SEO Mastery: Unlocking E-commerce Success with Thomas Phillips

Brent Peterson (00:02.843)
Welcome to this episode. Today I have Thomas Phillips. is the founder of DTC SEO agency. Thomas, go ahead, give us your day -to -day role and maybe one of your passions in life.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (00:15.628)
Yeah, thank you, Brett. Yeah, so day -to -day side of things is mainly sales calls and strategy overseeing basically, as well as our portfolio brands. So we run a bunch of different e -commerce stores and sites ourself, as well as clients with things. Biggest passion is definitely cars. I'm a big petrolhead.

Brent Peterson (00:38.683)
So no Teslas, you've moved to the headquarters of Tesla and you're not a big electric head.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (00:45.038)
You say that, I've got a car on tour over right now because we obviously just moved and that is a Tesla but that was the cheapest car that I could find right now so we'll be changing over to something a bit more V8 shall we say when I get my full license.

Brent Peterson (00:57.617)
Right, there you go. So I won't I'll keep us on track. We'll talk about cars at the end of the podcast. And I'm a big original mini lover. So I bought I brought minis from England to the to England to the US back in the 2000s. All right, but let's I'm going to tell you a joke. Just give me a rating one through five.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (01:10.495)
Excellent.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (01:14.687)
fantastic.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (01:19.714)
Nice.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (01:23.47)
Go for it.

Brent Peterson (01:24.963)
It's going to be super funny. You're going to, you're just going to, and this is actually appropriate to Austin, Texas. So here we go. My friend is fighting an addiction to country dancing. He's now in a good two step program.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (01:30.499)
Okay.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (01:37.806)
That's a good dad joke though, I like that. I'd say that's a good five, I reckon.

Brent Peterson (01:44.729)
All right. Excellent. Thank you. I realized, and I do have a lot of international guests and a lot of times the international guests, especially the non -first English speakers have no clue and they just sit there. And I realized you also have, you didn't grow up speaking American, so you don't always understand our vernacular, but I appreciate you got that right away.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (02:06.08)
Yeah, that's part of the reason why we came to Austin. We love the country and the dancing and all that.

Brent Peterson (02:12.495)
We'll talk about that later. All right, so tell us a little bit about the D2C agency, D2C SEO, and tell us your beginnings and kind of the beginning of your business career, just to get started.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (02:14.251)
Excellent.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (02:25.934)
Yeah, yeah. Yeah, I I started my first proper business, I would say, online when I was 13, 13 years old. And that was online e -commerce. Basically, I was making miniature, like finger skateboards, like little kids toys in my dad's garage. And yeah, used to sell them online, built a HTML based website with tables and all of that kind of stuff. Had a little PayPal button.

Yeah, so it's a 39 different countries in the first year and it just absolutely took off. And that was all through SEO and forums, the way that I sold it. So after the first year, it just got so busy. I was in the first year of, I guess, high school and I had to close it down. couldn't, I just couldn't keep up with orders. I didn't understand about hiring new people or anything like that at that age. But that really kind of opened my mind up to, ooh, this is the potential.

of e -commerce online. You know, I can sell stuff and it's not just to the local people at my school or whatever the case is. You know, there's a big world out there and especially in the States. Most of the sales were to the States and we've just been ranking in America ever since. And then from there, over the years, we just built lots and lots of different websites, all using SEO traffic. Yeah, exited 16 different companies now.

And it kind of got to the point where so many people were just asking me to do SEO for them. Eventually we gave in and yeah, started the agency a bit more, which is great. So it's great because I can help scale all these different companies, which is the fun part. And I don't have the non -fun part of operations and investing in all these different companies, which is great. So I definitely think we're, we're, we've got the better end of it.

