SEO

I am a guru at Shopify. One of the more common questions that we get is “How do I do SEO better?”. This question is hard because most of the time the real question is “What is Shopify going to do to build my business for me?”. Yes Shopify makes it easy to add meta description and title for the page and these are incredible important to add as they are what Google is reading to determine the pages relevance. Outside of that most of SEO is bullish*t in my opinion. I know that isn’t a popular thing to say because there are many people that make a living on doing SEO for businesses. So let me expand…

The merchants that have asked this question to me are not the people that SEO will help.

“SEO isn’t the easy way to build your business, building your business is the best way to improve your SEO"

Is SEO important?

Understanding what it is… very much so

Is it going to help you build your business?

No

Will it help you grow your business?

Yes, as long as you are built.

Why?

"People don't believe what you tell them.

They rarely believe what you show them.

They often believe what their friends tell them.

They always believe what they tell themselves.

What leaders do: they give people stories they can tell themselves. Stories about the future and about change."

-Seth Godin

You are very very rarely going to make a sale at first touchpoint from a google search. I am curious if any of you have found a brand that you had never heard of in a search engine and made a purchase right there. If you have please tell me.

This can’t be “Oh that’s that brand that Jimmy was talking about, I’m going to check them out. Oh this is sick! [buy all the things]”. It was not SEO that won that sale. It was the respect that you have for Jimmy and the trust you have for his recommendation.