Marketing Experts Reveal Top Strategies To

Arlen
[00:00:58]
Welcome to the e-commerce marketing podcast. Everyone. I am your host, Arlen Robinson. And today we have a very special guest Luke Carthy, who is a well-seasoned eCommerce consultant , eCommerce store founder and international speaker delivering double/triple-digit growth for eCommerce brands. Luke parks himself right in the center of CRO, growth and SEO disciplines. Having worked with brands spanning both D2C and B2B verticals including CAT, Renault and Schneider Electric, Luke knows a thing or two when it comes to getting C-suite buy-in and delivering smart, scalable eCommerce growth. Welcome to the podcast. Look,

Luke
[00:01:38]
I appreciate it. And yeah, that was a, that’s a pretty special intro like that, but yeah,

Arlen
[00:01:43]
Thank you for joining us. And today we’re really going to be talking about SEO is specifically how it relates to e-commerce businesses and some specific strategies on how an e-commerce business can utilize various SEO tactics to drive sales, drive traffic, and really, you know, just grow their business because as you know, and I know, and our listeners know the subject of, of search engine optimization is a pretty broad there’s a lot you can do. There’s a lot to tackle. It’s always good to know, you know, some specific things that people can kind of bite into and not feel really overwhelmed and feel like they can really accomplish some things. So I know you’re gonna enlighten us on that, but before we do get into all of that, why don’t you tell us a little bit more about your background and specifically how you got into what you’re doing today?

Luke
[00:02:29]
Yeah, sure. Sounds good. So I kind of got into it off the back of my first proper job to be honest. So I worked at a retail store called Currys, which is kind of like a home, a home Depot best buy over in the, in the U S and I was just kind of showing my age a little bit. Now I was working there when the big CRT TVs were just phasing out and the flat Springs were just coming in all these new cables, new components that were kind of flooded into the market. And I was just thinking, you know, what, how was it 50 pounds or, you know, 60, $70 or whatever for the HTMI cable, like seriously, it’s this long. It doesn’t make sense. So I jumped on Alibaba, did some research, found a supplier, next thing you know, I’m selling on eBay and it just grew it scaled.

Luke
[00:03:13]
And I guess someone who was on the pulse with technology kind of just seemed like a really good fit. And yeah, I kind of scaled that business, got to a position where I bought my first car and then it’s, it’s just kind of some things closed. And ever since then, I’ve been in the world of e-commerce since that point. So then I kind of went on and into agency, life did a bit of stuff in-house for the, for a couple of clients. And then about just shy of three years ago, I thought, you know what, maybe it’s time I can go away and do this for myself as a consultant. So I jumped into that space and now work with a lot of partners in the search space, software vendors, affiliate partners, which I know you guys are going to buy. And yeah, here I am to, to 2022 and what’s going on. So it’s, it’s been a journey, but I still love e-commerce. It’s still one of the things that catching down so

Arlen
[00:03:59]
Well, that’s awesome. And, you know, as everybody knows, I mean, e-commerce is really where it’s at today. It’s exploded. It of course was further propelled into the stratosphere because of the COVID situation, but like bounds and people really kind of had no, not too many options when it came to purchasing things and utilizing services, if everything was just kind of pushed online. And so e-commerce definitely is kind of become the forefront of everyone’s attention. And you had mentioned that the store that you worked for the prior to getting into everything that was similar to best buy. And I definitely remember those days. I mean, it, it is amazing how we went from those huge TVs with the CRT tubes in the back to just being able to watch stuff on our phones. I mean, it is just amazing when you think about the progression of the digital technology and being able to consume video and audio on these small devices.

Arlen
[00:04:50]
So it’s, it makes us to see where it’s gone. It’s going to go from the big toes to the flat screens. And, you know, I’ve seen a lot of, I’m a big scifi guy, and I watch a lot of these sites, five movies, and I saw one not too long ago. I am trying to remember what it was that I was watching, but anyway, a lot of these scifi movies, the next thing I think the next iteration is going to be screenless where something is projected in as kind of a holographic type of format that you can engage with. So I think that’s really probably where we’re going to go next, where there’s going to be no screen at all. And you can project something anywhere. So may be interesting to see where we go with that.

