Rank or Die: The Future of SEO in a Zero-Click AI-First World With Jeff Oxford

Jeff Oxford is the Founder and SEO Director of 180 Marketing, an e-commerce SEO provider. With over seven years of experience in e-commerce SEO, he has led over 200 SEO campaigns for brands like MasterCard and Belkin. Jeff frequently speaks at industry conferences and created LinkHunter, a tool designed to streamline link outreach efforts.

Here’s a glimpse of what you’ll learn:

[3:05] How SEO has evolved to align with Google’s standards for quality content
[10:06] The top underused AI workflow for e-commerce SEO and how to create brand-aligned content
[14:41] Leveraging AI tools to optimize product detail pages with ranking data
[18:23] Strategies for ranking in a zero-click landscape
[21:25] How to improve AI search and visibility
[28:53] Jeff Oxford’s two-part system for building topical authority to rank content
[31:46] The impact of Google’s ranking factor leak on SEO strategies
[38:46] A case study of how a sports gear brand achieved a tenfold traffic surge through SEO fundamentals
[47:28] Ranking number one on competitive keywords
[56:50] Jeff comments on the future of SEO in an AI-driven world and why backlinks and authority still matter
[1:02:58] The most over-hyped SEO tactic
[1:09:29] How Jeff journeyed into marketing and his secret for smoking meat

In this episode…

As SEO becomes more complex, competitive, and intertwined with AI-driven search, e-commerce brands struggle to adapt. With constant algorithm updates, disappearing clicks, and the rise of AI search integrations, how can brands break through the noise and rank effectively without wasting time or falling behind?

According to SEO strategist Jeff Oxford, ranking for SEO in an AI-driven landscape requires more than surface-level adjustments. Instead, Jeff recommends leveraging AI tools to improve rankings by providing them with detailed brand and audience information, focusing on topical authority by answering all relevant customer questions, and prioritizing backlinks and brand mentions to increase domain authority. Additionally, brands should be selective in their efforts by targeting specific funnel stages, optimizing category pages over blog posts for conversion, and aligning pricing with rankings.

In the latest episode of the Up Arrow Podcast, William Harris chats with Jeff Oxford, Founder and SEO Director of 180 Marketing, about optimizing for SEO in a zero-click, AI-driven landscape. Jeff talks about ranking first for competitive keywords, his two-part framework for building topical authority, and how to improve AI search and visibility.

Resources mentioned in this episode

Quotable Moments

“Google just keeps raising the bar, and SEO keeps jumping over it.”
“In a world now where everybody's using AI, the bar has kind of been raised.”
“You want to have different tools in your tool belt for different tasks.”
“Schema is like using Google Maps, and crawling your webpage is like turning right at the tree.”
“If you're doing well in Google, chances are you're going to be doing well in Bing.”

Action Steps

Optimize category and product pages first: These pages often drive the highest conversion rates, making them essential for SEO success. Focusing on these pages ensures you capture valuable bottom-of-funnel traffic rather than wasting effort on low-converting blog content.
Build topical authority through comprehensive content: Cover every relevant question and topic related to your products to strengthen Google’s trust in your site. This approach improves rankings by positioning your brand as a true expert in your niche.
Use AI tools with detailed brand inputs: Providing AI with clear guidelines, brand voice, and audience details leads to significantly better content outputs. Without this context, AI-generated content risks sounding generic and missing the mark for your customers.
Prioritize backlinks from reputable sources: High-quality backlinks remain one of the strongest ranking signals for Google and AI models. Securing mentions on trusted sites boosts rankings and increases brand visibility and credibility.
Monitor and align with evolving AI search integrations: As platforms like ChatGPT increasingly influence product discovery, optimizing for these systems positions your brand ahead of competitors. Staying current ensures you’re included in new referral pathways shaping the future of e-commerce.

Sponsor for this episode

This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is a performance-driven e-commerce marketing agency focused on finding the best opportunities for you to grow and scale your business.

Our paid search, social, and programmatic services have proven to increase traffic and ROAS, allowing you to make more money efficiently.

To learn more, visit www.elumynt.com.

Episode Transcript

Intro 0:00

Welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris, featuring top business leaders, sharing strategies and resources to get to the next level. Now let's get started with the show.

William Harris 0:15

Hey everyone. I'm William Harris. I'm the founder and CEO of Elumynt and the host of the Up Arrow Podcast, where I feature the best minds in e-commerce to help you scale from 10 million to 100 million and beyond as you up arrow your business and your personal life. Today's guest is one of the sharpest, most battle tested SEO minds in the industry. Jeff Oxford is the founder of 180 Marketing, an agency that's quietly helped ecommerce brands 10x their traffic, and not with gimmicks, but with serious strategy driven SEO that actually moves the needle. He's been doing this long enough to remember the Wild West days of search, but he's also one of the rare experts who fully embraced the AI era. His annual SEO updates have become most must reads for marketers, especially after his 2024 report broke down Google's internal documentation leak, exposed what's really going on with AI overviews and laid out a playbook for what comes next in a world where SEO is getting faster, smarter and harder. Jeff's not here to sell hype. He's here to show us what actually works, how to use AI to scale content without getting penalized, How to Win traffic in a zero click world, and how to build topical authority that outlasts every algorithm update. So whether you're running a 10 million e-commerce brand are just trying to keep up with the chaos of search right now. Buckle up. You're about to get a master class at SEO from someone who's living at the intersection of data tech and growth. Jeff Oxford, welcome to the Up Arrow Podcast.

Jeff Oxford 1:32

William, thank you so much for having me. And I have to say that was quite the intro. Was that all you? Or was that AI assisted?

William Harris 1:39

AI assistant brother, man, I mean, you got to use the tools that are there, right?

Jeff Oxford 1:44

Yeah, that was incredible. I'm impressed. I hope I can live up to it.

William Harris 1:48

You are, you already are. I wanted to give a shout out to I typically shout out whoever introduced us, and in this situation, you actually had reached out to me, which is, I love that people are studying to do that now that I've gotten to the point where people like, hey, I want to be on their show. But I will say that one of the people that I wanted to talk to, because I saw you on his show, was Andrew Youderian and Andrew was on this show. And I was like, okay, Andrew is, is Jeff a guy that I have on the show? And he was like, undoubtedly, Jeff is a great guy. And so you've got a good recommendation from Andrew eComFuel there. So I want to give him a shout out to and say, Thanks for

Jeff Oxford 2:20

awesome. Yeah. Well, I'm happy to hear and Andrew, if you're listening, you're listening, thanks for the shout out. Yeah, we're

William Harris 2:24

going to dig it in a little bit. I do want to give a quick announcement of our sponsor. This episode is brought to you by Elumynt. Elumynt is an award winning advertising agency optimizing e-commerce campaigns around profit. In fact, we've helped 13 of our customers get acquired, with the largest one selling for nearly 800,000,001 that ipoed. You can learn more on our website at elumynt.com, which is spelled elumynt.com, Okay, on to the good stuff. I want you, Jeff, to picture this. I want you to imagine building the perfect piece of content, only to have it summarized by AI cited without a click and never visited. Is SEO dead, or is it just evolving into something far more complex?

Jeff Oxford 3:04

I'd say it's a great question. I'd say SEO is evolving. You know, Google always has its updates, and for the longest time, SEOs are just living kind of living by the updates that Google has. But Google has always wanted the same thing. They wanted quality content to rank at the top. They want the legitimate brands to show up. They don't want crappy scammers or need, you know, junkie affiliate sites getting up there. They want the true best businesses and content to rank the highest. That's always been their goal, and every year, Google gets just a little bit better at enforcing it. They have a new update that, you know, get, you know, we remember the days of, like, you know, black text on black, black background. Oh my gosh, yeah, the shady stuff. Like, you know, they got kid, they took care of that, that. And then they got, you know, they really cracked down on backlinks. And, like, you know, 2011 2012 with some of the updates, and we saw in these past three years, you know, that the latest things, like these affiliates, they're smart. It's this whole cat and mouse game door. Affiliates are like, all right, Google, you're gonna raise the bar. Well, now I'm gonna have a legit looking blog with really good content. I'm gonna summarize all these Amazon products and reviews and create my own best, you know, T shirts page, or whatever, your best VPN page, whatever it might be. And, you know, they know that was kind of the latest thing, so they what? Google just keeps raising the bar and SEOs keep jumping over it, but I will say we're finally getting the point where the bar is high enough where it's really hard to jump over it without being like a legitimate business with good content and good products and good user experience. Yeah.

William Harris 4:39

So SEO isn't dead. It's just that lazy SEO is dead, and it's maybe been getting that way for a while.

Jeff Oxford 4:45

Yeah. I mean, I Okay. I will say for content sites, like, if don't start a blog today. If you're listening to this and you're like, you know, I'm thinking, I'll start a blog. You know, I have all these ideas. Like, if you if that's your passion, go for it. But SEO for content sites. Kind of got shattered. These last two to three years, there's been so many big updates like the helpful content update and core algorithm updates, or even legit blogs written by true industry experts with great content, they're just getting demolished. A lot of that traffic's instead going to Reddit Quora, or, funny enough, it's actually going to e-commerce sites that have a blog. So if you're an e-commerce site, and you know, you have a legit, legit business, you're in Google, my you have a Google My Business setup, Google can verify legit business blog all you want. You're gonna do do well. But if you're just a standalone content site, it's, I mean, I will, I will safely say SEO is pretty much dead for a standalone content blog site.