Brent Peterson (04:20.913)
That's awesome. So I just want to go back to your beginnings. So you started your first company or your first website when you were 13. Did you go to university after? you like you said you shut it down, you went to finish school. Did you go to university?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (04:36.11)
You know, I didn't go to university. dropped out of college. Well, college in the UK is different to college in the States. When you're like 16, you go to college in the UK. I dropped out of that after three months because they wouldn't let me do graphic design, which is what I wanted to do because I didn't do art in school, which was like finger painting, which is silly. And then I started making iPhone apps. I thought, the new iPhones just come out, you know, better start doing that. So I went down a whole route of teaching myself C++ and

made seven different apps and that's a whole nother story. But yeah, in the end, I didn't go to university. I thought this is a waste of time for me personally with the trajectory that I was on with things. So yeah, just got stuck right in and built more online companies basically.

Brent Peterson (05:23.537)
Wow, so we have similarity in the fact that I went to university, I dropped out and started my first company. I'm a little older than you, but I did end up going to school for eight, I went to university for eight years though, and I didn't get a degree, which I think it's a good benchmark to go off of and started a company.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (05:37.954)
Mmm.

Brent Peterson (05:47.857)
Tell us some of the reasoning or tell us how you learned about SEO and how effective it was. Was it when you were 13 or was it later that you realized, this is really what's making the traffic come in.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (06:00.94)
Yeah, it was, I think that it was, I was trying to find a way of driving traffic to the site. obviously we didn't have Facebook ads or anything like that back then. And I didn't have the capital to, spend on, on any kind of advertising in that sense. So I, I think I must've just been searching through trying to work out the best way of doing things and then stumbled upon that. I thought, hold up, everyone searches on Google, to find something.

and just started to try and learn and optimize the website. Back then, you could just stuff a load of keywords in at the bottom of the page and have a semi optimized title on the site. And you could rank in the top three pretty damn easy, which is great without links as well, which was awesome. So the cost of doing SEO back then was super, super cheap in comparison. So I think I was ranking first with custom fingerboard or fingerboard or something like that, something around that.

which is great.

Brent Peterson (07:01.041)
And then you've kind of grown into that. Tell us a little bit about how you, I just wanted to kind of look at your business life too, but you mentioned that right now you don't want to do operations. You focus on the sales side of things.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (07:18.998)
Yeah, yeah. So my wife Olivia is the CEO of the CSCO agency and she also handles all the other businesses that we run as well, which is great. So she is absolute master operator, which is not my skill set and not my forte, which is fantastic. So we're able to juggle multiple projects and scale out the team efficiently and everything like that. She comes from a corporate background, which is fantastic. So

She understands all of the business hierarchy and how to set up everything efficiently. So I get to work on the fun part.

Brent Peterson (07:57.303)
I do want to give, so you moved to Austin and we should ask you why you moved to Austin, but I do want to give Austin a plug in the fact that they have a great entrepreneurs organization chapter there. It's EO network and EO Austin is the, I don't know what their exact domain name is, but EO Austin is one of the biggest chapters that we have. Each chapter, there's one here in Minnesota, but EO Austin has been on the forefront of

of membership and pushing the boundaries on what the entrepreneurial organization could do. I would, if you haven't already hooked in with those, that group of folks, it's a fantastic group there and they're very forward thinking and lots of tech companies in Austin that are part of that.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (08:44.254)
Excellent. Yeah, thank you Brent. I appreciate that. That's I'll definitely check that out. We have to have a chit chat about that

Brent Peterson (08:50.459)
Yeah, let's talk about SEO again. Tell us some top strategies. Give us the top three strategies that you see in SEO today.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (09:00.96)
Yeah, top three strategies. mean, the first three things that we do on any client's website, number one is technical SEO. Like if your site is not technically sound and there's an issue and Google's headbutting up against something that's on your site that you can't necessarily see on the front end, trying to scale that is like having a car just stuck in mud. You know, it's not, it's just not going to go anywhere. So you got to lay that solid foundation first.

and fix all of those weird little issues that come up. The next thing is if it's an existing site, which is mainly what we work on, meaning it has previous reputation, you it's a few years old already, it's ranking for a bunch of different keywords, it might've had some digital PR at some point, is to then optimize the pages or re -optimize the pages. So in that sense, what we're doing is full -blown keyword research, competitor research, we're understanding

all the different commercial and transactional intent keywords, and then allocating those to specific pages or collection pages, and then either re -optimizing or creating new pages as well as. And that basically means that every single page is gonna rank for the highest ROI keyword possible. So you're lining everything up for success. And then the final one is link building.