Luke
[00:05:27]
Yeah, absolutely. My level cables.

Arlen
[00:05:31]
Definitely. I hear you. Well, as I mentioned at the top of the episode today, we’re going to be talking about SEO and some specific strategies on how e-commerce businesses can be successful with it. And so, in your opinion, what are some really main aspects of SEO that an e-commerce business should focus on? Because it really is a broad topic.

Luke
[00:05:51]
Yeah, sure. So I guess what I jumped into things for, for clients, if we’re always kind of, you know, starting from, from, or a blank piece of paper, it makes sense to go for the pages that have the broadest appeal. And in most cases, for most websites, this is going to be the category pages, right? So your brand pages, your departmental pages and seeing what’s going on. So it’s an easy analogy to digest, but so many people can get it wrong. Is your hierarchy, your taxonomy, your category structure, whatever you want to call, it really should be built in a way that serves the user and makes it easier for them to form. Or they’re looking for similar to walking down the aisle of a supermarket or department store, whatever it is, you know, if you’re looking for something specific, that should be a category that houses, that particular item by building your catalog or your category structure in a way that has parent categories that are named correctly subcategories and so on.

Luke
[00:06:44]
You’re in a really good position to be able to run it for some of the broader keywords. So I guess to, to use an example, if we were, we’d been talking about technology for a while. So if we think about televisions right now, you’d have televisions as maybe as a department. And then within that, you might have, you know, what’s going out, oh, led or OLED, whatever you want to call it, you’d have your LCD, maybe your categories by size, depending on, you know, your ranges and that sort of thing there. And then of course you might have categories of brands like Panasonic or LG or whatever that might be. But the point is you want your categories to be deep enough where you can capture people all across the shopping funnel, whether it’s broad Panasonic survey or something more specific like Panasonic old led 43 inch panel or whatever that might be.

Luke
[00:07:26]
And you want to be able to make sure that people can narrow down and find the product that looking for as effectively as possible. So that’s normally a really good place to start. And I think to tack on, on the back of that, we think about URL structures as well, and making sure the Casper, your ELLs are clean. They explain what they’re about. They’re nice and simple. And then not like, you know, a lot of brands we see out there are alphanumeric they’re full of all sorts of indices and primary keys and stuff. And I appreciate sometimes that’s the limitation of a system, but the cleaner, the URL, the better it is and the better it’s going to help your, you know, your SEO as well.

Arlen
[00:08:00]
That makes a lot of sense. And I know a lot of businesses that are listening, they may be on, you know, one of these, I guess you could say kind of off the shelf type platforms or the no code builders where it’s either, maybe the Shopify, the Wix is of the world, Squarespace, you name it, big commerce, all of that. And one of the things that I’ve seen over the years is that these, unfortunately these platforms have really adopted some better SEO practices as far as URL structure, because I can recall in the past, it really, wasn’t kind of like that. Where when you would go to different category pages, it would be a kind of a complex URL structure. Like you said, there may be some digits attached to it. And it really wasn’t SEO friendly these days. I think most platforms do make it easy and have a kind of a clear category structure, which is really good, even if you’re just utilizing one of their kind of built in templates, if you will, and you’re not doing anything custom.

Arlen
[00:08:53]
So definitely good to know. Now with, you mentioned having kind of a clear structure, you use the example of the, the televisions and, and kind of breaking down the different brands and the different things like that. When it comes to the structure with regards to SEO, it definitely makes sense. We have to have the clean structure and the breakdown like that. How important is the aesthetic aspects of that navigation when it comes to SEO? Or is that, should that be a consideration, meaning that it’s, user-friendly, I’ve seen different structures where the navigation will always stay at the top, even when you scroll up, you know, kind of floating that when even the side NAB does that way have any SEO importance when it comes to ranking for search engines?

