Think SEO is dead in the age of AI? Think again. While ChatGPT referral traffic surged 112% month-over-month across e-commerce sites, Google still commands 99% of search market share and processes 13.6 billion queries daily. Jeff Oxford, SEO expert and founder of 180 Marketing, reveals why smart brands are doubling down on search optimization—and how the strategies that work for Google are also positioning companies to dominate in AI search results. From his data analysis of 152 SEO campaigns showing consistent 75% traffic growth, to the "ranking factor leak" that exposed Google's true algorithm priorities, Jeff breaks down the exact 4-bucket framework that's still generating millions in revenue for e-commerce brands.

Key Topics & Lessons:

• The State of Search in 2025 - Why Google's 13.6 billion daily queries represent a 64% increase from 2024, how ChatGPT traffic grew 112% month-over-month (but still represents only 1-3% of total traffic), and why the "Google is dead" narrative is premature despite real AI disruption
• The 4-Bucket SEO Framework - Jeff's systematic approach covering Technical SEO (mostly handled by Shopify), Page Optimization (title tags, meta descriptions, headers), Content Strategy (200-300 words on category pages), and Link Building (the 0.3 correlation factor that still dominates rankings)
• What Really Moves the Needle - Data from 152 campaigns showing 20% growth at 3 months, 50% at 6 months, and 75% at 12 months, plus insights from Google's leaked ranking documents revealing click-through rate as a massive ranking factor
• The Great Blog Apocalypse of 2023 - Why standalone content sites lost 90% of their traffic while e-commerce stores with blogs thrived, how Google's "helpful content" update rewarded real businesses over affiliate spam, and Jeff's theory about Google My Business as a ranking signal
• AI SEO Optimization Strategy - How to reverse-engineer ChatGPT sources to identify link targets, why product roundups have a 0.45 correlation with AI citations (higher than traditional backlinks), and the overlap between traditional SEO and AI optimization
• The Future of Automated SEO - Jeff's experiment building a fully autonomous AI agency with zero human account managers, AI tools that can screenshot pages and generate optimized title tags, and how Gemini 2.5 Pro is changing the automation game

Chapters: 

(00:00) The Relevance of SEO in the Age of AI

(12:38) The 4 Components of SEO

(16:19) What Is the Payoff for SEO?

(20:22) Breaking Down Technical SEO

(23:43) On-Page SEO and Meta Descriptions

(25:58) Content Optimization Strategies

(33:27) Link Building

(38:30) AI and SEO: The Future of Search

‍

Jeff Oxford:

The tricky part is deciphering a good backlink from a bad one. So let's say you have two blogs. Trying to determine which blog is going to be helpful and which is going to be harmful is extremely difficult.

Brett Curry:

Well, hello and welcome to another edition of the E-Commerce Evolution podcast. I'm your host, Brett Curry, CEO of OMG Commerce. And today we've got Jeff Oxford on the show, and we're talking about SEO search engine optimization. Going to weave in some ai, some AI optimization, but you may be thinking what, is anybody still searching? Is anybody still talking about SEO these days? Isn't everything ai? And have we got some insights for you? Because the good news is if you're doing good SEO, it's going to help with AI as well, and I can stay with authority. SEO is not dead. And so with that, Jeff, welcome to the show, man. And how's it going? It's going great, Brett. Thanks for having me. Yeah, dude, it was awesome. Connecting at Steve Chu and Tony Airbox, event Seller Summit Fort Lauderdale, one of my favorite events. And I think you've spoken there multiple times as well, correct? You're kind of a

Jeff Oxford:

Radio. Yeah, this is my third time speaking there.

Brett Curry:

Nice, nice. And you talked about SEO. I sat in on your talk. I loved it. What a lot of people don't know is that actually at the very beginning, so OMG is now 15 years old. The first service we offered Jeff, SEO, really SEO for local companies. It was just something we knew, something we liked. I was a search engine nerd, and so a business partner loved it as well. And so that's what we did. Yep. Search engine optimization. That led to Google search, led to Google Shopping. I had a video background that led to YouTube, but in the beginning, SEO baby.