William Harris 5:43

Do you think that part of this has to do with the fact that if you're a blog on an on an e-commerce website, Google knows that you ranking for these keywords likely means longer time on page, people checking out, actually spending money. If they're spending money, then that website itself is going to end up spending money on its ads, versus you just being a standalone blog, Google's like, ah, not that much in it.

Jeff Oxford 6:04

For me. You know, what I think is really going on is Google's been getting a lot of flack the past. Not so much now, because they kind of fixed it. But if you think like 2020 to like 2023 if you were to search, let's say I want to buy, like, I like smoking meat or brisket or things like that. And let's say I want to buy I like eating that. Yeah, perfect. We got to hang out sometime. Let's say I want to get a new smoker. If I went to Google and search best smoker for brisket or for beginners, page one was just littered with these junky affiliate sites that they've never seen the product. They've never touched it. All they're doing is going on Amazon, summarizing the reviews and the product descriptions no value, and that was just littering everywhere like the best content couldn't stand out. So I think Google finally just dropped the hammer and said, we're only gonna show content from sites we trust. And there's, you know, trust is a very ambiguous word in the SEO world, but if I was to kind of make it more tangible. If a site has a physical address, it's been verified in Google My Business, and you have a few, you know, ratings there. Maybe you have third party views on Trustpilot or, you know, reseller ratings that that makes it a lot safer for Google to trust your website and rank you higher versus you're a faceless affiliate site with no contact information, no phone number, no address, you're not listed on Google. My business, and I think that's kind of the criteria they set to rank content.

William Harris 7:30

That's really that's really wise. I think the other thing that you called out that's interesting is it's trusting sites like Reddit. More. Do you think that that's just because people have no filter there. And so the while it might have a lot of interesting content, it also just has very real content.

Jeff Oxford 7:51

I think part of it is, like, it's Reddit was harder to game. Like, you know, you unless you do a really big effort, like, if I just go into Reddit and I try, like, let's say I search Reddit and there's the best smokers of 2025, posts there, and I plug my product, I'm affiliate with people are really good at sniffing out promoters and spammers, and they will down vote you to oblivion. So it's kind of this. It has this kind of built in editorial effect where Gen not always, but generally the kind of the real businesses, the real products, typically float to the top, and the spammers and the promoters that are trying to manipulate it kind of sing to the bottom. So I think that's why Google put more weight into Reddit, is because it is good at filtering that out, and a lot of people trust it. They have a lot of branded search you know, a lot of people are typing their query and adding Reddit at the end because they want to see what people, real people are

William Harris 8:46

actually saying about it. Do you know how, when you're going through the airport, sometimes they make you, like, walk through, like, the little dog area, like, side by side, sorry, the dog can stiff if you get any drugs or anything like that. I feel like that's what it sounds like. Reddit is where it's like, Hey, you can make a machine that can maybe sniff this out, but a dog just does a lot better job. People still do a better job of sniffing out what's trustworthy and not trustworthy, versus, you know, the algorithm for Google. Yeah.

Jeff Oxford 9:11

I mean, that's that's a great way of looking at it. Like, if I write an article about, you know, best gaming laptops, it's just one opinion. You don't know what, if I'm biased or not. You don't know if I'm affiliate, affiliated with it, but if it's Reddit, and there's like 100 people all commenting on this best gaming laptops post, you're getting different opinions. It's more nuanced. It honestly provides a better user experience. Like, why would you trust me if you don't know me? Whereas if you have you know, nine out of 10 people saying the same thing, that's going to be have a lot more trust, and you're going to get a you're going to feel more confident in your research decision.

William Harris 9:45

I like that, all right. I want to dig into AI and SEO specifically. You outline dozens of ways that AI can amplify SEO, from content to code to link building. What is the number one? Underused AI workflow that you think people need to know about, especially for ecommerce.

Jeff Oxford 10:05

So what I'd say like, as far as, like, saving time and being effective, AI is really good with content production, and I'm sure a lot of people are already familiar with that, and they're using ChatGPT, probably, to create lots of content, but I almost never see people doing it right, and I see that the outputs that people are doing aren't the most high quality. And in a world now where everybody's using AI, the bar has kind of been raised a bit, where it's not enough to just go into ChatGPT, ChatGPT, and say, write me a category description for a Page That Sells gaming laptops. You know, garbage in, garbage out. Instead. You know what you want to do is okay, let me, let me make a Brand Overview. Let me, let me list out what's my target audience, what's my writing style and voice, what's the story behind my my brand you want to in chat cheap, if you're lazy, you can use ChatGPT for this. So let me just give you, like, a three step process for creating really good content. Step one, you can do this with ChatGPT, although cloud just launched a feature like last week for deep research. You know, ChatGPT has deep research. Cloud has it. Either one's fine, but you just basically say, write me a comprehensive Brand Overview for whatever your brand is. You know, for William, for you, it's going to be Elumynt.com, okay, ChatGPT is going to go look through your website. It's going to go look at all these mentions. It's going to pull all this information. And it's pretty impressive. It create a full brand overview about your brand, and look at the history of the story, your unique selling points, your target audience, you know, all this stuff that you're affiliated with, with. And then from that, you can also say, okay, great. Write me a writer. Write me some writer guidelines based on this Brand Overview. And then it'll give you that it says, you know, maybe it's more informative, maybe it's more casual and funny, maybe it's like we're having a cup of coffee together. You take all this great information, you go to use cloud.ai. C, l, a, u, d, e, dot. A, I it'll just cloud or cloud, I always get, you know, whatever it is. And right now, Cloud's 3.7 sonnet is the best for writing content, ChatGPT kind of still has that AI feel to it at times. You know, Gemini is better, but it's not there if you're writing content, use cloud. It's just, you know, battle tested and kind of notoriously known as the best. And you can create a project. And in this project, you can upload a text file that has your Brand Overview. You can now add a text file that has your writing guidelines. You can have a text file that has information about your products. You can add a text file that has writing samples that really capture the style and tone you're going for. You feed all this information, and then when you say, write me a category description for a write me a category script for a Page That Sells gaming laptops, the output is going to be on brand. It's going to resonate more with your target audience. It's going to include unique selling points. It's going to have actual product information in there. It's just going to be a much higher quality output. So that's kind of the biggest SEO hack right now. It's not just use AI, but use it the right way to create content. I

William Harris 13:03

love it. I even add for when we're writing ad copy. You know, if there's industry specific jargon or slang or things like that that I'm like, please use that things that it's like only this audience would understand. Right? When you talk about using Claude or chatgpt in these ways. I like that you called out the idea that everybody's using AI now, and so it's not really a differentiator anymore to do that, but like, a better workflow is the thing that's gonna level that up as well. I would even say that I'm taking this to using three or four different ones for the same thing too. So it's not even saving me that much time. It's just making the output that much better. But I'll take something maybe, like you said, I'll do the deep research, maybe with Gemini, and then I'll go from that, and I'm like, okay, draft me something here in GPT. Then I'll say, okay, grok, how would you improve this? And then I take that to Claude, and I say, now make this actually sound good, because I agree with you. Claude ends up being, from a writing perspective, significantly better at the writing. I think Gemini is probably the most logical of the bottles that I use, and the grok is the most unfiltered, which they all have their different reasons why I like using them, but I end up using, like, four of them, oftentimes at a different time, because I feel like, once I do that, now I've actually come to something that's really refined, that's really good, versus just using one and done, single, you know, simple prompts, things like that.

Jeff Oxford 14:21

Agreed. It's like you want to have different tools in your tool tool belt

William Harris 14:25

for different tasks, yep. Can you take me through outside of that? What is? What is another area that you have found that people are maybe sleeping on when it comes to using AI to improve their SEO?

Jeff Oxford 14:41

I would say, like, Okay, if we go to the basics, like you have, you know, pick typical page optimization, title tags, meta scripts and header tags, let's start there. Because everybody's, you know, you still want to make sure your pages are optimized. Yes, you can use it. You can do like, go to chat, GPT or cloud, or whatever your model is, and say, write me a title. Tag for a Page That Sells gaming laptops, and it's going to be okay. But what works even better? If you have a rank tracker with STM rush or H refs, or something else, you can literally just take a screenshot of the page rankings fee, you know, drop that into chat GP ChatGPT is better for that, because there's really good vision. Drop them to ChatGPT and say, write me a optimized title tag for this page based off the ranking data. It will look at the rankings, or look at the search intent or look at the difficulty. It's going to look at the the volume and position, and it actually does a pretty good job of selecting the best keywords. So, you know, title tags change based off what you're what you're ranking for. So that's a kind of a quick hack you can use. Is just, you know, spend the extra 10 seconds grabbing a screenshot of your ranking data and feed that into any AI model when you're generating metadata,

William Harris 15:48

I love that a lot. I feel like being able to use all of this stuff, then it gets you a lot of information. You still have to take action on it, right? Like, ultimately, you as the human being, have to take action going back to some of the stuff you're doing before it's like, you can do the research on your brand and on your brand, maybe even put together the SWOT analysis. It can give you all of this information, but ultimately, you still have to make a decision. Do you think that the people who are going to succeed the most of the next few years are those people who actually have the ability to just say, look, the data is never gonna be perfect. Make a decision. Because I find that a lot of times, even now, we get stuck with attribution and we're just like, I can't make a decision because of this or this. North beam says this, triple oil says this, GA four says this, Shopify says I don't know what to do it. So you do nothing. I believe that one of the most important things you can do is actually just take action that that is diagnostic in and of itself. Do something, see what happens based on what happens. Now you at least have an answer.