Luke
[00:09:37]
Yeah. So this is a really interesting question, actually, and this is where the term SEO becomes quite elastic because in its strictest sense, of course, SEO is predominantly about optimizing for search engines, right. But SEO nowadays by nowadays, I mean like reading the last five years has predominantly been about a combination of user experience designs speed, as well as the technical side of things as well. So to kind of answer that question two, fold aesthetically, absolutely. Because the easier it is for customers to find, you know, the more likely it is, they’re going to stay on the site and look around. So that’s not necessarily a, an SEO specific thing because SEO is a specific, I guess, goal or objective is to drive as much traffic as possible. Right. Of course, as we know, it’s pointless to drive traffic. If the traffic gets there and they can’t find what they’re looking for, it’s difficult to use or it’s clunky on mobile.

Luke
[01:10:27]
So there’s almost like a, an argument to say SEO is actually from the point of acquisition all the way through to conversion and everything in the middle with exploration. So using the latter as a, as a definition for SEO, especially in the world of e-commerce then yeah, absolutely. From an aesthetic point of view, but from a pure play SEO point of view, internal linking and how you address para categories related categories are also really important to help distribute SEL authority across the site. So to give you an example, again, using televisions as a department related to that, you probably going to have maybe audio equipment. So maybe like, you know, your home cinema, TV stands accessories and those supplementary and relationship-based categories, and you want them to be linked together, but also you want to make sure that when you are on the televisions category, you can see subcategories.

Luke
[01:11:14]
So as we said, browse by brand, but also you’ve also got to think about the way that you define your category structure is just based on, I guess, sheer luck. You’ve got to look into the keywords, what people are searching for, how they’re behaving, how people are digesting content, and that can really help for you to understand and define how you build your Casper is your subcategories and how you build your relationships between them all. And if you’ve got that right, as a core foundation of your SEO, that everything else is a lot easier, as you can imagine, if you imagine building a department store and setting out your hours in a certain way, you can go and spend ages, stocking shelves, and, you know, putting up and merchandise and stuff. If you’ve got stuff in the wrong place, it’s a real difficult challenge to then start moving things around and churning around the layout is exactly the same for e-commerce.

Luke
[01:12:03]
So it’s really a good thing to invest them from data, but importantly as well, I think the last thing to put onto that is whether you’re using a, as you said, a no code platform like Shopify would come at us even big commerce, for example, or something more the enterprise side, like Magento two or Salesforce commerce, then it doesn’t matter like platform agnostic is how you should approach categories. And if anything, the more corporate side is where things are a heck of a lot more difficult to get changed because of people process all that sort of good stuff. So it’s definitely worth one investing in a structure earlier.

Arlen
[01:12:36]
Yeah, it makes a lot of sense because I can see where if you start off and the structure is convoluted and not necessarily the best structure, then when you get further down the line and you start adding categories, adding more products, it can be come like almost a nightmare to try to redo everything. And yeah, I’ve, I’ve experienced different companies that have, you know, utilize our software where I’ve seen them switching platforms, whether they maybe let’s say they were on a Shopify platform and for whatever reason, they’ve maybe switched to commerce. And then if their structure wasn’t really together where they were Joppa five, for instance, and they switch over then, yeah. I mean, it’s almost like redoing everything. And then of course, there’s the concern where when you do redo everything, how is that going to affect your rankings? You know? And so it’s definitely something very important to take mine early on. Like you said, now, one of the biggest questions that like these days, most big e-commerce businesses are focusing on because it’s becoming more and more competitive as all of these businesses are thrusting online and selling online or more competitive. So it is harder and harder to rank for certain things and to drive traffic. So what would you say are some specific strategies that a business can utilize an e-commerce business can utilize to drive their growth and, you know, sales,

Luke
[01:13:57]
You know, it’s the million dollar question, right? What is it you start on, if you start from scratch or you want to a shoestring budget, whatever it might be. But I think the reality is going for the big ambitious vanity based keywords. So again, we’ll stick with tech, like someone who’s early on in the game might be an independent, maybe a reseller who’s trying to compete with the likes of best buy and all that sort of good stuff. Big times like, oh, led TV and 50 inch television, for example, you’re going to find it really difficult, not impossible, but what I would say, I mean, it’s not a never, but it’s a case of where, you know, pick your battles, right. Start with the wins that you can pick your battles in night. And when, so, when it comes to e-commerce the, one of the beautiful things about e-commerce as a platform is there’s just so much scope for dynamically generated content in a good way.