So that's through digital PR and our outreach link building team. that's, links are effectively the rocket fuel for a site in Google. The more powerful the site becomes, the more likely Google is going to be to place that site up higher for search terms. So that combination and repeating all of them each month as well, like we rerun a technical audit. We do link building every single month.

and we go in and add new pages or re -optimize whatever's on the site. That combination is just absolute rock star right now.

Brent Peterson (11:07.185)
So good, I want to unpack that. So number one was the technical SEO. as we discussed in the green room, I come from the magenta world. And I'm going to say 99 % of the magenta sites are super slow. So the top thing, is the top thing speed? Or is the top thing how well your pages are designed? I'm going to say speed, because if your site loads in 15 minutes, nobody's ever going to go to it and Google's not going to index you,

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (11:34.144)
Yeah.

Brent Peterson (11:34.705)
And I'm being a little just ingenuous. says every Magento site loads in 15 minutes, but it's not uncommon that, and I'm just going to say five years ago, it's not uncommon that a new brand would launch on Magento and that brand new site would take 15 seconds to load.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (11:53.454)
Yes, speed is definitely a factor for sure. I would say 99, maybe even 100 % of our clients are on Shopify, which is great because out of the box, it's pretty damn quick, which is fantastic. So speed is definitely one for sure. Like for example, if a client has images on their website, they just straight exported from a DSLR camera and it's...

5 ,000 by 5 ,000 pixels, you it's gonna load pretty damn slow. things like that, obviously we need to address ASAP. There's other, there's lots and lots of other small things. For example, like 404 pages. So we find a lot of clients, especially if they're in clothing, like apparel and stuff like that, when they go out of stock, they then delete that page. And that might be linked from another page.

So then you have all of these internal links that are now hitting the 404. So Google's just hitting a brick wall effectively, which is bad for the crawler since a negative signal and everything like that. Yeah, there's a whole host of other issues. know, like some clients add an app on their site. They don't really know what it does. And then it goes and blocks half the website from a technical point of view, but it looks great on the front end. So that's our job right at the start. Our developer comes in.

and we basically pull the theme apart and work out how we can optimize it best from a technical point of view.

Brent Peterson (13:25.945)
And clients, mean, just from a rudimentary standpoint, the clients can look at their Google search console and determine if there's some technical issues or is it, do the clients have to do some more, I mean, if they, I agree they should hire you, but some people are just going to want to take that high level view to understand how well they're doing technically. Are there some regular built -in Google tools that start telling you how well you're doing technically, besides Lighthouse Score?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (13:53.004)
Yeah, yeah, great shout. Yeah, Google Search Console is a great place to start. It does get a little bit confusing. It doesn't necessarily tell you what the cause is. So you do have to do a lot more digging. If you're very technically sound, I would say, yeah, go for it. Jump in on that. But we love to use Screaming Frog is one of the tools and Ahrefs Site Audit is fantastic. So using a combination of the three,

we're able to just pull up so much stuff that gets hidden, or goes unnoticed, shall we say. So, fixing all those first.

Brent Peterson (14:32.869)
Yeah, and I was going to say, just as soon as they see those errors, they should start go to you because you're not going to tell them what the tools are that they could be using, but making a joke there. mean, if so they, they'll they could become aware through Google, right? And if they don't feel like digging in or paying for a screaming frog or, or ahrefs, they can always, they should be going to an agency to help them. And I think that what I've learned over the years is an agency has much more better.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (14:48.43)
Absolutely, yeah.

Brent Peterson (15:01.969)
you have a better way of seeing things from a more holistic view as we're going to get into the next part, which is content, that you can help them in a broader sense in terms of them trying to figure out all these little pieces. And especially if they're not really good at it or they're not an expert at all, going to an expert is always kind of the best way to go about doing it.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (15:19.81)
Hmm.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (15:26.434)
Yeah. Yep.