Jeff Oxford:

Okay, so we can go deep in the trenches. It sounds like

Brett Curry:

The We can totally nerd out for sure. Now, I have not been in the SEO game in detail recently, but I still keep up. I can still talk shop for sure. But why SEO as a topic now? And was that just something that Steve, the VIN organizer was interested in, or were there a lot of requests for it? Why SEO as a topic?

Jeff Oxford:

So I guess a little behind the scenes of what happened with that is he was also, he was asking me about AI optimization chat, GPT optimization. And this is after we already got SEO O in there, but we're kind of at a possible paradigm shift of how people are searching. If we just look at right now, June, 2025 as a data point, we just freeze this chat. Google is still the 800 pound gorilla. It still has 99 some ridiculous amount of market share. Chad GD maybe has one to 2% maybe of the search. So this snapshot in time SEO is still just kicking butt, making companies millions of dollars. But the trend is what gets people talking about chat. Yes, it's 1%, maybe one to 2% now, but a year or two ago it was 0.1%. And I mean, I can actually drop some stats for you. So being an e-commerce SEO company, we have access to a lot of Google Analytics accounts, and I had my VA a few last week. He went through all of our analytics accounts. He looked at how much referrals our clients, our e-commerce clients got from chat GBT in April versus May to see what's the

Brett Curry:

Fluctuation. Okay, great comparison. Love that.

Jeff Oxford:

112% increase in referral traffic from month to month. Yeah, from month to month. Wow.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. And I can even Now, did he also look at, and not to get too far ahead of you here, but did he also look at what percentage of overall traffic came from chat?

Jeff Oxford:

Jt? Not impressive. We're talking like most clients, it was one to 2%. But there are some e-commerce stores that we're seeing where chat GT is up to like 20%.

Jeff Oxford:

Whoa, that's significant.

Jeff Oxford:

Of course, it depends on your niche. It depends on how much content marketing you've done, how much blogging you've done, how much do you have enough stuff to get cited and chat GPT? But just if we're just looking at the e-commerce world and averages from this dataset, yeah, it was about a little over a hundred percent month over month. And then average across, this was about just shy of 300 visits a month from chat GBT.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. And how does that compare to Google, Google Organic and

Jeff Oxford:

Google paid, or did you do that comparison? Luckily, I have those stats here. I mean, Google's, I don't have the month over month for Google, but because it's probably pretty steady, I would assume similar data point would be for 2024, we took a sample of, I went over this to my talk, but we took a sample, like 80 e-commerce sites that we have Google Analytics access to, and also have Google search console access to. And across these, you want to see what's the highest performing channel on Google Analytics. And number one outside of direct, which just means it's not attributed, but number one was non-brand organic search, followed by paid search, followed by organic shopping. So yeah, it's one of those things where, yes, if we freeze this point in time, SEO is still the number one top performing channel, even non-branded SEO or non-branded search traffic. But the tides are shifting a bit. I was just on a call with a client earlier today who sells refurbished computers, and we were looking at some of their AI referral stats, and they've already, this year have had 23 in from chat GBT. So everyone should be paying attention to the trend

Jeff Oxford:

I live in here in Bend, Oregon, where we have the last blockbuster. And if you're, you still have a blockbuster, we have the last blockbuster on earth.

Brett Curry:

We were just talking about that. So my oldest kids are 23 and 20, and so they still remember when they were little, we still would go to the video store. There weren't a ton of 'em. It wasn't super popular, saw red box and stuff like that. But there was something magical about walking the aisles of a blockbuster. Maybe they didn't have what you were looking for, but that was all part of the fun. So we were reminiscing and missing the video store days.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, come to Bend, you can get a T-shirt and take a look, see what they have.

Brett Curry:

So okay, there's quick dive diversion here, but how's business at the last Blockbuster? Do people come from nostalgia to buy? Gees, a tourist

Jeff Oxford:

Attraction now? It's kind what? It's, yeah, it's all about the nostalgia. You can get some merchandise and they still have the big blockbuster sign outside front and they put little marquee letters on it. Super fun.