Jeff Oxford 16:38

Yeah. I'm a big fan of the ready, fire, aim approach, where it's just like, get, get, don't, you know, don't want to have paralysis by analysis. You want to just get something going and you can iterate on it. And honestly, when it comes to SEO, I think people get too fixated on on page SEO, like, they'll, they'll tweak the same title tag back and forth for months. They'll, they'll kind of go deep into the their site, make sure they have every, every page has, you know, alt text. And they'll make sure every single page is, you know, W, 3c, compliant. That is such and 2025, it is such a small part of SEO. I mean, if we're talking about the 8020 that's the, you know, that that might get you not even 20% of results. Honestly, in a lot of cases, 10% of the results. Because, you know, a lot of these platforms that people are using, whether you're on Shopify or like an enterprise platform like demand, where NetSuite, or whatever you're on, a lot of these platforms have become a lot more SEO friendly over the years. The technical issues that we saw 10 years ago aren't as prevalent out of the box as they used to be. So, you know, I'd say with when it comes to technical SEO, yes, make sure your pages are crawlable. Make sure they load quickly. Make sure they're indexable. Make sure you don't have a bunch of duplicate content issues. You know, you can use AI to optimize your top pages, but it should be more of a one and done thing. If you're spending more than two, maybe three months, getting your on page right, you're probably wasting your time and spinning your wheels a bit. Get it right once, and then move on to other things that really move the needle, like link building, content marketing and things like that.

William Harris 18:12

Okay, so that's a good transition into this. Let's say. How do you start ranking in a zero click world? What are the key fundamentals that people need to be doing. When

Jeff Oxford 18:23

you say zero click world, you talking like

William Harris 18:24

it's just showing up as well. Okay, let's say, yeah, the search results being part of this, right? It's automatically showing up there, or they're just going to, you know, they're using ChatGPT, that's zero click in and of itself as well, right? Is they're getting something. It recommends. It doesn't always give them the link

Jeff Oxford 18:40

to it. So I want to go on a quick tangent, because I'm not sure when this is going to be released, but two days ago, I think it was two or three days ago, on April 28 or 29th chat GPD just had a big update for to their search. Basically, they will not If you do keywords like, You know best smoke or grill, best gaming laptop, best compression socks, anything kind of like, what is the best they will now have, they have this integration. Will actually show you products. They'll show you merchants selling those products, and you can click a buy button that's going to take you right to that product page from ChatGPT, so going a little bit tangent, but AI optimize everyone's talking about a optimization, and you've got to be optimized for ChatGPT. And for the longest time, I thought it was kind of more hype, because ChatGPT is not giving us any data on what prompts people are using. I mean, imagine trying to do SEO without knowing the search volume of a keyword. It's going to be really, really difficult, but we know using SEO tools. How many people are searching for best gaming laptops, best compression socks, best shoes, whatever it might be, we can kind of extrapolate like, Okay, which of these are people probably most likely searching for in chat, GBT, and if this is the first path I've seen to getting you know real ROI on AI optimization, because if somebody. Goes into ChatGPT, they type in best smoker, grill, your products in there. I bet you're gonna get quite a bit of referral traffic. This is, you know, high intent, high conversion traffic. They're in the research phase. If ChatGPT is saying your products the best, I can almost guarantee you're gonna start seeing more referral traffic and conversions from ChatGPT in the next few months. Yeah.

William Harris 20:19

And I think that integration was more specifically with Shopify, too, wasn't it? Are they locking it out elsewhere? Yeah,

Jeff Oxford 20:25

I think they have a part. I believe they have a partnership with Shopify. So if you're on Shopify, you're pretty much already covered. You don't have to do anything extra, like you'll be eligible to show up. But out ranking all the other Shopify stores is another story. Then we can talk about a optimization a little bit later. Also, you know, open AI, kind of as a partnership with Bing. So I don't that, I don't think they've come out and said it, but that's true, if your products are listed with Bing Merchant Center, I believe, like, again, I've done some just like this already came out few days ago. I've done a little bit of testing. It does look like they might be pulling from some of Bing's data with Bing Merchant Center. So if you're, if you're, it's weird being SEO is becoming a thing again. Yeah, right, yeah. So that way you can get included. It's beyond Shopify or try to get on the Bing Merchant Center. That's

William Harris 21:14

intuitive because of the partnership that they have, like you said, with Microsoft. Okay, so how do we, how do we do a good job of making sure that we are showing up within AI search. So it's still evolving,

Jeff Oxford 21:25

but I'll just kind of tell you some of the best practices and things that are confirmed to work when you have an AI model, like chat, GPT, there's kind of two main parts of it. There's the initial training data, which is, they're crawling the web, they're taking all this information they're learning, they're using that to kind of determine, like, what's the best product, and what's going to influence their answer. So if your product is more prominent, you're mentioned in more places, and has more reviews and mention more Reddit, that's going to highly impact your prominence. And these large language models you can impact that by using on your web. So we'll talk about we can do on your website. And we can do off of your website. So on your website, use structured data, also known as, you know, schema.org, markup on your product pages. Have, you know the structure data saying what the product is, what the price is, you know, the reviews, the ratings. You can do the same thing for the home page and the organization. So get makes you have structured data in place. It makes it easier for these you for these robots and large language models to understand the page. You also want to structure your page as well. Make sure you have a good hierarchy of your eight you have one h1 tag, you have h2 tags. Have h3 tags. Don't include any header tags in your top navigation or your footwork. That's going to throw off the understanding your page, you can also do some blog and content marketing. Talk about your products, talk about use cases, who they're for, the benefits, why you choose one over the other. Just kind of general content marketing can help. So those are all things you can do on your website itself. But a bigger part is, what are other people saying about your products? What are people on Reddit saying about your products. If I go into Google and type in best gaming laptops, you know, is my product mentioned on some of these big maybe on some of these big hardware sites, my being mentioned, right? So Off Page link building can definitely help, because if you're doing link building and you're doing either guest posts and your product reviews or content marketing, you're going to be getting your brand out there. But you also want maybe just consider like digital PR, like, can you get mentioned on those big sites that have like Tom's Hardware? You know, can I get my gaming laptop mentioned on Tom's Hardware? Can I get my dress shirts listed on gq's best dress shirts article. So those are kind of the main things that's gonna really influence your presence in these AI models.

William Harris 23:45

So if I was gonna summarize those two things in like, a way that makes sense to my brain, the schema is the idea of, if, let's say that you launched a physical store and then you took all of the street signs down between that person's house and your house, like, without them knowing how to get there, they can't get there. The schema is the idea that's like, you've got the street signs, you've got a sign in front of your like, they know now how to get there. Like, the schema is, like, this really good, easy data for them to understand what's going on, what matters. And without that, that's like a base. Without that, it's just confusing for anybody, for a human being, for for AI, bot, et cetera, right?

Jeff Oxford 24:21

It's a great analogy. Schema is like, using Google Maps, them trying to call your web page. Is like, somebody trying to just tell you, yeah, turn right at the tree and turn left at the church, and it's like, it's like, yeah, I can kind of get the gist of it. But schema is like, this is it? No questions asked. I understand point. Three

William Harris 24:38

miles, yeah, 250 feet. Okay. And then on the the off site stuff, the way that I like to describe that to people is, and I think you've, you've talked about this before, a lot of like, topical authority. There's, there's one piece of this, let's just go back to the Google days, and then we'll go to the AI days, the Google days. There was, maybe, if a lot of people are saying something, a. Out you, then that's going to trigger your mind, right? And I would say, like, imagine if you and I were talking, and apparently you like smoked meats, and somebody, let's say 100 people, tell you, Will's really good at, you know, smoking brisket. It means something to you, even if you don't know any of those 100 people, it's just like, man, there's 100 people saying this. I'm going to take notice of that. And so, like, there's that piece. The topical thing would be if, all of a sudden, if you knew that, I or, let's just say that the person that you know who is the best at smoking meat, like somebody who's like, won the like, World Series of meat smoking says no, Will's legit. You should try his brisket sometime. You're like, it's only one person. But that person is very relevant. That person is topically relevant. They are authoritarily relevant, right? Like, those are the pieces going into the AI system. Those are still true. The only thing that's changed now is AI is not it's not human. So it can't see, taste, touch, smell, feel. It doesn't have that ability. And so the best way for to learn those things, kind of like what you're calling out Reddit or other forums, is like, where people are talking about that. Human beings are talking about their very real, lived experiences with that.