Luke
[01:14:43]
So although, you know, you might be able to run for 50 inch TV there’s opportunity here to rank for things like frequently asked questions, granular topics, like model numbers of screens that people are looking for comparatives and comparisons and those sorts of real long tail, but also very specific queries. And the great news is although if you look at things on a query level basis, so, you know, one keyword that’s broad. So one keyword that’s really long tail and detailed might only have 50 searches a month. You know, if you have $500 or even a hundred of those keywords to go after it quickly amounts up to a substantial amount of traffic. So my advice would be invest in really informative and the funnel content and a great analogy of this is if anyone is in the automotive sector, you know, you’re in a situation where you’re thinking about buying a car.

Luke
[01:15:31]
So you might search for the car type you’re after whether it’s a family car or sports car or something like that, then you’ll narrow it down to a manufacturer that may be a particular model. Then you think about dealership and that’s when you start looking for the best deals. So depending on your vertical, you don’t want to go for the top of the funnel stuff necessarily, which is like family car. What you probably wouldn’t want to go for is some delight Volkswagen dealers in your local area, because that’s the end of the funnel that you want to tap into. That’s where people are ready to start handing over the cash. So I guess to use another example in the back of televisions, it’s like, oh, led versus I guess some of the technology, whether that’s LCD or a comparative of a 50 inch versus a 57 inch screen or something to that effect. So it’s jumping in on that way and the long tail keywords to get after it. But also I think is 1.1 thing that is beautiful to try and test pay search is before you go away and invest thousands of pounds in content and build a team and start writing this stuff, then experiment with type search, put a small amount of budget aside for some really long tail keywords. See if that helps your conversion. And if it does then invest in that organically and go and chase those opportunities.

Arlen
[01:16:38]
Okay. Gotcha. Gotcha. That’s some great advice. And like you said, even if you’re in a space or a vertical, like you said, that televisions, obviously you’re not going to be able to compete with the best buys of the world for 50 inch TV that you might as well forget it, but there are so many other things, you know, related to that, like you said, comparison of specific models, because if you kind of drill down and look at the individual brands, you know, from the Samsungs to the LGS, there’s so many different models. And then, you know, when people are doing shopping and, you know, these days that all of the information is out there. So people do a lot of research and investigation. And so comparisons is a really a big thing. You couldn’t compare a specific model numbers and even get, even break it down even further and compare specific features that they have, and then try to rank for those long tail feature description names, and then that’s a way to get into it.

Arlen
[01:17:32]
So all hope is definitely not lost when you’re in a competitive space. So there, there is definitely, always a way to do that. Now, when somebody is, let’s say kind of embarking on this journey with SEO and commerce, they’re doing some things to try to rank they’ve maybe gone through, they’ve already done the cleanup of their URL structure, their categories of the ranking for certain keywords. What in your experience? Cause I know you’ve kind of worked with a lot of businesses and you have kind of, I guess you could say a tool bag of your own that you utilize for the companies that you’re dealing with. What are some specific tools and resources that you would say are kind of go-to or must have when it comes to, you know, any SEO strategy that you would recommend?

Luke
[01:18:15]
Yeah, that’s a good question. So I’d say what are the first things, or, you know, if I’m coming in at a good place, so maybe there’s a business with an SEO team or an SEO agency and it’s case of LA, you know what SEO is, what we need is what the client’s saying. So what I like to do is play a bit of devil’s advocate and almost as ridiculous as in science, talk myself out of work. And the reason why is, if I said to the client, look, if we increase your traffic by 30, 40, 50%, these that go into commercially put you where you want to be aspirationally. If the answer to that question is no, we’re not sure. Or maybe not, then it’s not an SEO problem that they have because more traffic at say a one and a half percent conversion rate, it’s still covered one and a half percent.