Brett Curry:

So I guess the question is, will Google and SEO one day go the way of Blockbuster far off in the future? We don't know, but I think we could say, Jeff, the demise of Google right now is potentially

Jeff Oxford:

Overhyped. What? Say you about that. I mean, no matter how this plays out, Google's going to be fine. Google has a corporation, they've got the infrastructure, they have all the best AI researchers in the world. Their new Gemini 2.5 Pro model is just killer.

Brett Curry:

It's insane. They've been play with a lot.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, they've really caught up to the AI race quickly. So props to them. The big question though is what about search these 10 blue links that we have on page one? Are we still going to be searching that way? And there's a big question mark there. Google's now testing their AI mode where it changes the homepage of Google instead of having a search box, it's now a conversation box more similar to chat GPT right now that's just in testing. So we don't know what's going to come out of that test. Is Google going to be like, oh, wow, the engagement's way higher, people are staying on our site longer, we're going to make this the default, or are they going to be like, ah, people don't trust it yet, there's still some hallucinations. We're still the best experience and they're going to stick to how it's now?

Jeff Oxford:

It's a big question mark, but the one part of it that no one really talks about that's so key is just the processing cost to serve a query. So if you go into Google and you type in, let's just say what are the best gaming laptops? What Google can process that quickly, it pulls from their index, it has temp links. Great. If you're on AI mode's, it'll pull five to seven queries. It will then have to pull in all this processing abilities from the LLM to process the results and then serve it up. So their cost per query is going to go up a lot. Now, Google are the kings of infrastructure and servers and data centers, and so they'll be able to get these costs down over time. But if their cost per query goes way up and their ads, the revenue per query goes down because there's less ads, it starts to not make financial sense for them. So even if the user experience is perfect and way better, I'm sure they're going to be balancing out the financial viability of moving to a more of an AI focused search result.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it's a really good call out. And we got to remember that It's like 80 90% of Google's revenue is from search ads or query-based ads, and you could argue that a larger percentage of their profits come

Jeff Oxford:

From this. Oh, okay. Profits. Yeah, profits are probably way more than that.

Brett Curry:

Yeah. Yeah, which is super interesting. And so a couple sets that I was looking at, because I was curious about this too, right? An executive at Apple recently said, Hey, for the first time ever, we saw fewer searches, fewer Google searches on Safari was the caveat. Google, however, released some data. They did not comment on Safari specifically, which would lead you to believe that was probably true. But they did say, Hey, we're seeing increased search volume across all platforms, including Apple users. And so what's interesting, I looked at this. If you look at daily search queries on Google, 8.3 billion a day in 2024 and now averaging 13.6 billion a day in 2025. So that is a massive leap. And just from the financials just to say, Hey, Google's going to be able to keep the lights on for a little bit. Earnings are up 12% year over year. They had a beat. So their projections or their guidance they gave to Wall Street, they beat it. So things are good from that regard from standpoint and what Google has said, and I was at Google Marketing Live, what Google has said is that, Hey, the AI mode, that's part of what's driving this increase in searches. But your point is spot on where it's heard different estimates, but it's a multiple higher to in terms of compute costs

Jeff Oxford:

To

Brett Curry:

Generate those AI mode results than it is just a normal query. And so Google's going to have to figure that out. I think they will. I think they'll be able to incorporate ads in a pretty unique and pretty clever way. And so listen, I think there's some existential threats facing Google. There's also the antitrust lawsuit and things like that. And so the future is not super clear, but I do think Google's going to be able to figure it out. And yeah, you mentioned AI scientists in 2015, that's when Google bought Deep Mind, which is one of the leading AI research companies on the planet. Some of those top researchers, top scientists are still at Google. I think they've got the best team. And so yeah, I think they'll be able to figure it out. But it is interesting, right? It is an interesting season right now. And so any other points on that, on Google's demise or what the future is going to hold for them before we get into some tactical stuff?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I think that pretty much covers. I mean at this point it's no longer an infrastructure issue with data centers and servers. It's no longer a software issue with LLMs. They have all that. It's really just a user experience UI issue. How do they take this all and give the right user experience? So we'll see what comes up with AI mode. It'll be interesting. It'll be really

Brett Curry:

Interesting to watch. For sure, for sure. So came in super good. I'm excited about it. Why don't we do this before we talk about SEO and AI optimization? They do go hand in hand. Let's back up a little bit and talk about what are the components of SEO. So I know in the early days we would always talk, Hey, there's technical SEO, and there's onsite SEO, and then there's offsite, SEO. How would you define though SEO now and what are the big components of

Jeff Oxford:

It? I have what I call the four buckets or four components of SEO you already mentioned. Some of 'em, technical, SEO number one can Google crawl. Your website is your insight indexable. This is site maps. This is robots tech structured data, basically making sure Google can crawl all your pages, can index all your pages and you don't have any issues that's going to slow down or hurt your ranking. So that's technical. SEO number two is page optimization. This is making sure of your keyword and the title tags, the meta descriptions, the header tags, also having it in your content, just making sure your pages are properly targeting the right keywords. Number three is going to be content. This is e-commerce. So do your category pages and collection pages. Have a description that describes your products and provides a good user experience. Do your products have good descriptions? Do you have blog posts targeting relevant keywords? So that's number three. And then the last one, which for most people listening to this is probably the most important. I mean, if you're a large brand at very high authority, you probably don't need to focus much on link building, but most people who are doing seven figures to low eight figures, the biggest benefit is probably going to be link building that's getting other websites to mention you and link and have a hyperlink back to your site.

Brett Curry:

And it's so interesting, and I remember several years ago, Google's been trying to downplay backlinks and even say they don't work and stuff, but I think a lot of the people that have been doing SEOA long time like yourself, like me, were like, well, that's kind of what Google was built on. The original innovation that Google had. It was a project called bankrupt just to get super nerdy. And the whole idea was Larry Page and Serge Bren were like, Hey, what if we could look at the entire internet, but based on the links? And then wouldn't that be a vote of confidence if a lot of people are linking to this page or this site, that is what gives it authority or makes it trustworthy. They created page rank anyway, so super interesting. So it's like, yeah, I don't think they're going to get away from that, right? That's still got to be the best signal. Probably Google's just getting better at weeding out spammy paid for junkie links, although that's maybe debatable as well.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, and I mean, there's a study done recently as just earlier this year in January, and they looked at, this is coming from hfs. They looked at something crazy. It was like, I think it was a million keywords. So that's a million search results. And they did all this statistical analysis to see what ranking factors correlate or which factors correlate with rankings and the number of backlinks to a page. So if we stick with the whole gaming laptops, I'm a recovering gamer, so if we stick with gaming laptops, and I have my Jeff's laptops.com website and I have my gaming laptops page, the number of links to that collection page is one of the highest correlated ranking factors for those stats Nerds listening, it was about 0.3 out with one being perfectly correlated, but in perspective, most ranking factors in SEO have a correlation of 0.05 or 0.1. So to have 0.3 is substantial. It's very, very high correlation. You're going to have to have, if you don't have back lanes, it's going to be really hard to rank. Well,

Brett Curry:

It's like three to six x more valuable than other ranking factors. So to put that into context, that's great. And maybe, okay, so we've, we've got those four buckets of SEO, let's break those down in a minute. But maybe to back up just a little bit before we do that, what's the payoff here? Why do we do this? If we invest time in this, hopefully we've convinced you that the demise of Google's a little bit down the road at least, so you should invest in it. But if we get this right, what's in it for us? What could the payoff be? What are the results you see? I know it varies from category to category, site to site, but what could we see here if we do this right?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I mean, that's the question everyone should ask before you invest in SEO. And it's going to depend on some, a few things. It'll depend on are people searching or even searching your keywords in Google, or do you have a product that's new to the market that people haven't heard of where maybe you're better off doing Facebook ads or YouTube ads? So firstly, is the search interest there, how competitive is it? If someone said, Hey,

Brett Curry:

I want to just real quick on that, Jeff, I think that's a super important point.