Jeff Oxford 26:05

Yeah, that it's like and, well, what's interesting with the way large language models work? If you break it down, it's literally just trying to guess what's the next word that should come next, and it's based on that, just on all these parameters across a massive data set the entire web. So if you just look at how large language models work, it doesn't really factor in authority as much. It's not saying this article is more authoritative than this one. It's just saying across our data set, when people are talking about best gaming lab or best smoker grills, Traeger happens to have that frequency the most. So it's when you look at large language models in the training data, I think it's less about authority and more about just prominence and occurrence. So that's something to keep in mind, but that's that's only half the equation. When, when I go into ChatGPT today, and I type in best smoke or grill, it's not just it's not only using their training data. It's also pulling real augmenting that with real data from the web. So it's going to go search best smoker grills into Bing, because it's part of with Bing, it's going to pull, you know, it's going to find these, these, like here, if I just do it right now, like best smoker grills, you're going to have these authoritative things from barbecue guys, Comm, Reddit, food and wine Comm, Men's Journal, some very authoritative websites. So it's augmenting, it's training data with real data. And if you want it to impact that, you want to make sure your products are listed in whatever being showing for the best smoker grills. And

William Harris 27:38

that's where the PR piece comes in that you're talking about to a point this is no different than what has always been true in marketing, which is, if you want people to want your stuff, you have to show that other people already want your stuff. That's kind of fair. And so if you can use the PR to kind of get that, the AI system is also going to be, let's just say, fooled by that potentially. But it's really just learning from this saying, okay, great, apparently other people that I research right now currently also are suggesting your trigger grill. So that's what we should go with. Yeah,

Jeff Oxford 28:05

like I said before, it's, it's weird talking about being SEO. I don't think I've had those two words come after each other out of my mouth and a long time. But you know, especially with this new update that ChatGPT had, where you can now it's going to list products and actually take to those pages. If you want to perform well in this new shopping integration that ChatGPT has, you have to perform well and Bing. There's no way around it. You can you

William Harris 28:32

break down your two part system? Do you remember you talked about a two part system? I think I read about this in one of the articles that you were kind enough to send to me that you wrote for e-commerce fuel, like how to find the questions to answer, and then how to structure and deploy content in a way that Google loves. And then, let's just say, by by, you know, association AI is going to love. And I think you're talking and

Jeff Oxford 28:53

that with that, you kind of talking about topical authority. Yes, so topical authority, for those that don't know, it's kind of this newer ranking factor that really became prominent the last three or four years in the SEO community, we started to see some remarkable case studies where websites can rank extremely well with very few back links. Lower authority sites just kick and butt out ranking. High Authority really trusted websites, and the way they were doing this is what we call topical authority. And if I were to summarize topical authority, if we take a topic like, let's say, you know, smoking meat, for example, and smokers, you know, if I, if on my website, I have blog content saying, like, you know, what is a smoker? What is it made of? What are the types of smoke, or how to use smokers? Who you what are the best recipes for smoke, smoking, you know, all, all how to clean your smoker. Just take the entity of a smoker and think of every single possible you know kind of angle that you can do on that. And what you're doing is you're helping Google build out its Knowledge Graph. It's saying it's kind of it gives it more, more kind of trust, of like, okay, smokers are made of you. Know, metal, steel, aluminum. You know they you know smokers are related to grills. You know smoke, the smokers are related to Weber and Traeger. And you make, you make all these connections between entities and Google's Knowledge Graph, and it helps Google understand, like, okay, I can see the relationship between a smoker grill and all these other things in the world, and this website seems to do a really good job of making those connections. So in short, whichever website does a better job of answering questions about a particular product will have higher topical authority about that product. So that's the first part of it. Is coverage. You want to make sure you're fully covering your topic or your product, or whatever it might be. The other part of it that people forget is history. You can blast it all out today. You're gonna have high topical coverage. You're gonna have no topical history. So another equation is time. You need it each takes time for Google to crawl all this. Rank it, index it, and be like, Okay, this site has been talking about smokers for 10, you know, five years or 10 years, they're gonna be way far ahead of someone who just started

William Harris 31:08

today. That makes sense. That's true for anything in life, right? Like time gives you just more perspective, more opportunity to have built out a bigger web, etc. Maybe this is, maybe this is off topic, but I feel like it's kind of similar to this, and maybe it's a little bit old, but I want to jump into excess of wait. I want to lead into this. So in the Google ranking factor leak, we saw that there was confirmed use of Chrome data engagement metrics, even sometimes, you know, author profiles. What changed in your strategy after that leak? And do you think that that's still relevant? Still relevant today, and let's just even say into the next three years?

Jeff Oxford 31:46

Well, I would say is the Google data leak kind of confirmed. It wasn't any like bombshells or revelations. It kind of just confirmed what a lot of SEOs already saw working. So for example, we kind of theorized that bounce rate, time on site engagement was a strong ranking factor. Google lead confirmed it. We kind of theorized that having a higher click through rate in the search results was a major ranking factor. The Google lead confirmed which, by the way, for those listening, one of the most important ranking factors is if you're showing up on page, one what percent of people are clicking on your listing versus your competitors? You know, for every position on pay, you know those top 10 positions, it has, like a theoretical, projected click through rate. If you're outperforming the click through rate for your spot, Google will move you up so quickly. So it's, it is a very that's the power of branding. You know, people click on brands. If you have a big brand, they're gonna you're gonna go up higher. So great point. So that that was one that it confirmed. And another one that's interesting is they had something called Site focus score, which basically looks at how is a website or an e-commerce site focused on one particular product line and product, or is it selling everything under the sun? And the sites that are more hyper focused on just one product or a few products, all things considered equal, will outrank sites that have a lot of other products and categories. So if one advice I give to people is, if you have an e-commerce Store with a massive catalog, but really maybe only 20% of 20% of your categories are driving 80% of revenue. If there's a business case to kind of consolidate your catalog, cut low performing products that maybe haven't sold in a while, cut low performing categories that aren't a direct fit with your core audience and you don't really need there's massive SEO benefits to doing that. Yeah,

William Harris 33:36

we've seen this. I know in content a lot. Jimmy Daly wrote about this years ago, I remember Tommy Walker wrote about this, like, a lot of people have talked about, like, this idea of, like, calling that content right here, like, you know, pruning that content back. And by doing that, by actually getting rid of pieces, they rank significantly better for all of the stuff that they left on site. You're saying. The same thing is true for product, basically, products

Jeff Oxford 34:01

and categories. And I'll give you an example. We had one client that's kind of in the health and wellness space. They sell pretty much every product you could find at CVS, band aids, ointments, creams, you know, pain relievers, just all, all the typical things. But really there's only four products, four types of products they cared about, COVID test kits, gloves like disposable gloves, incontinence products and masks like K 95 masks that were vague during COVID. That was it that, because they manufactured those, they had higher margins, and everything else was kind of just more having a full catalog to provide a good user experience. So I wouldn't recommend doing this unless you're consulting with an SEO professional, but we work together, and we cut every single product and category page that was not part of those core four lines that I mentioned. We literally took down over 90% of the pages no longer visible to search engines. And people would think that's like SEO suicide, sure. And in some cases, my. Might be, but their traffic tripled in 30 days. Really. They jumped up there. Actually, I think last time I checked the ranking number one for K 95 mass, which is a highly competitive keyword, and they jumped on to, you know, top three for a lot of their core things. So yes, yes, their site went down to just 10% of its size, but their traffic and revenue had a huge impact.

William Harris 35:23

Okay, you hinted at this, but why can you emphatically say, like, Why did getting rid of those products? Why did that raise their traffic that much, that fast?

Jeff Oxford 35:32

So only Google knows for sure, but I'll tell you my speculation on why I think happened. So it goes back to the site focus score that I talked about before, yeah, before Google's calling this website and says, Okay, this website's about band aids, ointments, creams, knee braces, you know, breast pumps. It's about all these things so they're dilute. It's the focus is diluted across all these categories. You take all that out, it's like, oh, this side is just about COVID test kits, masks, incontinence products and disposable gloves, and that's it. So they became way more prominent for just four things, instead of being diluted for like, 100 different things. Sure,

William Harris 36:10

sure. Out of curiosity, let's go back to the wish analogy. I've had Christian alone on the show here before. He's the one who grew wish.com they had a product for everything, like, way more than any of the other ones that you're talking about, right? Literally everything and every variant you can imagine, right? Like, they had tons of it. Like, let's just basically say this is Amazon in a situation like that. Let's just say old school me, I don't do SEO as much as anymore. I used to do SEO as well, right? So, like, I, I'm following a little bit there. Some of my stuff might be a little bit old, but the old school SEO me would say that user engagement metrics still played a really big part of this. And so if they see, Hey, you came to the website and you ended up purchasing something that's a very high intent person, they actually went through, completed the checkout. Google sees that if they come to the website, they they and they leave, they bounce after a little bit, then it's, it's a lot less relevant, right? If they come to your website and you only have a fraction of the products that you used to have, and so now they come here that I didn't find what I wanted go somewhere else, like, potentially losing some of like, those signals as well, not even like the pages versus somebody like wish, where they have something for everybody. You come here and like, you didn't and, like, you didn't buy something. And this is actually kind of surprising. If you had to pit something like that, where you're like, maybe in the medium range of products, it's worthwhile to prune it down to like, just the ones that are relevant. But if you have the ability to have everything, your Amazon, your wish, or somebody like that, do you think that there's still some benefit there? You're like, No, I think even they would benefit from probably pruning. So

Jeff Oxford 37:44

you're totally right that UI, UX, user, engagement, bounce rate, time on site, these are very important things, and if they're failing like, it doesn't matter how perfectly optimized your page is, it doesn't matter how many backlinks you have. If you have a high bounce rate, you will not rank period. So to your point, you have to make sure provide a good user experience. Now, if somebody is going to Google and they typing COVID 19 test kits, and you have a great selection, they're buying it, it might not matter if you also sell band aids, it might not matter if you also sell appointments, as long as you're probably providing a good experience for that user. But to your point, if you're, if people are expecting to see something that's not there and that's causing higher bounce rate, lower time on site that, yes, that absolutely will kill rankings. Yeah,

William Harris 38:31

um, what are some other good case studies you mentioned to me? One about a sports, sports gear story, yeah? What was the core that unlocked and drove that 10x surgeon traffic for them?