Luke
[01:18:56]
Right. But she could spend just, you know, to use an example, a hundred hours investigating in trying to improve your SEO, spend, say 30 hours, improving things that are in your control, like site element, experience, pricing, comparisons, recommendations, merchandising. So there’s lots of stuff there. So for me, when it comes to, I guess, getting buy-in and to maximize your return on investment, it’s a combination of both traffic acquisition, whether that’s through email or search or paid or whatever that might be in combination with improving the experience in conversion. So this can be in things like invested in site search because typically as a general rule, people who use site search are about five to six times more likely to convert than people that don’t. So it’s a really strong signal to suggest that someone’s ready to buy or is in that mindset. So by identifying opportunities and improving their advance in the performance of your site search, that’s a quick way.

Luke
[01:19:54]
Things like, again, in a bit, in a situation where we looked at say pagination, and how many products are on a page speed, product reviews, merchandising opportunities. So, you know, for example, can we prove the average order value? Can we put an offer or a promotion in, but equally what normally happens is a lot of retailers are very promotion heavy. So they rely quite a lot of discounters delivery threshold, all that sort of good stuff to try and get people to buy. And actually what we could be doing is just giving away margin unnecessarily. So could there be a way to actually improve conversion and improve orders and have a dollar value by making things more discoverable rather than just throwing discounts that you know away? So one really good example is like a personal shopping assistant where there’s a couple tools actually what’s called shop box.

Luke
[02:20:41]
And it’s a really good tool for if you are in a really granular market. So things like baby care and buy stuff for new boards where you’ve got push chairs and clothes and all sorts of stuff to buy a power and fashion automotive parts where there’s lots of fragments and that sort of thing, because what it basically does is build together products that either look like what you’re looking at or a complimentary service. So it’s sort of like a personal shopping assistant. But my guess my point is sometimes actually the time and resources can be better spent on advancing the experience and optimization of the store onsite than looking at SEO in isolation. And I think there’s a last point on that. What’s great thing is when you brought in as an SEO consultant or an SEO agency and you uplift revenue by X percent, you still win that you still get to kind of call the credit, right?

Luke
[02:21:31]
It’s still yours. So as far as being able to then spend more money on resources and SEO, you then unlock it. In which case you then start to invest that additional resource and confidence in SEO. So it gets, there’s a weird kind of way what I’m brought in as an SEO consultant. An SEO typically is always the first thing that I go for because it’s, you know, someone brings me in today. I want to wait three to six months to see return. I mean, some people might be, but you know, there’s always the companies that want to see things happen within the first 30 days. So it’s a balancing act of what you can control on the site versus waking controlled in the site.

Arlen
[02:22:04]
That’s great advice because it really just sounds like there really is. No, I guess you could say magic pill if you will. That will just for SEO, that will work for every single business and is right for every single business at NBC at every point in time. Because like you said, you really have to assess everything before you say, okay, I’m going to do some SEO. I’m going to do some on-page improvements. I’m going to do keyword research. I’m going to start building content. Yeah. All those things, of course, like you said, well, we’ll help, but there may be a lot of, I guess you could say food already on the table that you haven’t eaten yet, meaning that you haven’t cleaned up your site structure, you haven’t improved the user experience. You know, there’s a list of things that you can do to help drive growth and improve your conversion rates and all of that. So yeah.

Luke
[02:22:53]
Yeah. Hopefully. Yeah. I mean to use a really painful example, actually there was a client of mine based out in Canada, a fashion and apparel company. And this was really at the infancy of COVID where everyone was still quite blahzay as to what it was. It was in the press, but no one really understood the severity of it. So this was late 19, early like 2019, but long story short, I started stocking face masks. But if you searched for face masks as one word, you got no results. If you search for face masks, as two words, you’ve got the face mask. So the point is there was about 8,000 searches a month for face masks, as one word, which is 8,000 potential lost sales. So I mean, that is a really quick five minute fix, which could actually uplift revenue quite dramatically. Or so you do that. You will not the confidence in the team and the business. And then you go and spend the real money on the stuff that’s going to be longer a more of an investment. So if you can get them out of your hands, so to speak sooner than then, great, you know, that that’s normally the way I prefer to go about it is to justify where’s the immediate return. Where’s the quick wins, and then let’s get onto the big stuff that’s achievable, but it’s going to take a number of months to see return. Yeah.