Jeff Oxford:

One

Brett Curry:

Of the ways we like to describe that is does your product and does your category depend more on demand generation where you need to go out there and convince people to start looking for your product? They're not maybe thinking about it, but if they saw it, they'd be interested. Or is it more about demand capture

Jeff Oxford:

Where

Brett Curry:

You are capturing existing demand? And so a couple of examples there. On the demand capture side, we've done quite a bit in the automotive space, in auto parts and things like that, especially on paid search. And that's one of those things where it's like, yeah, if I need brake pads, well, first of all, I'm going to go to a dealership, but if I need brake pads, they're squeaking and there's an event, and so then I just go search and I buy brake pads. But if it's something like, Hey, some new apparel that I've never worn before, or maybe the chiefs just made the Super Bowl and so now there's something popping up in my feed and I want to buy it. That's demand generation. And so understanding where your product, your company sits on that continuum is going to also determine how much is it going to pay off to invest in SEO.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, 100%. So we talked a little bit earlier about dissecting a bunch of e-commerce analytics accounts, non-branded organic search's traffic. So that means people going to Google searching for a keyword, but not having your brand name in there. They're not searching OMG commerce, they're searching YouTube ad services, something like that. So that was the highest performing revenue wise. So we know the potentials there, but as far as what can you expect as far as increases go, I have some data there. I looked at 152 SEO campaigns over the past few years to see on average, what was the increase after three months, six months, nine months, and 12 months, three months on average, we saw about a 20% increase. Six months was about 50%, nine months was 65, and a year was 75%. So

Brett Curry:

That's just

Jeff Oxford:

Ballpark. And it

Brett Curry:

Changes increase in non

Jeff Oxford:

Organic brand organic traffic. Correct.

Brett Curry:

Nice.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah. So if you're a massive brand and you're getting hundreds of thousands of visits a month, that 50 to 75%, it's going to pay for itself a thousand times over. If you're a smaller startup and you're only getting maybe a thousand visits a month, a 50 to 75% increase might not be as substantial. So a lot of this depends on for SEO to be worth it. Obviously, the more traffic you have now, the more organic search revenue you have now the better. Think of it as like a multiplier. If you're starting out, it's going to be at least a year before you really start getting good momentum. But the potentials there. If you do it and you're an industry where people are searching your products, it's not too competitive. And the last caveat I'll give is that your prices aren't too expensive. I mentioned this briefly, but if you have a premium product that costs three x to four x, so people get on Amazon, you're going to have a much higher bounce rate and Google's just not going to rank you as high as your competitors.

Brett Curry:

Right, right. Yeah, totally, totally makes sense. Okay, super helpful. So then let's kind of break down those buckets then. Let's go through each one and kind of talk about some of the tactics or approaches that we should consider two to

Jeff Oxford:

Fill that bucket. Sure. Bucket number one, technical SEO. If you're on Shopify, you probably don't have to spend too much time on this. Shopify is a very SEO friendly platform. I'm sure most people listen to this right now. If I had to guess more half are probably on Shopify. Totally.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Jeff Oxford:

Totally. It's a great platform. Very, yeah, you probably don't have to spend too much if you're on Shopify, Magento two, BigCommerce or WooCommerce, any of those four platforms, you're probably pretty solid. If you're on a custom platform, if you're on Volution or you still haven't left Yahoo stores or some of these old legacy platforms, you're probably going to want to spend a lot more effort on technical SEO. But for most people

Brett Curry:

It's you're probably going to want to migrate, honestly,

Jeff Oxford:

More so migrate. But for most people, technical, SEO gets overblown. I honestly think people talk about it too much. People love to talk about it because it's something you can control. You can go in and make updates to your XML side map, and you can make changes to your robots text that your crawl efficiency is super dialed in. You can make sure you have schema on all these pages, which a lot of times Google's not even respecting all the different schemas and structured markups these days. So honestly, yes, there might be. It's still good to have a professional, do an audit and say, okay, fix this and then move on. Don't dwell on the technical SEO stage. It should be a one and done type thing. It should not be a big project. Totally makes sense. Number two, page optimization. Very simple. Make sure whatever keyword you're trying to rank for, you have that in the beginning of your title tag. And if you're not familiar what a title tag is, if you search a keyword in Google, it has that blue or purple link that's the title tag. It's a very important ranking factor. Google puts a fair amount of weight into what keywords you put in there

Brett Curry:

In the search in general. Then in the search results, that title tag is going to become kind of the headline almost for that organic listing. Not always, Google can kind of put whatever they want to put there, but a lot of times the title tag shows up there, but also shows up in the tab of the browser as well. So it's going to have some pretty prominent placements and Google gives it a lot of weight.

