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Using Internal Linking to Get More Traffic

In the second episode of our SEO series, SEO expert and founder of 180Marketing Jeff Oxford explains how to optimize your internal links to generate more traffic. While internal linking is not the most important SEO factor, solid internal structure will make it easier for Google’s crawlers to index your pages.

Jeff explains whether old SEO strategies like PageRank, sitemaps, and domain authority are still relevant in 2017. Separating fact from myth is the most important lesson from this episode and will ensure you’re using your time effectively.

Jeff also walks us through a step-by-step process for helping pages rank better and how to get the right traffic.

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(With your host Andrew Youderian of eCommerceFuel.com and Jeff Oxford of 180Marketing)

Andrew Youderian: Welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast, the show dedicated to helping high six and seven-figure entrepreneurs build amazing online companies and incredible lives. I’m your host and fellow eCommerce entrepreneur, Andrew Youderian.

Hey guys, it’s Andrew here and welcome to the eCommerceFuel podcast. Thanks so much for tuning in to the show today. Today, we’re gonna be picking up the conversation where we left off last episode talking about SEO. More specifically last week, we were talking about kind of on-page optimization, how can you optimize your metatitles and your contents to rank more effectively. Today, we’re gonna be transitioning to talk more about internal linking the site structure and technical aspects of SEO, and joining me to impart all of his hard-learned wisdom is Mr. Jeff Oxford from 180marketing.com and linkhunter.com. Jeff, welcome back sir.

Jeff Oxford: Thanks for having me again.

Andrew: Yeah, thanks for being willing to come on and do a bunch of legwork on the eCommerceFuel site. It’s been cool watching you go to work. So today, internal linking, we’re just gonna dive right into this. For people who don’t know what that means, what does internal linking mean and why is it powerful?

The Power of Internal Linking

Jeff: So with internal linking, the reason it’s talked about so much is if you go way back to what made Google so popular is their PageRank algorithm. And basically, what they did that no one else really did is they used the metric to see how many websites are linked into your website or how many pages are linked to your pages, and then kind of measuring the flow of this PageRanks throughout your website. So, your homepage is typically gonna have the highest PageRank score and then, category pages would be a little lower, and your product pages be a little lower than that.

So this is kinda what Google’s built off of. Now, Google’s really not looking at PageRank nearly as much as they used to. It’s kind of become a minor ranking factor with all the other ranking factors they have and how advanced they’d become. But it’s still important to make sure the website…any website is gonna have an internal linking structure that’s optimized, that makes it easy for search engines to crawl all the pages and index them.

And when Google’s crawling a website, they’re gonna look at the website from the user’s perspective. If you have pages that are very far from the home page, that it’s hard for users to get to, search engines like Google are gonna think maybe that page isn’t very important. So when we do internal linking, we wanna make sure our target pages that we want to rank well are as close to the homepage but are also getting links from some of our other most linked to pages to increase the PageRank for those types of pages.

Andrew: So we hadn’t planned on this but I’d love to do something kind of right off the bat, talk about some older techniques, maybe things that were out that were related to Link Juice, PageRank, all these different aspects that might be a little bit antiquated and see if they are worth or still relevant. So I’ll just throw a few out there and maybe you can give kind of a real…

Jeff: Yeah, sure.

Site Maps

Andrew: This is still important or/and just kinda gone on the way of the dodo. So, site maps.

Jeff: So site maps are great for making sure entire website’s crawled and it’s getting to all your pages. But, it’s not gonna have any impact on your ranking. So now in 2017, it’s really not that important to have a site map but just as a best practice to have all your bases covered, I’d still recommend it.

Page Rank

Andrew: What about PageRank, you kinda touched on that like the metric. I remember…maybe I’ve just changed what I look at. But two years ago, I’d look at PageRank for everything like when we were vetting new applicants for the eCommerceFuel community, PageRank was something we looked at all the time. There’s great stories that don’t have any PageRank and that can grow with paid advertising and so they don’t have to be having a big SEO presence. But if you got someone who’s got, let’s say a PR4 or a PR5 eCommerce store, that’s probably fairly a good indication that they’re most like…maybe they’re really good at black hat stuff, but more than likely that probably you’re doing something right in the eCommerce world.

