SEO: Blue Ocean Blogging Strategy with Adam Bastock (episode 052)

by April Buencamino-dy

Adam is an eCommerce specialist who has been involved in all sorts of eCommerce over the last 10 years – from running his own Etsy store, to being the marketing-person at a series of eCommerce brands. He now focusing in on SEO and helping Shopify and WooCommerce retailers to hit their first £1m.

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Getting started in the world of SEO

Adam has done a bit of everything from Google Ads and affiliates, to building and breaking websites.

From his work with small brands as an eCommerce executive, he has found SEO to be 2 things: that it’s the most interesting of all channels for him, and it’s the one that drives the most revenue or return on investment.

Seeing quick results

Adam believes that the problem facing SEO is that business owners focus on it, but if it doesn’t generate revenue today, they’ll start ignoring it.

But not seeing quick sales may be because you haven’t put in the foundation or infrastructure to run that business in the first place.

The 4 marketing stages and when to use SEO

There are 4 marketing stages:

  • Awareness – people don’t know yet what they’re looking for
  • Consideration – defining the problem and the product to solve the problem
  • Evaluation – comparing different products
  • Purchase – people have identified the product they want to buy

Most common SEO strategies are focused on evaluation and purchase.

Adam suggests focusing SEO efforts at the awareness and consideration stages.

Benefits of doing SEO early

The benefits of reaching your audience in the first 2 stages is that they’re not typing more specific questions than they would be at the bottom funnels.

Applying SEO during awareness and consideration is also:

  • A great way to ahead of the competition because you’re not competing directly against them
  • Bringing your customers into your brand fold journey in a far earlier stage, giving you a chance to nurture them much better

Starting early gives you time to build trust and interaction with your customer and develop a longer relationship. This means they are more likely to convert and buy from you again.

Testing SEO

Adam says that if you are able to do it well, you can get results in as early as 6 weeks. 

The key is writing quality blog posts. Even just 1 post a month or every 6 weeks would be better than continuously churning out blogs that are business-focused rather than customer-focused.

Remember that a really good, sticky blog post can stay on top of search even after 3 or 4 years.

Blog post topics

Adam’s says open your customer service emails and start grouping them by common questions.

There is a gold mine of information in these emails where you can start extracting questions, then write a blog post about it.

One last SEO tip

Empathy is always going to win. Don’t write for you; write for your customers.

Insider Tips

If we’ve inspired someone to take their first step with SEO – what do they need to know to give themselves the best chance of success?

Be empathetic.

What people are looking for is the best search result when they’re looking up a problem, and if you are able to naturally write a piece about that, you can have more impact than just using so many keywords.

If you just write an article, a blog post, or a page that is genuinely relevant to the user, chances are, you’ll get fairly close to being a natural and well-ranking piece of content, without getting caught up in the keyword side.

Once you’ve started of course you’ve got to ‘keep optimising’! So what’s your favourite way to improve SEO performance?

Start thinking about your branded vs non-brand search terms which is a really good metric to measure.

Look at the different terms people use to find you. The top one would probably be a brand term, but in an ideal SEO-optimised world, your traffic should come from non-brand terms.

This means people who don’t yet know about you are finding you, and you’re reaching a regular audience of new people who aren’t aware of you.

If someone listening wants to learn more about SEO is there one cheap/free resource you’d recommend?

Crystal ball time – what’s coming up in the next 6-12 months that we should be getting ready for in SEO?

The magic words are core web vitals.

By June of this year, Google will begin measuring your website in terms of user experience such as load time, interactivity, and the visual stability, and start rewarding sites based on this.

Make the user experience of your website a priority.

Interview Links

Adam on Social media:

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