Jeff Oxford:

And speaking of title tags, like this is one thing I see a lot I a mistake a lot of people make, and you can have a very brandable name. So I was talking with a client who they sell leather conditioners and leather cleaners. It's a product for, if you have a car and you want to have the leather look in its best, you get this leather conditioner that you can put on the car seats. But they don't call it leather conditioner. They call it rejuvenator oil, and that's the brand name. So the issue with that is people aren't searching rejuvenator oil, they're searching. So their products weren't ranking very well in Google because they're calling it what they want to call it,

Jeff Oxford:

Not

Jeff Oxford:

What the customers are calling it. So finding a balance between brandable names and keywords is always something that you're going to have to keep in mind, but you're going to want to have that whatever keyword you're ranking for, ideally you want to have that in your title tag as close to beginning as possible.

Brett Curry:

Love

Jeff Oxford:

It, love it. And then meta descriptions, that's those two lines of black text that we see in the search results. These aren't really a ranking factor. It doesn't matter if you have your keyword in there a bunch or not at all. The best way I like to describe it is meta descriptions are your ad copy for SEO. So having really well written meta descriptions with your calls to actions, unique selling points, it's going to have a higher click-through rate, which will send more traffic. But if Google sees your listings getting a higher click-through rate, that's also going to have a positive impact on rankings.

Brett Curry:

Yeah,

Jeff Oxford:

I

Brett Curry:

Love that. So it's an indirect ranking factor, isn't it, where it's like, use this text to get more clicks, organic clicks, the more organic clicks you get. Actually Google's going to reward that by ranking you higher. So yeah, it's an indirect but important piece.

Jeff Oxford:

And just to nerd out a little bit more, Google had this massive ranking factor leak last year. We saw thousands of documents, internal documents on what they're looking at when scoring websites. One of the things that's confirmed is they look at the click-through rate and the search results. So if you're in position three, but you have a higher click-through rate than position two because you have either a brand name that people recognize or a really well-written meta description, Google, it's one of the most powerful ranking factors. Google will move you up so fast.

Brett Curry:

Yes.

Jeff Oxford:

So yeah, metas script is going

Brett Curry:

To huge impact. Again, that's a vote of confidence, right? That's Google saying, Hey, people are voting with their clicks and with their attention that they like this result. So we're moving it up.

Jeff Oxford:

Exactly. And then the last piece of page optimization, second to last would be header tags. This is what's actually displayed on your page. This is the big header that users see. Not as important as a title tag, but still there's some ranking benefits there. So make sure you have your keyword and the header tag. That's kind of like the

Brett Curry:

Headline for the page, right? So when you open a page, it's

Jeff Oxford:

Basically the headline that you see exactly. It's the big bold text you see at the top. And then the last piece is content. You want to include your keyword in the content, preferably at least once in the first 100 words or so. You want to include variations throughout it. You want to include related keywords. So having your keyword throughout your content is also a very helpful ranking factor, which is why for category pages and collection pages, you want to have at least 200 to 300 words of content and sprinkle your keyword in there a few times.

Brett Curry:

Love it. Love it. Okay, so we got technical SEO that's probably covered before on a reputable platform. Most listeners are probably on Shopify, so you're mostly good there. Then we got page optimization, which is really those factors, title tag content, header tag. Yeah. So it totally makes sense. So then what's bucket number three

Jeff Oxford:

Content? So with content, where I see the most opportunity is making sure your category pages and your collection pages have that 200 to 300 words of content. It can make such a big difference in ranking. It's so easy to do, especially with ai. There's honestly no excuse not to have some well-written category descriptions on your pages. And then there's also blog posts now I think gets overblown a bit. In the SEO world, everyone feels like they have to create content. You have to keep having fresh content on your website that way Google keeps indexing things. There's all these myths about it. My take on blogging is you should only blog if there's particular topics that have high search volume and decent conversion potential. So sticking with the gaming laptops, I bet you there's a lot of people searching best gaming laptops or maybe they're searching Dell versus Lenovo gaming laptops. Any keyword like that, that's like best gaming laptops or comparison, Harrison, or maybe it's laptops for programming students. Anytime that the keyword has some type of search intent that they're looking to do research and byproduct, those are great blog posts to create That way you're not just getting traffic, but you can get conversions. But writing about what is a laptop, how to clean your laptop, how to install Windows 12, whatever it is, those are not going to convert. Yes, they'll drive traffic rank. Whatcha going to get from that? Exactly.