So, is PageRank still a metric that serious SEOs look at or because it doesn’t get updated enough and you’ve got other metrics like maybe domain authority and other proprietary ones, it’s kinda faded away?

Jeff: Yeah, you’ve got it. PageRank was basically the number one DL metric in the early days of SEO, and then Google stopped update against much. They only update it maybe three or four times a year, then they just stopped updating it completely. So right now, PageRank isn’t user talked about at all, the metrics that everyone is using these days is Page Authority and Domain Authority. So Page Authority is pretty close to PageRank. It’s looking at how authoritative is a page based off the number and quality of links going to that page and then Domain Authority is just looking at the exact same thing but on the domain level basis instead of just one page.

Andrew: And those are kind of metrics that Moz puts out, is that right?

Jeff: Yeah, those come from Moz and then Ahrefs has its own metrics. They use domain rating and URL rating which is essentially the same thing.

Andrew: Is it just me or is the browser plug-in for Moz horrifically buggy and never works and takes forever to give you those metrics? Am I just having bad experiences with that or is that something you’ve seen, too?

Jeff: I’ve had the exact same thing happen to me. So I used Firefox. I think what happened is it stopped getting supported on Firefox. Last time I checked on their site, that you can’t even download for Firefox anymore. And then they have it for Chrome which works pretty good but it’s not as good as it used to be.

Kicking It Old School SEO

Andrew: It just seems super buggy which surprises me that it’s been buggy that long. What about PageRank Sculpting. I’m gonna kinda get maybe geeky here for old school SEOs. Back in the day, there was kind of this idea that PageRank would work at the analogy people would a lot is PageRank would work kind of like water into a bucket. So if you can envision a bucket and the bucket is any given page on the internet, and the PageRank that you have coming in, either links you have coming in are like water being poured on that bucket, the more links that you have or i.e. holes in the bucket you have, the more you dilute where that PageRank can flow. So if you’ve got a ton of PageRank coming into one page, and you’ll have one outbound link, it all gets funneled through the outbound link

If you have a hundred outbound links, then it gets diluted through all of those. People would spend, myself included, a lot of time like intricately shaping the links on their website and agonizing over how many links to put and using no follows which supposedly wouldn’t let link travel through there and save your PageRank. Is that something that people still do? It seems like a little bit that that’s kind of what we’re doing in a way with some of the internal linking strategies that you’ve been doing, that we’re gonna talk about here in a few minutes, but it also seems like it’s something kind of from a bygone era and isn’t as effective.

Jeff: Yeah, it’s funny because today…Google will say PageRank Sculpting doesn’t work. It doesn’t exist, don’t even worry about it. Now, if you ask a lot of SEOs that have done tests around this, they say, “Well, it still helps. It can still be used to improve your rankings.” So what I’ve seen just with my own eCommerce clients is it’s one of those things where you don’t have to go crazy like how many links are on this page, which ones we got the nofollowed, we have to put these links in iframes so they can’t be crawled. It’s more about just making sure that the pages in your website that have lots of links, that you’re linking from those pages to other pages that you’re trying to rank for.

So the general principle is still beneficial but I think going out of your way to nofollow links or put links in Iframe is a little bit excessive.

The Process for Building Internal Links

Andrew: Great, thanks. Maybe we can jump into the process. So like I mentioned, you’ve been graciously helping me with a lot kind of optimization work on the eCommerceFuel site. Specifically today, like I mentioned, we’ll talk about internal linking. So can you maybe walk us through, myself included, the process you’ve gone through on an internal linking basis to try to increase the traffic overall but very specifically, there’s about a dozen pages that we’re trying to rank more effectively for? So can you walk us through that process?