Arlen
[02:24:03]
It’s very good to be mindful of that fact that you don’t have to jump right in with this, you know, there’s other things that you can do for sure. We’ll look, as we get ready to wrap things up, wanted to see if you can enlighten us on any e-commerce businesses that you’ve either worked with or you’re familiar with that have implemented, you know, specific SEO strategies and had some success with it. And, you know, what were some specific things that, that you did to get so much even what results?

Luke
[02:24:28]
Yeah. So I guess I’ll answer that question in two ways. So I think there’s a company out there that are really kind of leading it from a UX and experience perspective. And I’ve really kind of come through the, the trenches, if you like with the organic side of things, as a company in the UK here called aol.com or appliances online, but they back in the car members specifically, but maybe five to 10 years ago, they rebranded from appliances online to AOL. But when they did that, you know, they didn’t really say buy the book. I bought the domain, I migrated properly, but they had a dramatic drop in organic traffic and it took them a good few years to work out what the bowels and the problem was and what was going on. But I think what they ended up doing is realized they couldn’t rely so heavily on SEO and really started advancing and user experience and personalization.

Luke
[02:25:13]
So that’s a really good website actually to look at an extremely white goods slash technology space, but a site that I’ve influenced directly, unfortunately, sidebar NDA. So I can’t mention the client, but what I can do is talk you through some of the things that we did that really made a massive uplift. So one was a frequent problem with customer services where customers would constantly call it the same problem and the same challenge week in, week out, which was at the checkout with a basket full of stuff, they went to go and pay. And for whatever reason, there was a, an error message that popped up to say, look, the payment has been successful. Could you please call this number on blah, blah, blah. So they call it a Merck, but say, look, there’s money in. They can use the supermarket or whatever earlier tender balance.

Luke
[02:25:56]
It’s all good. And it was just this vicious cycle of customers, kind of getting to the checkout, trying to Bain bay and they couldn’t do it. Now my thinking here is if you’ve got one customer that has taken the time to call up and tell you that there’s a problem, there’s probably at least a couple hundred who just couldn’t be bothered and went somewhere else. Right? We’re all consumers. We all do it. There’s a problem in our way. We just go to the next place. So the point is we built a bespoke Google analytics ring to pull some data in from error messages and lots of different sources. What we found is it was just a simple error message and copy in the area. That was the problem. So rather than saying your payments failed, call this number, we changed the message to invalid card number.

Luke
[02:26:38]
And that was a simple enough reason to bring revenue by that 30,000 pounds a day. My point here is it was a bit of a needle in the haystack type situation, but everyone was there, much drive more traffic. It’s a big problem. Get the dev team on it. You know, and you’re burning hours and hours going from QA is to web dev to product teams and everyone’s kind of arguing and blaming everybody else. And when I started to take a look at the platform in detail, look at user journeys and really get into it. It was a really small thing that took five minutes to fix. But I guess the point here is, I guess I’m trying to make is sometimes it’s really, really small. And I think an analogy that I really like to use is if you’re a store owner and you know, you’re not doing very well for business.

Luke
[02:27:22]
If you get a thousand more people to the front door, are you automatically, I’d be a millionaire. Like the chances are probably not. You need to fix what it is you’re doing as a business. Is it the shop front is price. Is it your food? What is it? And I guess the point here is you don’t have customers calling every day. So they’ve got problems when there isn’t a problem, there’s clearly something going on. So sometimes it’s about taking a step back, moving yourself away from the technology and just thinking about actually, what is the customer want? What are they expecting? What are we not doing? Yeah. E-commerce is a weird one. Right? Sometimes it can be super technical. Sometimes it can be like hidden in plain sight.

Arlen
[02:27:54]
That’s very true. Very true. Yeah. And it’s these days, it’s sometimes you, you do have to also kind of get to try to get into the psychology of your customers or potential customers. And, you know, even just the smallest things of the placement of buttons or the color of buttons, you know, those definitely make a big difference. And so not only from your conversion aspect of it, but all of that is just visually just a better customer experience. And it’s kind of a trickle down effect. If somebody has a pleasant customer experience versus somebody that doesn’t, even if those two people get the product or service that they want, the difference is going to really trickle down to, okay, will they recommend it to their friends or some people versus those that said, okay, yeah, it was a great product, but you know, checkout page sucks. You know, they might not be thinking about referring their friends to that particular site. So that,

Luke
[02:28:49]
I guess, lastly as well, it’s e-commerce right. So if the goods are in stock, we can’t sell them. So a lot of times, a lot of people in the warehouse or the merchandising team will be like, right. Can you tell us why sales on this product is down 15, 25, 30% compared to last month, but it’s nine stock. Like a lot of people just go down the rabbit hole of looking at their data and spending maybe a few hours trying to piece it together. But I want to help you like fundamentals of e-commerce. Right.