Jeff Oxford 38:46

So it's interesting. What I would like to tell people, you know, and I've been doing SEO for about 15 years now, it would be irresponsible for me to claim I know exactly what thing pinpoint it, but what I do know is, if I do all these different things in conjunction together, we usually see good results. So sports gear, swag. What I like about that case study, it's an example of just doing SEO best practices. So what do we do for them that got them such their traffic really skyrocketed, not just for low quality, high low converting keywords and blog posts for like, their products, their category pages, the high converting traffic exploded, and we kind of just went to the fundamentals like what make sure your pages are optimized. Have the key in the title tag, have the keyword in the meta description, have the key in the header tag. Make sure that your category pages have, you know, 300 to 500 words of good content that's helpful and helps people understand the products and how to decide one from the other. Make sure your content is optimized with not just your target keyword, but relevant keywords don't write. Don't just try to pad your word count with sales a copy that's fluffy. Make sure it's concise and actually helpful. Make sure you have a good internal linking structure. Are you linking to your category page? Are relevant blogs link into your category pages? Is your. Home Page link into your most important products. Do your products have breadcrumbs so that Google can see the hierarchy and can see them link to the parent category page? Do your products have related to have links to related products to make it easier for Google to crawl into your website? So that was getting the on page done right. And we also did a big push with what we talked about earlier, topical authority, lots of blogging, lots of content, talking about, you know, custom sports jerseys and materials, why you pick one versus another. It all these questions people might have. We made sure to answer it, and then also doing link building. So we did a few different things. We did like, you know, we do product reviews, we do guest posting, we create a scholarship to get back links from some universities. We had some discount codes that we pushed out to get links from like, you know, first responder blogs and military blogs and other types of online communities. So doing all these things, getting the on page right, building the topical authority, having a content marketing plan and doing link building, it all came together very nicely, and their traffic just exploded, and the revenue exploded. Yeah, the

William Harris 41:09

edu links, I remember those being really fun ones to get right high authority that was beneficial for brands. It sounds like to a point you're saying, correct me if I'm wrong, a lot of into that you're working with, let's just say a ten million e-commerce brand, they likely have gotten there mostly off of ads or, you know, something else, right, like some organic stuff, whatever that they're doing, but maybe not SEO, that when they're looking at improving their SEO, are you walking into these ten million brands saying, Hey, you're 90% of the way there. We just need to do these 10% or more. Or more often than not. Is it like you've got 10% of the stuff done that you need to get done, and it's 90% broken? It's

Jeff Oxford 41:48

a really good question, because the profile of what every site needs is different. If anyone's coming to you pitching like, Hey, here's Plan A, you get this many backlinks, this much content that. Here's Plan B. You get that. Just doesn't work in 2025 because every website is different. So how I approach it is, there's kind of four main buckets to see, and I want to assess what does the site actually need. The first bucket is page optimization, and that's just keyword targeting. Are the keywords in the title? Tags? Are the keywords in the meta descriptions? Are they in the header tags, are they in the content? So I want to assess that. And if you have a large catalog, there's a lot of opportunity there, because you probably haven't gone deep into your site to optimize all those pages. Next is content. How's our topical authority? Are we covering the main topic and entities associated with this brand? What's the strategy look like? Making sure we do our category pages have category descriptions, so looking at the content. Next is technical SEO. This is your traditional like SEO diagnostics, crawling, schema, site map, robust text, all that technical stuff. You know, what do they need? There? Is there keyword cannibalization issues? Do they have a bunch of duplicate URLs getting indexed by search engines? And the last port part is the link building? Do how authoritatives or website versus their competitors? Do their category pages and product pages have enough back links to compete. So we have these four buckets of SEO, and we have to assess, how are they doing in each one? So I'll give you an example. If there's a really high authority site, maybe they have a domain rating of 70, well known in the industry. We probably don't need to focus as much on link building. They have that authority. They've been there. But maybe they're on, like, demand where, or maybe they're on, you know, some of these enterprise PLA or ODU, or some of these enterprise platforms that aren't very technical SEO friendly, we might have to do way more work, structuring the website, fixing technical issues, creating content, optimizing the pages. On the flip side, maybe there's this site. They're doing 20 million a year, but they just don't have the big enough authority, because most of these come from paid ads, or no, that's that, or Amazon, or whatever it might be. For those kind of middle tier sites, we're gonna do a lot more link building. So it really just depends on, like, what's the catalog size, what platform are they on, and how authoritative the website. From there, we can kind of piece together a plan that's gonna be customized for their needs. It

William Harris 43:58

reminds me of, I remember going to the gym the one time, and I saw, as I'm getting ready in the gym, I saw some like a box of HO HO sitting in the trash can. And I just thought somebody gave up on their New Year's goals here, right? Like they just decided to eat the whole box of Ho Hos at the gym. To a point, if you are trying to get in better shape, maybe there's working out, and maybe you're working out five days a week, but you haven't fixed your diet, and so you're not seeing the results that you want. Or maybe you've to optimize your diet. Maybe you're even working out, but you go to bed at, you know, 2am every night. You wake up at 6am so you're getting no sleep. And so it's like, it's not one or the other, but it's like figuring out where are the breakdowns within all of these different systems that work together, and by optimizing the systems as a whole, you end up seeing significantly better results than just one plus one equals two, but it's one plus one equals five, or something like that.

Jeff Oxford 44:49

That That's exactly it. I can't tell you how many times I've seen store owners obsessed with having the perfect title tag, obsessed with having the most you know, oh, like, oh, we have a this. Page doesn't have alt text on this image. You know, they get hyper focused on technical SEO, when really they just do not even come close to having enough backlinks to compete. Like you're, you're putting your efforts towards something that's not going to get you where you want to go. And it's, it's, it's difficult, because a lot of people, it's, unless you've done SEO, you it's hard to make those distinctions. It's hard, like, am I focusing on the right things? And it's so important. You could be putting money and time and effort into part of SEO that you heard is helpful. It's important, but you're totally missing out on this other thing that you really do need.

William Harris 45:33

Yeah, I think that's easy for us to get caught up in. That sometimes, the way that I think about this is, when we're not sure what we're doing, we focus on the one thing that we do know. And so I feel like, I mean, I'm guilty of this as a CEO myself as well, or even just as a human being, where sometimes it's like, well, I know this, and so I'm just going to continue to just dig into this one thing that I know and ignore all these other things because I'm scared of that, or I'm, you know, whatever I don't want to look like. I don't know what it is, or anything along those lines. So I think, to your point, sometimes, for CEOs, remember to get out of the way of your own growth.

Jeff Oxford 46:09

Yes, I see that a lot in the SEO industry, because, you know, you can read it. We can read a few blog posts. You can watch a few videos, and it's really easy to spot on page opportunities. You can you can you can control the website. You can fix the title tag. You can add internal links, you can create the content. You can fix the technical SEO issues, but link building, it's the most difficult part of backlinks. How do you get these other websites to link to you? So a lot of SEO professionals just they take technical SEO and on page optimization, which should only be maybe two or three months, and they stretch it for like, a year long, like, Oh, now we're gonna re optimize this title tag, and now we're gonna go back to this page, and it's like, you're missing the big picture here. So, yeah, I do see that a lot, where people just stick to what they're comfortable with.

William Harris 46:51

Yeah. I mean, going back to the sign knowledge or whatever, it's like, you've got this amazing store, and instead of actually getting people to come to your store, you're out there on the sign. Like, I don't think that apostrophe is quite right. I want to make this just a little bit different. It's like, how about the signs good enough? You can optimize that later, but just get people coming to the store. Let's go to the next step. Yeah, 100% I want to talk about some strategic SEO stuff for founders on like, what actually moves the needle, right? So we've talked a lot of good theories. We've talked about some good practicalities, but what's the real answer to how do I rank number one for Best smoker?