Jeff: Yeah, so like you mentioned, there’s about a dozen pages we’re really trying to push up and these are pages that we’ve identified in the past few weeks that have lots of potential search volumes. So the keywords that we’re targeting on these pages are being searched very often but they’re also tied to keywords that we wanna rank for that’s gonna bring in the right type of traffic. Just taking a step back, someone who’s searching what is job shipping, they might not be the best candidate for the form but if they’re searching something like how to get reviews on Amazon, that’s the right type of traffic we wanna bring in.

So, the exercise that we did before was finding those target pages. There was about 10 or 12 of them. And then what we do with the internal linking is I went to the site and looked at all the pages by links. So I wanted to see which pages in the website had the most linking root domains. That’s just the number of other websites that are linked into your site.

Andrew: Just to clarify, this is totally unrelated to the pages we’re trying to boost the rankings for. You’re looking at the entire list of let’s say, 300 pages on eCommerceFuel or this could go for any eCommerce website for that matter and say, which one of those pages across the whole site has the most links coming to it from other domains?

Jeff: Exactly. So there’s essentially two lists we’re working with. One list is which pages are we targeting, and then other list is which pages have the most links. And for the page with the most links, there’s a few tools you can use. There’s Ahrefs, Moz, Majestic. I like to use Ahrefs just because they have a very large link index and you get lots of great data. And what I did is going page by page, finding pages that have the most links, and adding links to some of our target pages whenever possible.

So, if I saw that, an article mentioned a website migration, I might link to the website migration article. I did this exercise across any pages I had a significant amount of links, and what that’s gonna do is, once Google see those links, it’s gonna move some of that link value to the target page and it’s gonna have a higher chance of ranking in Google.

Andrew: How do you know how much to do this? So for example, let’s say, let’s use the website migration page. So website migration was a page that we identified as one that we wanted to rank better for, and so it’s when we’re trying to boost up in the rankings. We have kind of a…let’s call it our arsenal of 40 pages that have a decent number of inbound links that kinda have link juice to share. Like you mentioned, I’m kind of repeating maybe more than I need to, but you’re gonna be…a number of those 40 pages linking to the website migration page.

How do you know…two things, one, how do you know how many pages to link to? Can you overdo it? Like if you do an…obviously, go for 40 pages, that’s probably gonna have diminishing returns and/or be counterproductive, but how do you know how many pages internal links to create? And then secondly, what’s your philosophy for using the anchor text to link to that? Do you super natural? Do you try to work in the keyword with some natural language in front and behind it? Maybe if you could touch on those, too.

Using Anchor Text

Jeff: So as far as anchor text goes, I’m usually not too concerned about making sure the keyword’s in there just because it’s been abused so much in recent years that it’s very likely Google’s not using it, as showing with signals as it used to. And also, my personal opinion is I think Google has become a lot more advanced to understanding what the page is about. So if you can crawl the content of page and then kind of asses like, “All right. This page is about X, Y, Z,” and you have a link from the page to the migration page, I think it will know just on a topical level if that’s relevant or not.

So I think it’s relying less on anchor text and using some more advanced things such as the general focus of the page. And then, your first question was about how many pages did you link to. Do you ever wanna go overboard? I think this goes back to the initial PageRank patent that made Google what it is, where essentially, the more pages you’re linking to, the less link juice flows to each page. And while it’s not as important of an issue as it used to be with PageRank Sculpting, I think in general, the general principle still applies.

So, I found 5 to 10 is probably a good sweet spot. If you got 10 to 20, now it’s gonna be a little bit more difficult because you’re gonna have so many outbound links. That’s what I usually recommend is anything below 10, you’re more than fine.

Andrew: So now, are you saying, when you say below 10, do you mean below 10 links on a page that you’re linking out to those pages you’re trying to boost or do you mean 10 independent links across our entire arsenal to that website migration page? Hopefully, that makes sense.

Don’t Overlink It

Jeff: Yeah. So just to clarify, in general, the more links you have, the less link juice is gonna go to each page. So if you have an article that has lots of links to it, I’d say within the article, you probably don’t wanna have more than 10 internal links and anything past that is just gonna dilute the value of each link more and more.

