definitely appreciate you coming on today on the e-Commerce Marketing Podcast.

[00:33:37]
Joshua:
Thanks for having me. I really enjoyed it.

Podcast Guest Info

Joshua George
Owner and Founder of ClickSlice