Jeff Oxford 47:28

So I'll give you a step by step process. So first thing you want to do make sure you're pushing the right type of page. So for most e-commerce sites, okay, I can actually lose them out a little bit more. Make sure you're targeting the right part of the funnel. So if you have your typical customer journey, you're gonna have the awareness stage, the research stage, and like the purchase conversion stage. There's an oversimplification. There's kind of you can break out the steps, but in the awareness stage, you might see, like, what is a smoker grill? You know how to clean your smoker? It's like, there's no intent there. They're not looking to purchase. So what I always recommend is focus on things where there's some conversion potential, and that's going to be literally, someone's going to Google and typing smoker grill, smoker grill for beginners, Traeger, smoker grill like it's very clear that it's going to rank better, and that's typically going to be on a category page or product page. So if you want the highest ROI with SEO, you should be focusing mainly on your category pages, although there might be some products that are also worth it. Yes, you can go middle of funnel and do like, like you said, best smoker grill. That's probably gonna be a blog post, but you know, it's not gonna convert nearly as high as someone typing in best smoker for brisket. And you have a smoke, you have your category page there that has all these smokers that are good for brisket. Maybe they're bigger size. They can have more meats, whatever it might be. So start at the right part of the funnel. So let's say we're going to go for best, or let's say we're going to say smoker for for brisket. You want to have, you want to make sure you're pushing the right type of page. So always, always, always search into Google whatever keyword you want to rank for, and look at the search results. Is it mainly product pages? Is it mainly category pages? Probably not going to be home page or blog posts. It's usually going to be products or categories. If you see Google's ranking all product pages, don't try to push a category page. If you see Google's ranking all category pages, don't try to push a product I never hear people talk about this, but this is a big pitfall I see people use where they make they're just focusing on the wrong type of page. When Google's expecting something different, you don't want to go uphill. Go with the grain. So let's say you search your keyword, and you search, you know, smoker for smokers for brisket, and you see all category pages, great. Now you're going to push a category page. You want to have smoker for brisket in the title tag. You want to have a compelling meta description that talks about unique selling points and has a call to action. You want to have the keyword in the header tag. You want to have, you know, 300 to 400 words of content talking about, you know, why these are good for smoking? Biscuit. Talk about the materials, the size. You know why you go with one or the other. Maybe which brands you're gonna have like a little mini buyer's guide on this category page. Then what you want to do is you can optimize that. And here's a little trick you can do. Go to google image search, type in smoker for brisket, and they have that refinement bar across the top that shows all these related keywords. Google's kind of telling you what related keywords that they're associating with this so you want to sprinkle some of the those in your content as well, to make sure you're having a kind of more comprehensive piece of content. Then what you want to do is you want to internal links to this category page. So if this category page is really important, maybe you want to feature it on the home page and link to it there. If you have other blog posts about maybe brisket recipes or how to make brisket. Make sure those blog posts are linking to your smoker for brisket category page. If you have, yeah, if you have products, you know, like all the products that fit in that, make sure they have bread crumbs so they're linking up to this, you know, smoker for brisket category page. So now you got your on page dialed in, and that's really all there is to it the net. But the big part is building backlinks. So if, if you search on page one and all your competitors there, you know, smoker for brisket pages have, you know, five backlinks, 10 backlinks, 15, you're probably gonna need to have five to 10 backlinks to compete and get that. So you want to do some link building. If you're a manufacturer, maybe you just send your maybe you work with a few bloggers, send them, send them a product that they can test and get a backlink that way. Maybe you're doing some guest posting talking about how to choose the best smoker, how to cook brisket, and maybe you're getting a back link. So there's a few different angles you can take, but you want to get if you see the competitors having five to 10 backlinks, make sure your category page has five to 10 backlinks, and typically, if you do all those things, you'll rank really, really well for your target keyword. Yeah,

William Harris 51:47

that's a great summary. Let's say that CEO comes to you then says, Hey, Jeff, why aren't we ranking for, you know, number one meat smoker or whatever right now? Like, what's your what's your process to figure out why

Jeff Oxford 52:04

there's a few red I would say there's a few issues that I see that I know a site won't rank well. So the first one, and again, this is something I don't hear SEOs talk about much, but your prices can have a big impact on rankings. So let's say on Google, I search for, you know, smokers for brisket, and it's Amazon, it's like Dick sporting goods. It's kind of all these ones, and their prices are around, you know, 300 to 800 and let's say I'm selling a premium product that costs 3000 so let's, let's look at just, kind of, if you look at the the market for any industry, there's going to be a portion of people that just buy the cheapest no matter what it's called, 20% there's going to be, you know, on the other end of the spectrum, you're going to have your your premium shoppers. Maybe that's another 20% that they want the best. They're affluent. They're going to spend $3,000 for a smoker. Most people are somewhere in the middle. They'll pay a little bit more if they see the incremental value that they're going to get from that. But here's the thing, if, if you're selling this premium smoker that costs $3,000 and only 20% on the market for this type of product, what's going to happen to your bounce rate? Let's say you somehow got to position three, and Google sees that for every 10 people that come to your web page, eight of them are hitting the back button and clicking on dicks or clicking on Walmart or clicking on Amazon, you're gonna fly off page one so fast. So if you're listening to this and you're selling a premium product, just know that there's a chance SEO might not be a good fit. Your marketing dollars may be worth may be better spent elsewhere. I've

William Harris 53:37

never heard anybody talk about that, but that makes a lot of sense. I mean, you think about that with anything like cars, like Ferrari is likely not gonna rank number one for cars, right? Like anything that you're trying to do, it's so far priced out of that. So then, if you are going to do something, let's just say, outside of the SEO realm, on something like that, like you're wanting to do that, I would just give advice to people like you, said, ads could be a potentially good market for you, for this, if you're selling a premium product, because you likely, hopefully have the margin and the CAC to support, you know, acquiring a customer, and then there's also just becoming cool influencers, I think is a great way to use this, because they want to show the absolute best product. They want to show something that everybody wants it into. So if you're saying, hey, maybe SEO isn't here, this would be a good place to go. That said SEO is not gone. So how would you how would you optimize a website where you're the $3,000 smoker and you know, you're not going to rank number one for maybe the category of collection pages is this where you're getting into the blog content. Blogging

Jeff Oxford 54:41

can work. There's, in some cases, there's still going to be some keywords you can go after, like maybe people are searching for premium smoker, high end smoker, smoker, under three grand. Do your research. There still might be people looking for what you have, and you want to make sure you're owning those keywords, even if the search. Volume for those keywords is way less, the average order value is gonna be a lot higher. So there's still gonna be some value there. Yes, you can, you know, blog content. You can still create all this content and just accept that most of the people coming to read your blog content probably aren't gonna purchase from you. You're probably gonna have lower conversion rates. But, you know, you can still get some some value from it. Maybe you extend the funnel. Maybe you have some like lead magnets, where you know you have a article talking about smoking brisket, and you say, hey, enter your email. We'll give you our full guide, no full video course or guide or checklist or whatever it is for smoking brisket. And you get their email address, and then you get you remarket to them with Klaviyo or something like that. There's a few ways you can do it. But personally, if, if I, if a client comes to me and their products are, say, three or four times higher than what, what's the average? I typically just say, Hey, I don't think your money's well spent on SEO. You're probably better off spending on, you know, paid ads, digital PR and other marketing channels. Yeah, let's

William Harris 56:03

talk about the future of SEO. We've talked a little bit about it from an AI engine perspective, and let's we can continue going that way. I had Britain lad on here about a year ago, maybe or so, and one of the things that he said then, that I thought was very interesting, was that in the future, going to a website at all is going to feel like the Stone Age, like people just aren't going to go to your website. We're starting to see maybe a little bit more of that too. Like even Shopify is pushing that with their commerce everywhere. Social shopping, people will just be going right through your your, you know, AI agents get to the point where you're just execute right through your AI agent. You don't even need to click through. I think that that's very inevitable at some point in time. What does what does that look like? Then, from an SEO perspective,

Jeff Oxford 56:50

that it's very interesting like, if we go to like, I think the first question there is, are we moving towards a place where people on share websites and they just do it? And I think the analogy I'd give is we've had online shopping for a while, and even online grocery for a while, but there's still a lot of people that want to pick up the apple before they buy it. There's a lot of people that want to see it before they get it. So I think that, if I had to guess, yes, I think there's gonna be a portion that just they especially for like commodities, where you don't need to do much research, like use your AI agent to get you tooth based, use your AI agent to buy you batteries. I think that's the case, but I bet most people listening to this probably aren't in those spaces. They probably have something more unique, and maybe people are researching and want to learn about so if I had to guess for stuff like that. What I'm seeing is, AI is kind of more of a data point and the search process and the research process, but it's not the the ending that kind of, it's not the entire journey in itself. So I still think that there's going to be people going to websites to actually like I want, I want to see more of the photos. I want to read about it. I want to whatever it might be, and who knows, maybe AI in these large language models are going to get there where I can just use chat GBT, and it's going to pull it's going to have videos and photos and everything, one place like that. That could happen. But I'd say it's, it's, it's too early to tell and to kind of make big changes to your marketing efforts on something to prepare for, but I wouldn't say we're at the stage yet where it's kind of worth optimizing for something that may or may not happen. I

William Harris 58:33

like the way that you worded that, where it's like, maybe, maybe in the future, but like, think about it with, let's just say, driverless cars, even a decade when some of this stuff was starting to come out, you know, people could say like, oh, this is going to happen within a decade. And it's like, we still might be a ways away from this becoming ubiquitous, and not even so much because of user adoption. Let's say that user adoption were, was willing to be there. Let's say prices are there, etc. There still might be legal things that block that policy that blocks it. So I think, to your point, there may be things that prevent that from becoming a reality quickly enough. And so if you're in an e-commerce space, it's like, well, that might not happen for more than a decade from now. So, you know, right now, optimize for what you have, and

Jeff Oxford 59:14

it kind of touches what's you know, I'm sure a lot of people, listeners are wondering, like, is SEO even going to be a thing in five years? Like, are people going to use Google and search for things and go to my website? Or is everyone just going to use ChatGPT, because if nobody searches in Google, SEO is dead. SEO no longer exists. It's all AI optimization and these other marketing channels. But what's what's interesting is, you know, SC like, Google just had their, their quarterly investor the quarterly financials come out a few weeks ago, and one thing I was looking I always look at this because it kind of gives you an indicator of how well search is actually doing. Their revenue from search was up about 12% let me get make sure. About 10% and q1 2025, versus q1 2024, so when people say SEO is dying, it's not there. The one metric that I'm looking at most is what's coming from Google's earning reports, and is revenue from Google Search higher or lower? Because if people stop searching, that's going to be less clicks on ads. It's going to be less revenue, but it's still increasing. So for now, we're still seeing that upward momentum. You know, who knows what it's gonna look like in 26 or 27 but it hasn't flatlined yet. It's still growing. So you know, it's definitely worth keeping an eye on changes and with AI and like what we talked about earlier, with ChatGPT, adopting this Google search, this search integration and product integration like it's good to be aware of those and capitalize on it, but we're still seeing massive amounts of people searching in Google and buying products based off that. I would

William Harris 1:00:52

say to your point, the things that you need to do to optimize for AI search are the same things that you basically need to do for optimizing for Google search. And so if you continue to do good SEO, which is, let's just say, making up 90% of your traffic, of your search traffic, then you're still positioned well for being in the right place for when and if AI search were to take over larger share of that. Yeah.