Andrew: Got it. Perfect. It sounds like is that…that’s pretty much the process right there. Is there anything we’re missing?

Jeff: Yeah. That’s the general process. There’s a few common opportunities for eCommerce sites and blogs if you want me to touch on that real quick.

Andrew: Yeah, of course.

Jeff: So, I’ve looked at a lot of eCommerce sites, and in general, there’s just a few places where people miss these massive internal linking opportunities. One of them is the linking to your most important products from the homepage. When I say most important, that could be your best-selling products, that could be products with the highest margin. But, from an SEO perspective, we really wanna look at products that are searched the most. One way you could do this is have a section to the homepage called “Featured Products,” or, “Best-sellers,” or whatever you wanna call it and then linking to maybe four to eight of your most searched products can really have a good impact on ranking for those pages.

That’s one thing that works really well. Then another thing is adding links to related products on the product pages themselves. This is very helpful for sites that have hundreds or even thousands of products and skews where it might be hard for Google to crawl an index, all these products, it has to go way deep within the website. Well, if you have these related links on your product pages, that can really help with the internal linking and make sure the link juice is flowing throughout your whole site.

Common Opportunities You Could Be Missing

Andrew: Interesting. One thing we were talking about was common opportunities either for blogs, standalone blogs, or if you’ve got a blog, let’s say on your eCommerce site.

Jeff: Yes. Similar with eCommerce sites with blogs, we wanna make sure that we have our most important articles on a blog sidebar. When I say most important, again, from an SEO perspective, this is usually gonna be the blog post that are targeting keywords with lots of search volume, where there’s really lots of SEO value and potential traffic to come to your site if these articles are ranking well.

So whatever your topmost important articles are that have that high-search volume, you wanna add links to them on the blog sidebar, that’s just gonna send one kind of link juice to those pages and make it easier for them to rank, bring in more traffic. Another opportunity is to link to related articles at the bottom of blog posts. So similar to what we discussed with products, how you wanna link to related products, same thing’s for blog post. If you have dozens or hundreds or even thousands of blog posts, having these links to related articles help spread the flow of link juice throughout your website and improve your internal linking.

And then another recommendation is also just to link to your most important articles from the homepage. So if you can do those three things and it’s really gonna have a big impact on the rankings for your articles and if you have some articles that are targeting keywords with high search volume, it can be a great way to bring in more traffic to your website.

Tools for Analyzing Your Site

Andrew: So, I wanna talk about a few handful of other technical SEO issues that people wanna know about in terms of making sure they’re getting them right. But maybe before you dive in to those, what tools would you recommend for being able to analyze technical issues? I know Moz, again, I’m a Moz boy. I haven’t used a whole lot else which is… some I need to diversify on. But they’ve got a tool that will go crawl your whole website, give you a bunch of reports and say, “Hey, here’s some of the technical issues that…” you know, things look good or you need to make these fixes.

Without much in maybe the specifics which we’re going to in just a second, what tools do you recommend for analyzing, kind of diagnosing, and being able to identify and fix technical issues on the site?

Jeff: I’d say if you’re a beginner and you don’t know a whole lot about SEO, Moz is gonna be a great place to start. It’s very user-friendly. They can find lots of opportunities. They can prioritize which opportunities really matter, which are just kinda nice to have things. So Moz is a great place. It’s meant for business owners that aren’t SEO experts and it works really well for that.

Surprisingly, Bing Webmaster Tools actually has a lot of great information for people that are looking for fixing technical issues on the website. So Bing Webmaster Tools and other place I’d recommend looking at. It has even more information than Google Webmaster Tools which is now called Google Search Console in my opinion. And then, if you’re a little more on the technical side and you’re comfortable with SEO to some degree, my two favorite tools are Xenu and Screaming Frog. These are website crawlers where you can just plug-in your homepage and just gonna crawl every single page in your website.

Screaming Frog, I think will let you crawl up to 500 URLs for free and then if you want a full site crawl, it’s like $100 a year or something like that. It will tell you any issues with crawling issues, duplicate content, basically anything and everything, it will find and help you. So that’s gonna give you lots of great information. But yeah, if you’re just starting out, I’d say Moz is a great place to start and then, Bing Webmaster Tools also has some great information.