Brent Peterson (15:28.561)
So content, think content is always changing. Two years ago or 18 months ago, Google came out and said they're going to penalize everybody that's using AI content. What is your view on that?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (15:45.251)
It was such an interesting one because they kind of said, no, you can't do it at all. And then they flip -flopped and went, actually, yeah, you can. And then people took that literally and just started creating huge websites based off of chat GPT, straight output of content, super automated. And then they get smacked down three months later, surprise, surprise. And then Google then goes, actually, haha, kind of half and half. You know, we probably messed up a bit there.

Yeah, and now I think it's kind of in a middle ground with things. yeah, it's, I don't know, it's a touch and go, but I think definitely the best way to do it if people are going to use it is to use it as a base and then just have proper editors and proper writers comb through it and use it as a tool rather than like a straight output, you know, because half the stuff that ChatGPT writes, you know, I'm embarking on this journey.

all of these lardy da words that you don't necessarily want in a blog post.

Brent Peterson (16:46.747)
Delving. Yeah, I'm going to delve into that right after this call. I think that the one thing that I point that I always like to make is that you write content for people to buy things. And right now, chat GPT is never going to buy that widget you're selling on your Shopify site. It's never going to purchase a pool queue or whatever thing you're selling. People are going to purchase it, though, and a person is going to want to read whatever they're buying, not

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (17:09.942)
Mmm.

Brent Peterson (17:15.985)
chat GPT. I'm a big believer in whether or however you create the content, have a human read it to make sure it's readable. And I think one of the things that happens a lot that they'll do that the AI engine does is it over does keywords. you might get, if you're saying, hey, go to Austin to buy donuts, you get Austin in the 75 times in a

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (17:36.983)
Hmm.

Brent Peterson (17:45.969)
in a 1000 word article, where it overdoes it, right? It doesn't understand that people don't want to see all it knows is that Austin is a keyword and it's got to stuff it through the whole thing over and over again.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (17:57.28)
Yeah, yeah, definitely not efficient.

Brent Peterson (18:01.233)
So the last one you talked about was link building, and I think that's the hardest one for the average consumer to understand and execute. Tell us a little bit about how you help people link build. Well, before you say that, just tell us what it is to make sure everybody understands what link building is, and then tell us how you help them.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (18:15.5)
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (18:22.806)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, I mean, it is much more of a tricky one. I think the biggest misconception, especially when we hop on calls with clients who haven't necessarily done SEO before is SEO is just on site and that's it. Like, I've optimized my website. I'm like, yeah, but it looks pretty, it's great, but there's no links, there's no reputation. So I think the best way of viewing links is...

votes of confidence in effect. Like the more votes of confidence that you have, the more Google trusts you. So if you, and this is why Google doesn't rank brand new websites for huge search terms right away, because it can't trust them. What does it have to go to trust, go off to trust your website? So that link building over time just builds and compounds and compounds. And link building is effectively one website that simply links.

to your website. It has a anchor text or clickable link text. And the anchor text is extremely important. So is the relevancy of the page and the website that it's linking from. We have like insane metrics that we go through to verify and check that we actually want to get a link from that particular website. There's like three different buckets. There's links that are toxic that will have a negative impact and pull your site down.

There's links that will do nothing, and then there's links that actually have a big benefit and move the needle. it's really that last bucket that we invest so much time into to find those sites. There's a lot of websites online, but a lot of them are not so great, shall we say.

Brent Peterson (20:07.121)
Yeah, that's interesting. My blog is fairly, my talk commerce blog is fairly busy and I now get a lot of people saying that they will pay me to put either just a link, link to their site on my site and they pay $40 is the typical bid that I get from people. Is there a danger for me and I don't do it to everybody. I kind of do a little bit of research, but is there a danger?

on my site to link to somebody else's site.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (20:39.884)
I think it really depends on the site and it depends how natural it is. So are they reaching out and saying, can I get a link from an existing post or is it they want a brand new post and whereas...

Brent Peterson (20:56.869)
Yeah, I mean, it's both. And I think the ones that I maybe I've gone with is where they give me, they, they, they rearrange the context of the article in, and they introduce a new sub little message that then links to their website. It's usually a product or something like that. so I have to do a little work by just posting some content and then the link and then the lot, tons of people just want to write an article and post it.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (21:16.47)
Yeah. Yeah, I mean...

