I had planned on writing about the new way to buy performance media.

Throwing your goals, content, and data into a blackbox ad algorithm and letting it do it's thing.

But then Meta had to go ahead and mess all that up this weekend.

Their "outage" that overspent budgets and totally ignored targets certainly (and rightfully) does not help build trust in this modern media buying method that many of us would probably like to fully embrace (read more about what happened and a great perspective here).

Automated campaigns should make media buying easier, smarter, and scale beyond what a typical marketer would be able to accomplish.

But, it's clearly still lacking the trust and transparency needed to gain this buy-in and thus we've taken a few steps back in this evolution...

However, this slip up presents (yet) another opportunity for me to rant about how important I think it is reduce your business' dependency on performance marketing.

I've published a lot of ways of how you can do this using YouTube and upper-funnel media...

But we all know the best way to build organic and sustainable growth is through search engine optimization (SEO).

SEO has a lot of similarities with upper-funnel marketing:

• It takes time to make an impact
• It's difficult to measure
• It takes a specialized skillset

But... when it works. It really works.

And it's free.

Getting your results into the SERP for a relevant search query can be an extremely lucrative and efficient channel for your business. It provides longevity and can reach millions of potential customers who are literally searching for what you're selling.

However, SEO is a very hard nut to crack. It's quite mysterious and the goalposts are always moving.

I spent 4 years working directly inside Google and never came across anything SEO related. They keep complete separation between paid and organic search - which is the right thing to do in my opinion. No insider knowledge or handouts.

And to make it even more challenging, there are plenty of agencies and experts who claim they are the best at SEO. Many of who will gladly take your money and tell you to wait 6 months to see the results and then move on to the next...

So for this week's edition of Teach Me Marketing, I asked Travis Biechele to teach us how to do SEO:

I recorded this episode with Travis on April 14th and implemented most of his suggestions that night. As you can see below, the tweaks he recommended I make to my Shopify store helped boost my organic impression volume which have sustained ever since:

So if you're wondering what these changes were (and are too lazy to watch the video), below are five key technical SEO tenets of structured data that feed into search engine optimization.

Most of these are likely missed by Shopify site owners who are designing sites for aesthetics and not SEO:

1. Page / Meta Titles
2. Meta descriptions
3. URL structure
4. Header hierarchy
5. Body copy

Travis used these tenets to audit my site and came up with suggested actions to make within Shopify to make my store more relevant. I figured you could use this as a guide to do a quick gut check on your site and see if you're hitting the right content with the most relevant terms you'd want to show up for:

1. Update my page title from "Magic Pop Mic | Official Store" to "Magic Pop Mic™ | Phone Microphone for Digital Creators"

2. Update my meta descriptions to become more relevant by using more verbiage like creators, wireless, smartphones, and sound.

3. Fix my header hierarchy from being one that was optimized for design to one that is optimized for search crawlers.

The problem here was that the homepage was using H2 tags for my header content - because it looked nice. But H1 tags are some of the most important signals you can feed to these crawlers and my site was completely missing the mark.

So I updated the header structures of the entire homepage, feeding the crawlers a very strong H1 tag and followed it with much more relevant H2s throughout the page.

4. Update the body copy to include more relevant verbiage like microphone, digital, online, influencers, and the phone makes/models that are supported. These were all missing from the site.

He also pointed out that many of my images were missing titles which is a super easy way to get more relevant terms included in the body and header sections across all of the pages of a site.

---

With these foundational aspects cleaned up, I'm going to start building a process around creating content specifically for SEO purposes. I've found inspiration on how to automate this and do so at scale using ChatGPT and this method of feeding in specific markup instructions so the output covers both the technical and content needs that this strategy dictates.

​Here's an example of a blog post I recently published on how to become a YouTube creator. Since this product is made for creators, I figured this would be a great angle to get some incremental traffic. Notice how the post is nicely formatted, using H1 tags and inbound links to my product page - that was all done by GPT.

Now when creating an SEO driven content strategy, it's important to focus on both relevancy and the technical construct of how you write and publish the articles. You want to make Google's job of crawling your pages and understanding your content as easy and as simple as possible.

​

---

Thanks for reading! Reply any time, I'd love to hear from you.

​

Want to work together? Book a coaching or strategy session here​

​