Andrew: And Xenu is X-E-N-U, correct, is how you spell that?

Jeff: X-E-N-U, right.

404 Errors

Andrew: So maybe let’s dive into some actual technical issues apart from internal linking people should be thinking about. So, first one, 404 errors, how big of a deal is this? I’m guessing you could spot those with one of those tools you mentioned. How problematic can they be? And 404 errors, just to clarify for people who don’t know, I think most people probably do but it’s when you have a link that’s broken and you can’t find the page.

Jeff: Yeah, 404 errors, here’s the thing, if you just have a few on your website, just a small portion, then that’s really not gonna have any impact on your rankings. But if there’s a significant portion in your website like, you know, 5%, 10% or anything above 10%, that could start to have a negative impact on your rankings, just because Google’s gonna spend all of its resources crawling your website. If it keeps coming to pages that have 404 issues and they’re not found, it’s gonna provide a poor experience for the users.

So if it’s just a few pages here and there, you have nothing to worry about, but if it says you come a bit excessive, then that’s when you’re gonna run into some issues.

Andrew: What about the level of content or people not having enough content on a category pages like spend time in the past? Category pages are hard to put content on because a lot of times, especially in the eCommerce world, they’re just pictures of things. You feel like you’re trying to make up content. You got to worry about the content pushing the products down the page and then, kind of this all sorts of issues that only eCommerce storeowners would appreciate. But is that an issue if you don’t have enough content on the category pages and it’s just those images in the links over to the products?

Jeff: Yeah. Google has gotten better understanding what the page is about, but one thing, it still relies on a lot is just contextual content on the page, just having somebody copy, have a big impact on ranking. So I always recommend, I’ve seen this firsthand and I’m sure a lot of us who goes out there have seen that firsthand. But if you have a category page with no content and then you add around a hundred words of content, that can have a noticeable impact on rankings. If you’re trying to wrack your brain for what am I gonna put in this content, well, one thing that makes it easy is talking about the value propositions of your store or maybe the benefits of the product. You can talk about who’s it’s for, how it can be used.

So there are ways to use content to your advantage and that can help a lot. Also, one thing, one question people ask is if I have too much content, is that gonna push my products down and result in a lower conversion rate and poor user-experience? Well, there’s a few ways to get around this. You can put content at the bottom of the page, although that won’t have as strong of an impact on rankings as it would at the top of the page. So what I find works really well is maybe show a few lines of your content and then have a “Read More” button that will expand the content to show everything.

Andrew: I see. Yeah, that’s what we used to do at the Right Channel Radios and just two lines to turn people in there. Because then, if you have it totally hidden, you can get in trouble with Google. Technically, you could get in trouble with Google. But the Read More is kind of a way where you don’t have to show it all. You’re not gonna get penalized by them for trying to be sneaky but you can kind of balance the UX with the SEO.

Jeff: Yeah, that’s exactly it.

Duplicate Content

Andrew: What about duplicate content on product pages?

Jeff: So this used to be a much bigger issue five years ago back in 2011 when the Panda update came out and all these eCommerce sites were getting penalized for having duplicate content. And all that duplicate content was coming from the product pages because a lot of eCommerce sites are just using whatever the manufacturer puts because if you have hundreds or thousands of products, it just really doesn’t make sense to rewrite every single ones. So rather than doing that, they would just put the generic manufacturer’s product description just like everybody else so everyone looked like they had duplicate content. Everyone got penalized.

Well, Google since reworked their Panda algorithm so you don’t have to worry about getting penalized for having the manufacturer’s default product descriptions. But where it can be an issue is you’re really not gonna rank very well if you have the same content as everyone else out there that you’re competing with.