Brent Peterson (21:25.489)
and then they put all kinds of garbage links inside of that.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (21:25.666)
Yeah.

think that's the thing. I think it's just being very cautious and conscious of what websites you're linking to, like from the website owner point of view, for sure. If it's something that's related to what you're talking about, and it can benefit the reader, then yeah, great, that makes sense. Yeah, I don't think it will harm you.

Brent Peterson (21:49.883)
So what type it's like, so let's just say I have a D2, and actually I have a D2C client that we've never even looked at doing outbound link building. And they sell deli meat type of thing like beef sticks and beef jerky. What type of links should we be looking to to try to get inbound links for them?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (22:02.989)
Mmm.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (22:16.096)
Yeah, so either reaching out to like food blogs would be a great one. If the whole website is all about meat, then that's amazing because you have website relevancy plus page relevancy. And then if you zoom out slightly, I would contact food blogs. And if you can write an article about meat specifically and then have a link in there to your client site.

because that way you still have pretty good relevancy from the website as a whole. You have great relevancy from the article. And obviously that links directly to that site. Where it doesn't work so well is let's say you try to get a link from a tech website and then you're writing about meat and then you linked to your client site. There's a bit of a disconnect there and I'm sure that Google can pick up on that kind of thing. This isn't meant to be there.

We're not gonna give so much weight to that link and so much power. So yeah, definitely relevancy from that point of view.

Brent Peterson (23:19.185)
Unless you're talking about meaty tech talk topics.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (23:22.606)
Or that, yeah, yeah, maybe there's an angle there, you know, and a new meet app or something for butchers or...

Brent Peterson (23:24.145)
Right. Yeah. -E -E -T app.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (23:32.096)
Yeah, that's it. I'm sure there's a way.

Brent Peterson (23:33.921)
We're definitely going downhill here. So it kind of leads me to some questions around mistakes. We talked about the non -contextual mistakes where you're doing links where it doesn't seem right or it's not appropriate to link to that. What other kind of mistakes have you seen?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (23:56.588)
Yeah, I think a big one is just not optimizing products or collection pages. I think a lot of business owners, especially at the start, like for example, they're using Shopify, they just kind of take their best guess at what they should call a collection page. And it might be called something, but people use the keyword that's completely different. And they don't have like a SEO conscious thought process behind it as well as.

So I would really try and push people to really, really be conscious about the kind of keywords that you're using in the URLs and headings and everything like that, like the product title, collection title, things like that. If you can make it more optimized to the keywords that you think people are searching, that will definitely go a long way. That will really, really help out from an SEO point of view.

And the other thing as well is, as I said, with like the, the clothing brands, like they really have a tendency to just go in and delete products. and then when we do an audit on their site, we're like, you had a huge amount of traffic a few months ago and now you don't. And we go in and look at the pages and they've just deleted them. So we've come up with a much better structure with them now where instead of just deleting products that are now out of stock, which might be temporarily out of stock as well.

is to use like a wait list plugin, you know, like notify me when it's back in stock type thing. So that way they're able to build up an email list, which is great. They're able to then email that exact customer when it comes back in stock, which is a very high conversion rate. And you're also able to see how many people are raising their hand and saying, yeah, I actually want this product. So it really gives great data back to them and it keeps us happy.

because we can still drive traffic to that page and someone might go in and buy something else or they may opt in and get an email, which is great. yeah, I would definitely say they're the main two.

Brent Peterson (26:00.431)
Yeah, think deleting is definitely when I was in the Magento world, and I just have to make a plug here that the wait list or notify me when it's back in stock is just a built -in feature with Magento, even though it's really slow. We always had to educate, I have to emphasize that, always had to educate our merchants not to delete products, not that it

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (26:15.028)
there you go.

Brent Peterson (26:29.489)
Not only did it just screw up, you know, your SEO, but I mean, it doesn't necessarily screw up your inventory because in Magento, the inventory and the invoice is then pulled away, but you don't have anything to link back to. You don't have any data you can go and look at. You lose that potential forward looking data as well from your, from your SEO visits and all that is gone. And then they would never, they would never do a 301 redirect. Anyways, so.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (26:57.079)
Hmm.