Jeff Oxford 1:01:15

And if you're doing good in Google Search, you're probably doing good in Bing search, which is also going to be pulled into chat, GPT, right?

William Harris 1:01:21

That's fair, although maybe make double check. What is it your Bing Webmaster Tools, right? Is it even called that anymore? I don't remember. Yeah, maybe double check that. Dust that off again. It's like, Oh, yeah. Haven't logged into this

Jeff Oxford 1:01:31

in a year? Yeah, get, get your bases covered. Make sure there's no big red flags. But you know, if you're here's the thing, if you're doing well in Google, chances are probably going to be doing well in being

William Harris 1:01:41

Yeah, what's the number one thing that you think brands should do to protect their SEO future? Then, irrespective of anything that could happen, number one

Jeff Oxford 1:01:50

thing they can do just kind of build like a SEO moat around them. And is that what you're kind of getting at? Yeah, yep, the biggest differentiator is just the authority of a website and how many backlinks like he can so many websites can have really good on page SEO and good content and no technical SEO issues. But what really separates the sites is how authoritative is it? How many other sites are linking to them? And

William Harris 1:02:12

what's beautiful again, is that that authoritativeness means that you're getting mentioned in other articles, and that means that you're likely increasing the llms understanding of wanting that to be the next right word, too. Yeah, if

Jeff Oxford 1:02:26

you like, if you're doing product reviews and you're getting your products in the hands of all these bloggers, and they're writing about it, and then ChatGPT updates their training data on the whole web, and they see, oh, wow, there's all these mentions of this that's gonna just based on how the technology works, that will have a positive impact on these large language models and how often they mention

William Harris 1:02:47

you? Yeah, you mentioned title tags before. So aside from that, what's the most over hyped SEO tactic that you're just like, just, please stop making this such a big deal. A lot of

Jeff Oxford 1:02:58

things related to tactical SEO is very over hyped. So I'll throw it and then some of these might be controversy. Controversial, and I'll happily debate anyone on this, but good XML site maps, I don't think matter at all. Everyone gets hung up on XML site maps. It was important in the early days when Google's crawler capabilities wasn't as strong as it as it is now. But Google's not really relying on your XML site map. It's relying more on your internal links on your website to find things, and if you have a page that's an orphan, meaning there's no way to navigate to it on your site, maybe from a technical issue, or you just forgot that internal link. Even if it's on your XML site map, it's probably not going to rank very well. So XML site maps really aren't that important. What again, what focuses what matters more is your internal linking structure. Site Speed, I think, is overrated. A lot of people get hung up on site speed. What I'll say is, as long as your site doesn't load slow, it's fine. So like, if your site takes 10 seconds to load, yeah, that's gonna kill your rankings more so because it's providing a poor user experience, but going from two seconds to one second. Honestly, it's probably not going to make any difference with your SEO. And a lot of people, you know, they'll plug their website into Page Speed Insights. They'll look at the core web vitals, look at that mobile score and like, yell at their developer because it's so bad. The we have to accept that as e-commerce sites, we need a lot more functionality that a content site doesn't need we need to have live chat, we need to have Klaviyo pixels, we need to have heat map tool. There's all these different things that we need just a WordPress site doesn't so don't worry if your core web vitals aren't perfect, don't obsess about that page speed, Insight score, as long as when you go incognito and you visit your site and it loads decently and provides a good user experience. That's it. That's all that matters with site speed. I love hearing

William Harris 1:04:47

you say that as an SEO because I say that to clients all the time who will say something like, you know, I remember one client basically coming to me it's like, I think that my developer is screwing me over. Like, I can't believe. This. Look at what this independent audit from McKinsey, or whoever just did on my website, and they said that, you know, this is where I'm at for my page speed. And blah, blah, blah. And I said, Okay, great. And I just go over there, and I'm like, here's Nike's, like, you're actually a little bit ahead of them. Here's this one. And it's like, to your point, like, the if you want to just a static HTML page. Fine, you'll be really fast, right? But the reality is, you need that rich dynamic and so don't sacrifice user experience for just some raw, blanket metric. Because to to we talked about this earlier, if people come to your website and they don't purchase that's a much stronger signal, potentially, to Google than your site speed, as long as it's not, you know, blatantly horrible. Yeah,

Jeff Oxford 1:05:44

it gets it definitely gets overblown. A lot in the SEO industry, people obsess about it. It goes back to, we say, some people like to just stick with things in their comfort zone, and site speeds in their comfort zone. So that's, that's another thing, just kind of related. But what I see a lot of people do, especially with e-commerce platforms, they get shiny object syndrome, where everyone is like, Oh, I have to be on shop everyone's on Shopify. I have to be on Shopify that's more SEO friendly, or I have to be on big commerce, or whatever it is, but I like, I've yet to find an e-commerce platform that is not SEO friendly or cannot be made SEO friendly. And changing platforms, it's so expensive, and not just the cost of rebuilding the entire site, but just the hours that you could be spending other things, rather than project managing this thing and approving things and providing feedback, that the only time I see it makes sense is if you're spending, you know, 10s of 1000s of dollars a year on custom development, because you're on this outdated platform where everything needs to be custom developed. But Shopify has an app that you can just install in seconds, that's there's the ROI case for but thinking that going to new platform is going to solve your SEO issues, or even thinking that an entirely new design is kind of getting a little outside of SEO, talking about design in UX, you know, throwing out your entire theme and website starting from scratch, there's no guarantees it's gonna be better. You'd be surprised how many times gut instincts are wrong, and just because it looks nicer doesn't mean it converts nicer. So I always recommend do iterative AB testing instead of just throwing everything out and starting with a fresh theme.

William Harris 1:07:18

Yeah, completely agree. I will say on the RE platforming. Did re platform from Magento to Shopify? Plus, this was back in, like 2015 back before Shopify. Plus even had a booth at IRCE, which IRC, I think, didn't exist, and now it does again. So like we're talking about a while ago, but we

Jeff Oxford 1:07:37

again. I know it was IRCE and they changed to something else.

William Harris 1:07:41

I think it was like, r i, c e, I think it's back to R, C, E, maybe, but, yeah, I don't know. I can't keep track of it anymore, but we, we re platformed at the time because we had enough people writing into us saying that they couldn't complete their checkout. And it's like, if somebody actually takes the time to say they can't complete their checkout, how many more people are struggling with that? And I believe that one of the biggest reasons why we ended up ranking significantly better than after that was simply because people were able to continue to finish through that checkout, and that being a really strong indicator to to Google. And so sometimes it is the right thing, more often than not, I agree with you. It's not 100

Jeff Oxford 1:08:15

is Yeah. So as long as you can do what you need and just not costing a lot and like upkeep, with your platform. Yeah,

William Harris 1:08:23

okay, one more. Then when I get into the personal side of Jeff Oxford here, what's the favorite weird keyword that you've ranked for? Is there something you've ranked for? Like, this is so bizarre. I can't believe that we're ranking for this. Gosh,

Jeff Oxford 1:08:34

sometimes you get, like, not at my company, but early in my career, I was working with another agency and I had a client who was doing penny stocks. It was the most shady engagement I ever had to deal with. Every he would never stop. We weren't allowed to call him. Every call. Would have to be on Skype. He had a fake name. He was he was a highest paying client. He's paying like 10 grand a month for SEO Help for trying to rank for penny stock keywords. And, yeah, he had, like, a fake name on Skype every single time he paid came from a different bank account and, but, yeah, that was an interesting one.

William Harris 1:09:12

That is crazy. Okay, I want to get into more of the person who is Jeff Oxford. I want to know you know your likes and dislikes and things. But I want to start with your journey for want any marketing, because I understand that you have an interesting journey that led you to starting this.