So if Google sees 10 stores that have the same product and has the same product copy, but one of those stores has taken the time to rewrite the content and make it unique, that one store is most likely gonna outrank the other ones. So I never recommend rewriting every single product page in your website just because you’re gonna spend so much time and energy and money, and the lift that you get from that probably won’t be worth it. But what I do recommend is apply the 80:20 rule or even the 90:10 rule here and take the top 10% to 20% of your products that are driving 80% to 90% of the traffic and those are the ones that you’re gonna wanna rewrite and put time into. That’s just gonna…it’s a little more scalable way of increasing your traffic and your rankings rather than writing everything from scratch.

Category Pages

Andrew: What about duplicate content in terms of category pages where you’ve got…especially filterable ones where people can come in and filter based on size or color or something like that? For quite a while, it seemed like Google potentially could ding you for that because it would generate, let’s say, 20 different URLs based on the parameters put in, different URLs with very similar content. Is that something Google’s gotten smarter about now or do you still have to make sure that you’re careful with that and you’ve got economical tag on there.?

Jeff: I’d like to say that Google’s gotten smarter about it but it really hasn’t. So many times, you see all these duplicate category URLs getting indexed. So for example, on a lot of eCommerce sites, you have the ability to sort and filter results. You can also show the number of products per page whether it’s, you know, 20 or 30 or 40. So most of the time, let’s say you change it from showing 20 products per page to 30 products per page, so that could change the URL and add a little parameter that might say something like “show equals 30,” or maybe you wanna sort alphabetically, or maybe you want to sort by manufacturer.

So all these little sorting and filtering parameters that you have are changed in the URL, but essentially it’s the same page. Well, even though to you and me we know it’s the same category page, every time the URL changes, Google’s seeing that as an entirely new page. You have all these pages that have the same content and it’s basically diluting the focus to your website within Google’s index and you have all these low quality pages that aren’t providing any additional value search engine.

So the solution here is using something that’s called economical tag and it’s just one piece of code that goes in the source. You’ll probably need to work with a developer to implement this but it’s a very easy fix for most developers out there. And what that’s gonna do is tell Google which URL is the main URL and that’s gonna be the URL that doesn’t have all this sorting or filtering parameters, and that’s gonna clean up all this duplicate content on your category pages.

SEO Friendly Platforms

Andrew: That’s actually a good segue I think to talking about which platforms are really SEO-friendly and have this stuff built in, because something like that…I mean you can go in and hack your shopping cart, maybe if it’s open source. If it’s hosted, you’re not gonna be able to. You’re kinda stuck with it unless you can hound the developers there and get them to do the fix on their side. So which platforms…maybe we’ll do the good and the ugly, which ones are the most SEO-friendly in your opinion in terms of shopping carts?

Jeff: I’ve had my own eCommerce sites, drop shipping sites and I’ve also worked with a whole bunch of different eCommerce clients on SEO. So I’ve had the chance to touch a lot of different eCommerce carts, and my favorite cart, hands down, is Shopify. They’ve invested a lot to make it very SEO-friendly. It has lots of great features. There’s really not that many technical issues. So if you get Shopify, you really don’t have to worry about having this whole in-depth SEO audit or diagnostics. It’s still beneficial but, out of the box, Shopfiy is very SEO-friendly, so that’s gonna be my all-time favorite.

Number two is gonna be Magento. So with little asterisk after the end of that statement. So Magento, out of the box, is okay. It still got ways to go but there’s a extension for Magento called MageWorx SEO and what that does is it basically cleans up all the technical issues that Magento has or at least nearly all of it. So if you have Magento and then you install the MageWorx SEO extension, which I think is like $150 or $200 around there, that’s going to clean up a lot of these technical SEO issues and make Magento a very SEO-friendly platform.

And then the third on this list would be OpenCart. This is what I use for all my own personal sites. It’s very SEO-friendly. It has lots of SEO capabilities and features, so that’s a personal favorite of mine. So those would be my top three most SEO-friendly eCommerce platforms.

Andrew: And on the flip side, who can you just strike down with lightning from above in terms of how horrific their SEO is?

Jeff: Yahoo store.

Andrew: I shouldn’t be…Yahoo store.

Jeff: If you’re on Yahoo store, it’s time to move.