Brent Peterson (26:59.425)
what other, like, what other things, one thing I can think about that a lot of people don't quite understand is cannibalization. And you mentioned, building new collections, which is a category in, in other platforms, but building a new collection and then determining the keywords. Tell us about how cannibalization works into that.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (27:23.66)
Yeah, so it's really a case of working out which keywords are going to target what. So what we really like to say to people who aren't at the point yet of taking on an agency, you know, and they're just starting out their website or starting optimizing is to basically just take a Google Sheet or Excel, write out all the different products that you have. And then in another column or different columns, just go through and write out all the different possible things that people might search.

for that particular product or collection of products. And then you can then, after that, you can start to then group them together. I've like, okay, this makes sense that these would be grouped. This is a completely different keyword, but it means the same thing. I then might want to create that as a separate collection page or a separate product and have the same products inside of it. So I think by doing that way of doing things, you're not gonna...

cannibalize. you had three different collection pages that were all targeting the exact same thing, then you're going to have some cannibalization issues. yeah, I think if you're being very deliberate with separate collection pages and product pages for separate keywords, you should be OK.

Brent Peterson (28:44.453)
I'm going to use my own blog as an example, because I get a report of all my cannibalization and honestly, I don't have time to try to fix it and it's nothing that's mission critical. But I've always struggled with how do I fix it? And I'll just give you a little backstory about two years ago, I just did this experiment where I'm just going to write about cricket protein powder. And I'm going to prove that I can write about this and own it in an SEO terms.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (28:55.469)
Yep.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (29:08.568)
Okay.

Brent Peterson (29:13.985)
and it's on the right, it's on Talk Commerce. And I was successful at it. I haven't done it in about a year now, but I do get a cannibalization report and there's a whole bunch of keywords that go to different or the same pages, but I've never quite understood how, and I'm probably not gonna put the effort in, but I think it'd be interesting to learn what is the lift in trying to fix it.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (29:19.34)
Nice.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (29:41.26)
Yeah, yeah, I mean, it's a, it's an interesting one. think the, if I think it becomes an issue when we're trying to rank a specific like product or collection page and like a blog post is outranking it. Like at that point, it's like, okay, we want to do something about this. We know that we can get a higher conversion rate from going directly to a product page. So that's the kind of thing that we would try and

de -optimize the blog post as an example. I think if they're all blog posts, or all content -based, not necessarily product pages or collection pages.

maybe trying to de -optimize some that are not the ones that you really want people to go to. Like you'd rather people go to like a 10 best cricket protein shakes rather than when should I take a cricket protein shake, you know, as an example. yeah, it's a case of trying to de -optimize it a little bit, but you do run the risk that that page or those pages that you try and de -optimize as in reducing some keywords out of the...

titles and the content, everything like that, you do run the risk that the traffic might go down to those a little bit as well. Yeah.

Brent Peterson (31:01.733)
Yes. Anyways, I should have never started writing about cricket protein. What other, we have a couple of minutes left. Give us another mistake that the typical merchant might make.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (31:05.782)
Hahaha

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (31:17.394)
Another mistake. Yeah, I think just installing shed loads of apps is a huge one with Shopify Like I'm not sure the mindset behind it, but I also think it's partly Shopify's issue Like when you go in and try and uninstall an app sometimes all the code is still left there in the theme So just blokes everything and just slows the site down so much from that point of view so

Yeah, I think being very, very conscious about testing plugins or apps rather. Having them on a development site first is definitely recommended before you just go and install five different wait list apps and pick the best one and leave all the JavaScript in the backend when you go and uninstall it. So I that's probably a big one.

Brent Peterson (32:11.365)
Yeah, I have heard that. don't have a lot of experience with Shopify, but I know especially in WordPress, Magento, that whole world of every app is free and you don't pay a monthly fee. I know the other thing on Shopify too is that a lot of times you don't take into account that monthly cost of an app and typically they might charge you on a transactional basis or a dollar amount basis. And that then goes into your overhead. suddenly we've definitely had clients who

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (32:30.935)
Mmm.