Arlen
[02:29:14]
Definitely. If it’s not in stock, then you can’t sell it. That’s the boss of my mind for sure. Well, that’s awesome, Luke, thank you for sharing that. I’ve definitely learned a lot. Minority listeners have as well. So some great actionable tips and especially in this e-commerce space, as I mentioned before, that’s now, you know, more competitive than ever, but I think some things that businesses can definitely lead, you know, try to tackle to grow their businesses. Well, I always like to kind of close things out by switching gears here and trying to get our audience to know a little bit more about you. So if you don’t mind sharing one closing fun fact about yourself that you think people would be interested to know,

Luke
[02:29:50]
Alright, okay. So we spoke about this off air didn’t we, before we jumped into the recording, but I am painfully obsessed with the world of fragrance, which is, I just spent a lot of time on fragrance, sides, buying stuff, trying stuff out, getting samples of things. And I guess, do you know what, as a relationship related tip to that, whatever you were thinking of going into, whether it is e-commerce or whatever space, the technology getting to spend a lot of time immersing yourself in that exact words, right? Because nothing beats experience, like it doesn’t matter how much education, how many courses you were in, how many degrees you have experience is 10 fold, more important. So, you know, I shop a lot and I see some things that are great. I see some things that are terrible. And as a result, I can kind of avoid those or put those in when it comes to clients and stuff. So,

Arlen
[03:30:35]
Yeah, they’re very true. Very true. You really have to, in order to put yourself in the shoes of your customer, you really almost, you have to be a customer yourself in whatever space that it is that you’re in and you’ll be able to uncover a lot, you know, and you’ll be able to learn a lot now, not only from other companies, but from just that experience in general. So yeah. Good, good, good stuff and stuff. And as I’ve mentioned before, as well, I’m also kind of into fragrances, I’m trying to get, or try to get back into it myself and try to stand out and not smell like everybody else. So yeah.

Luke
[03:31:07]
Yeah. I’ll tell you what, I’ll set a challenge fair. And if you can find a website somewhere that allows you to shop by your preferences and a fragrance, then let me, or what it is. Cause a lot of places like shop by brand by price for men, for women, you know, that sort of thing. If you want to shop like spicy or fragrant or floor or a sudden noticing like bird or whatever, it’s impossible. So if you can find me a website that is a good reference or case study in the one with fragrance, that I’m more Marriott.

Arlen
[03:31:32]
All right, great. I keep my eye out and if I find one, definitely you pointed to your wife, for sure. Well, great. Well thank you for sharing that. I appreciate that. And you know, lastly, before we let you go, if any of our listeners want to reach out to you and pick your brain anymore about SEO, what is the best way for them to get ahold of you?

Luke
[03:31:49]
Sure. So we’ve got a fairly unique name. I don’t think there’s too many leak. Art is around, but if you just throw me into Google or lukecarthy.com, or you can find me on Twitter and LinkedIn, you know, and stuff on under my name as well. So yeah, I’ve got a blog and lastly, I run a tutorial and a newsletter called let’s talk shop where you can check out specific case studies and things that I run into. So, but yeah, give me a Google, your farmer stuff and a different chat whenever you’re ready.

Arlen
[03:32:14]
All right. That sounds great. Well, thank you, Luca. I definitely recommend people to check you out and, and engage with you, you know, further. And thank you again for joining us today on the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Luke
[03:32:24]
Not a problem, glad to be a part of it.

speaker 1
[03:32:28]
Thank you for listening to the e-commerce marketing podcast.

Podcast Guest Info

Luke Carthy
SEO Consultant at lukecarthy.com