Andrew: I think in general, not necessarily really the SEO.

Jeff: Gosh, it was great at one point in time but that point in time has been long gone.

Andrew: Awesome. So, Yahoo store, is anyone else that specifically…and I sound terrible. I shouldn’t take so much joy in website carts that have SEO structures. But anyone else that people need to be really careful on that platform or just stay away from?

Jeff: Yeah. Every single platform, it has its faults and you can usually get past it with a good developer. So a lot of the open source platforms, they might be bad out of the box but pretty much anything is possible. The reason I just don’t like Yahoo stores is because I think they kinda control it and they’re hosting it. You’re much more limited on what you can and can’t do. So not only you have not the best platform, but you don’t have much you can do about it.

Hosted Options That Get Two Thumbs Up

Andrew: What about the hosted ones where there’s nothing you can change? So maybe just name the three most popular ones, say Bigcommerce, Volusion, and let’s say maybe Spark Pay.

Jeff: So I haven’t used Spark Pay so I can’t speak to that. Volusion, last I checked, they really weren’t that SEO-friendly. I don’t know if they’ve made any changes to their platform since but they were using a very outdated technology which is Microsoft.net, all those .asp URLs. Unless they’ve changed something drastically recently, it wasn’t a good platform last I checked. So I’d recommend staying away from Volusion, and if you’re thinking about Volusion, go on with Shopify. Bigcommerce is pretty good. I don’t have anything bad to say about Bigcommerce. It’s a pretty solid platform, too.

Andrew: Awesome. Jeff, well this has been great. We’re gonna do a follow-up case study on this to kind of tie this all together and talk about how it helped, this kind of multi-week process that Jeff and I have been going through. If it actually makes a difference, you know, so we’ll show you the pages we’re trying to optimize for and the before traffic, the after traffic, and let you know what kind of impact, if any, this had.

So if you’re listening and if you have an eCommerce store and you need some eCommerce SEO help, Jeff’s your man. I’d probably say he’s a pretty safe bet I’d say. He’s probably the most well-reviewed SEO in the eCommerce private community in our service provider directory there. So give him a shout, 180, that’s the number 180marketing.com is how you can get in touch with him. And Jeff, getting excited to… You, of course like we mentioned last time, just launched linkhunter.com for link outreach and managing, kind of linking campaigns and SEO campaigns when you’re reaching out to people. You’ve got a big push for that coming up the next couple of weeks, yeah?

Jeff: Yeah. You can actually check it out and sign up now. It’s linkhunter.com. We’re doing a big push in the next month or two, adding some more features and make some tweaks to make it even better. So basically, I’ve taken all my knowledge about link building and put it into a do-it-yourself link to link platform, so it’s gonna be much more financially feasible and give much better results.

Andrew: Very cool. And I love the name too because the name, you kinda crowdsourced it in the community, right? Didn’t you ask to propose a bunch of names and have to go vote on them?

Jeff: Yeah. We had a few names like linkhunter, linkify, linkeasy, and linkhunter was hands down, the most popular so that’s the one I went with.

Andrew: Yeah, a good comment. I like that name. It’s a great name. Well, Jeff, thank you so much sir. We’ll be following up with a case study once we give this some time to kinda marinate and Google to get to work and I appreciate all your work and you taking the time to come on the show.

Jeff: Yeah, absolutely, no problem. Thanks again for having me.

Andrew: Want to connect with and learn from other proven eCommerce entrepreneurs? Join us in the eCommerceFuel private community. It’s our tight knit embedded group for store owners with at least a quarter million dollars in annual sales. You can learn more and apply for membership at eCommercefuel.com.

Thanks so much for listening and I’m looking forward to seeing you again next time.

 

What Was Mentioned

Photo:Flickr/Thomas Hawk



Andrew Youderian
Post by Andrew Youderian
Andrew is the founder of eCommerceFuel and has been building eCommerce businesses ever since gleefully leaving the corporate world in 2008.  Join him and 1,000+ vetted 7- and 8-figure store owners inside the eCommerceFuel Community.

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