Brent Peterson (32:41.873)
have gone or wanted to go for Magento and then discovered that there may be other free version, but they're paying $1 ,000 a month and hosting that Get Thing to Shopify Plus and then going with all the fees and the check and everything. They're going to spend $4 ,000 a month on Shopify. So the monthly costs is much more. How about...

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (33:02.657)
yeah.

Brent Peterson (33:10.554)
You're focused specifically on D2C. Do you feel as though there's an SEO play for B2B?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (33:19.886)
Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. Yeah. I mean, the agency is DTC SEO agency. So, but yeah, 100 % we focus on B2B as well. So effectively it should be e -commerce SEO agency, I guess. But don't quite have the same ring to it. So yeah, we certainly work on a B2B side of things as well. Big, big, big potential on that front. Love the bigger average order value.

Brent Peterson (33:42.001)
So last question, I guess, is there a difference between the American English English when writing your keywords and does it really matter anymore? And if you wanted to expand into your new market, should you be looking at vernacular for UK English or Australian English or wherever?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (34:09.358)
Yes. Yes, 100%. Yeah.

Brent Peterson (34:11.057)
Canadian English, like in Canadian, think you just say hockey hockey hockey.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (34:17.306)
That's it. Yeah, definitely. Like the way that, you know, like as an example, like in the UK, we don't use the term cologne, we use the term aftershave more so than in the States. So different small terminology like that can really go a long way because the search terms in the UK will be a hell of a lot lower compared to aftershave will be hell of a lot higher and kind of vice versa over here.

Brent Peterson (34:17.393)
It's a joke.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (34:46.412)
Yeah, there's really quite big differences when you start to look at the keyword side of things. But then also, we like to, if we're creating a UK based page, we'd be on a, know, forward slash UK dot com forward slash UK or whatever the case may be. And that would be in British written in British English. I guess it just helps that that extra step. And obviously,

people from the UK, they're reading UK English or British English, yeah, you would trust the site a lot more, especially if it was in pounds as opposed to dollars. So I would say so for sure. Definitely worth doing.

Brent Peterson (35:28.251)
That little trust thing that you just mentioned, is that something like if they spell favorite, like you guys spell favorite wrong and color and all those other fun words. I would imagine that does go back to though, who am I buying from? Where are they located and how come they're spelling this word wrong? I think us as Americans would be much more forgiving to that. Do you think that English would be less forgiving to spelling favorite without the U?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (35:37.731)
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (35:42.156)
Yes.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (35:45.827)
Yeah.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (35:58.732)
I think that if I was to read that and I was still in the UK, then I'd be like, where are they shipping from? Because I don't want long shipping times and I don't want to have to pay import duty. So that would be a question and a hesitation potentially around that, for sure.

Brent Peterson (36:04.74)
Right.

Brent Peterson (36:21.549)
So this has been a fascinating conversation. you. So Thomas, we close out, I give everybody a chance to do a shameless plug about anything they like. What would you like to plug today?

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (36:33.486)
Yeah, I guess the agency side of things, you if you're DTC brand or in B2B, e -commerce side of things, and you're looking for SEO, you want to take things to next level, build that solid profit foundation, which is normally the biggest backbone of profit for a lot of DTC brands. Then yeah, reach out to us DTCSEOagency .com. Happy to have a chat and yeah, for a good fit, we can do a full blown audit on your site and see what we can do.

Brent Peterson (37:02.949)
and where's the best place to contact you if they want to get in touch with you.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (37:06.774)
Yeah, either LinkedIn, if you just search up Thomas Phillips, I guess put SEO after it, I should pop straight up. Or Thomas MR Phillips on Instagram, or just contact that DTCSAOagency .com if you want to shoot us an email.

Brent Peterson (37:24.613)
That's awesome. I'll make sure I get all those into the show notes. Thomas, it's Thomas Phillips, founder of the DTC SEO agency. Thank you so much for being here.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (37:27.842)
Beautiful.

Thomas Phillips (DTCSEOAgency) (37:33.944)
Thank you, Brent, much appreciated.