Jeff Oxford 1:09:29

Yeah, so it's there's a few places where it happened. First off, my dad had a advertising company. I'm gonna go even further back. My grandfather had a publishing printing company doing like, typography with like, you know, the bit like working at almost like a paper, where you're doing the letterhead and things like that. And then my dad kind of took where he started and brought it to the digital age with computers and doing logos and branding and brochures, and back when brochures were a thing and but then. Like, it started evolving further, and now I started getting to SEO. And he's like, Hey, Jeff, this is SEO. This is back in like, 22,009 it's like, This is Seo thing. I don't really understand it. You spend a lot of time at your computer, video games. Maybe you can figure this out. So I read about, I guess get, I get hooked, like, I get so fascinated by you, the fact you can do these things and you can see your ranks go rank go up higher. It's kind of like it triggered the video game part of my brain where I can see my score go up. So I got hooked on that, and I started helping him with his clients. And then I'm like, You know what I'm gonna I see? This is back in like 2011 I'm like, I want to make some money doing this. Like, I don't want to just be helping other people. So I start fresh out of college, I started a drop shipping site, drop shipping beer pong tables, which, if you're not familiar with beer pong it's a popular American drinking game at college parties, we throw a ping pong ball into a cup of beer. I think

William Harris 1:10:51

everybody's familiar with

Jeff Oxford 1:10:54

that. So did that realize that people aren't there's not a big market for beer pong tables. I was Rankin top three, and I wanted to go to something that had more opportunities. So I sold that to a manufacturer, and then I decided to launch a 3d printing site. This is back in 2012 now, where D printers were all the hype, and they're coming out, and people are talking about, this is the future. Every home is gonna have a 3d printer. My first month I was doing I was ranking really well, and I got, like, again, I'm like, 25 at the time. I got $30,000 in sales, and I was stoked. I'm like, I'm gonna be rich. I'm gonna I'm killing it. Next month, I start getting these chargeback issues. I start getting chargeback after chargeback. Turns out 90% of those sales were all chargebacks. I had already sent the product to the customer. I had already done this. So every chargeback, I lost about two grand, and I'm just seeing my bank account, like going down, it wiped out all my savings, any money that I had, I'm gone, and it put a really bad taste in my mouth, and I'm like, You know what? I enjoy SEO. I enjoy marketing for e-commerce sites. I don't enjoy the customer service and the, you know, the inventory and the shipping and all these other things. I'm just gonna stick to what I like. And from there, I walked away from my my e-commerce sites, and I just went all in on e-commerce SEO. And this was back in 2012 so I've been working exclusively on e-commerce, SEO now for about 13 years.

William Harris 1:12:25

I think it's so good to recognize the thing that you enjoy and say, this is the thing that I actually want to do. Though, too often we say, I want to do this, I want to do that, and we get into there and, like, we only enjoy 1% of whatever that is, yeah. So it's like, why not actually just find the thing that you really enjoy and dig into that. I think that's really

Jeff Oxford 1:12:42

cool. All the more I could see that. I could see the fact that these drop shipping sites were going out like the margins were getting squeezed. You know, you pretty much had to house inventory and, you know, even white label. And I just, I saw the path and how much work was required. I'm like, I'm good. I'm just gonna help people on how to do it.

William Harris 1:13:03

What about hobbies? Do you like to smoke meat? We brought that smoking meat a lot here today. I

Jeff Oxford 1:13:11

got into about two years ago. I it's kind of funny. I make a brisket every week, so like every week, maybe that's why it's so fresh in my mind. I'm probably gonna have brisket right after this for lunch. After this for lunch, but I love it. I try to eat healthy. It's a high protein diet, and I know I'm also kind of lazy. So what I'll do is I'll smoke a whole brisket on like Sunday, and then, you know, I chop it up, I put into Tupperware, and then I now a meal prep for the whole week. I

William Harris 1:13:41

love it. Do you get up at like 3am to make this brisket? I've

Jeff Oxford 1:13:45

done it a few times, but I'm, I'm more of a, you know, I'll let it rest overnight, sure, before doing meal prep now, yeah, I got, you know, I got two little girls, age four and one. I think I'm done with the waking up early when you don't have to stage, yeah,

William Harris 1:14:01

because they wake you up quite early enough, as it is. That's amazing. I have three girls I can completely relate to that. Mine are things with the age where I can sleep again, because they actually I have to wake them up now, right? So I've got 1512, and nine, and it's more like it's time to wake up. It is Saturday at 10am get out of bed. That's good. So, okay, so you like to smoke meat. You like smoked brisket outside of, let's say, What is your secret? What is your secret sauce to a good brisket? I'm

Jeff Oxford 1:14:32

still trying to figure that out. But what you know? I, I'm just kind of trying to follow what all the experts are doing. You know? I, I first see, I put in salt and pepper, Texas style. Then I have a really good rub that I put in. Addition to that, put it in, you know, low and slow at 225 until it's got no nice smoky crust. And then I'll increase the temperature to, like, 275 and I always finish it and so. Wrap it in butcher paper that has, like wagyu tallow, just to get an extra tender and moist. And then I'll kind of finish in the oven. And then sometimes I'll even just kind of let it rest in like 170 degrees overnight to get it even more tender. So yeah, it tastes great. It's pretty healthy, and it's easy. So it checks a lot of my boxes when I'm looking for food

William Harris 1:15:21

I need you after this, remind me, I'm going to send you some stuff here. Buddy of mine, Mike Steele, runs barbecue champs Academy, where he literally, I talked about the World Series of grilling that's a thing where, like, you can win, like so many, like, of these grilling competitions. And he has all of these guys who are, like, Master grillers, explaining, like, how they win these competitions, exactly what they're doing. So I would love really good I will say that you outside of grilling, are there any quotes that you live by? You've got two young girls now. You said two. It's like, is there a quote? You're like, this is a thing that I say often, and maybe you're not saying it to them yet, but you say it often enough to

Jeff Oxford 1:15:57

yourself, there's something that come to mind the business world, and I'll see that come in my personal life, but business wise, you know, if you're not growing, you're dying, you know. And kind of, kind of with that is, you can coast, but you can only Coast downhill. So like, if you kind of feel like you're just going for No, we're just gonna take things easy. We're not gonna push into new initiatives. Like, yeah, well, your competitors are, so you're, you might be falling behind. I live by the 8020 rule. I think you know what I always tell people with SEO is, anybody can optimize it, like I told people on this podcast, everyone here knows that's listening. Can easily optimize a page and get good results. But how do you scale that process for a site that has 1000s upon 1000s? How do you choose which pages really matter? How do you choose which pages build backlinks to? It's the scale, scaling things that separates the great SEOs from the good SEO and that all comes down to the 8020 rule, focusing on that 20% of products and categories that drive 80% of your revenue.

William Harris 1:16:53

I love it. I'm a big fan of the 8020 rule, the Pareto Principle. I The Bell Curve is, let's just say, similar in that idea as well. And I reference that all the time with my daughters, who are at the point where it's like, okay, I want you to see how this all fits in here. And so in order for you to go from 95% to 98% it means this significant amount of exorbitant or maybe you're saying 95% is good in this area, because I still also want to be good at this other thing too, right? And so you're saying, Yeah, you have to do this. I see this on, let's see, on the search side, on paid ad side, with impression share right, where somebody's like, Oh, we're 98% for our brand. How do we be 100% and it's, well, you can, you know, for $1,000 a click, you could pretty much be there, and even still, then you might not be right. But yeah, there's a limit to that. When you're not working, what do you like to do outside of smoking meat

Jeff Oxford 1:17:45

with between the business and the two girls and family, I get about an hour a night. Yeah, that every time, maybe, you know, not two hours on weekend I'm not smoking honestly, it's kind of nerdy, but I've always, you know, I was a gamer in the past, and now, instead of games like, what I spend my time on doing is just playing with AI like, My hobby is using some of these no code app builders that are all AI powered. Like, there's like, bolt dot Dev, and there's lovable and replit. I've always wanted to be a developer, but I don't know how to code. It's kind of a problem, but I've been able to make some amazing websites and web applications by just working with AI and having it build build things for me. So I just love building things with AI. As nerdy as that sounds, what's

William Harris 1:18:31

one of the more interesting things that you've built recently? So

Jeff Oxford 1:18:35

I'm trying to scale the SEO process. I built a tool in replit, and what it does is it uses an API to take a screenshot of a web page, and then it passes that screenshot to ChatGPT to understand what the page is, what the company like. I use it for category pages. For example, you know what products are listed, what are the selling points, what's the brand, all this stuff. Then it takes that information, and then pass it to another prompt. Then it pulls in H refs data. It pulls ranking data. It's like, what's this page ranking for? What are the keywords, search volumes, ranking positions? And then it takes the information about the page from the screenshot, it takes the ranking data from H refs, passes it the ChatGPT again, and has it write an optimized title, tag, me, description, header, tag based on all that information, and then also write the category, description of the category, or whatever it might be. So it's, I'm in the final stages of tweaking it, but it's basically using AI. My goal is to use AI to optimize a page just as good as if I did it myself. That's

William Harris 1:19:40

brilliant. I like that, and you get that done. I would love to test that out sometime. Yeah, we're getting close. Well, that's cool, Jeff, I have really enjoyed chatting with you today. I've learned a lot about you, and I've learned a lot about SEO and where things are going if people want to work with you, if they want to follow you, where is the best place for them to do that? Yeah, websites,

Jeff Oxford 1:20:01

just 180marketing.com. Or you can just shoot me an email. My email is Jeff@180marketing.com. If you enjoyed, you can just say hi. You know, love, love meeting new people. So yeah, don't hesitate to reach out.

William Harris 1:20:12

No, that's good. Well again. Thank you so much for jumping on here, sharing your time, sharing your knowledge with us. I've really appreciated it.

Jeff Oxford 1:20:19

It's been great, William, thanks for having me. Thank you everyone for tuning in

William Harris 1:20:22

Have a great rest your day.

Outro 1:20:25

Thanks for listening to the Up Arrow Podcast with William Harris. We'll see you again next time, and be sure to click Subscribe to get future episodes.

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