Brett Curry:

That's all going to be answered in the AI overview anyway, so

Jeff Oxford:

That's a hundred percent. So realistically, most clients I see, I'd say maybe 20 to 30% actually have some good topics where it makes sense to go down that direction of blogging. But for me, honestly, about 70% of e-commerce sites I take a look at. I don't think blogging's a waste of time and that they're not going to get a positive ROI from it.

Brett Curry:

Just put content on the category page, product page, things like that, and leave the blog alone. Yeah. Now another interesting thing, I was talking to Steve at Seller Summit and he was talking about how his blog traffic has died. A lot of blog traffic has died, and that was tied to a recent, somewhat recent Google update. Can you talk about that a little bit? When did blogs, again, maybe die is overdramatic, but when did blogs die or when did they reduce in importance? Because there was definitely a day early in our SEO careers, I'm sure where leaning heavily into blogs, that was a winning

Jeff Oxford:

Strategy. Yeah, we can go deep into this one. I was actually working with Steve on his blog while all this stuff was unfolding. So we had worked together, we Forex his blog traffic, and then it was around 2023 that Google had a barrage of updates, different core algorithm updates. They had the helpful content update, and I'm going to give you a little backstory and a tie it all back into your question. So essentially what happened is Google was pretty good at giving results, but what really dropped the ball and really failed was anything like best gaming laptops, best protein powders, best weight loss supplements, best VPNs, the affiliates. And for those that dunno what affiliate is, it's basically I have a blog. I am going to be an Amazon affiliate. I include links to products on Amazon. If people with those links, I get a commission.

Jeff Oxford:

So there's an incentive for these affiliates to rank as high as they can. They can make a lot of money, and they were making a lot of money, millions upon millions of dollars. So they're just flooding Google with all these really crappy low quality affiliate sites that just regurgitating information on Amazon. It's causing a nightmare for Google. Everyone knew the results. You just can't trust them. It's just you're hearing reviews about products and it's obvious they've never even touched the product in their life. They're just regurgitating Amazon reviews and other information. So Google what their solution to this was. They pretty much just decimated any middle tier, low tier, standalone blog. If you're just a blog, you're screwed. But if you're an e-commerce store with a real business that has a business address and has customers and you happen to have a blog doing great, you're blogs can perform better than ever. If you're a service provider like Brett, you or me, and we have a blog, we're established businesses. We might even be Google My Business, we might have a physical address and we have a blog, that's great. But if I'm just a blog and that's all I do and I don't have a product or a service, those sites got decimated,

Brett Curry:

Which makes sense. And a lot of those were back in the day when you would pay for backlinks and things like that. Not that I ever did that, but you'd get links from sites like that. And so a lot of them just got torched.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, it got destroyed. I mean, the results now are way better. But one of the byproducts of that is even really good quality content. Like Steve and his website, my wife quit. Her job is good stuff. He's a true industry expert. He knows his stuff, his content's great. It's a high authority I think of for those SEO nerds, domain rating 70 or domain rating domain authority around 70, huge, huge. But even then his traffic dropped off like 90% because these updates. Now I am working with one content site that's pretty authoritative, and we're doing an experiment right now. So I have a theory because when I work with Steve and I did analysis, all his competitors that are just standalone content sites, they plummeted. They dropped off like 90%. The sites that absorbed all those rankings and benefited were the product and service sites that had, they were in Google My Business, they were in Google's knowledge graph. So if you do auto complete, they'll show up as like a known entity and Google. And so right now I'm doing an experiment to see if I can take a blog, get them and Google my business, get them a Wikipedia page, get them all the signals that show it's a legit business.

Brett Curry:

This a real business,

Jeff Oxford:

A real business. What impact will that have? So TBD, but the correlation is there.

Brett Curry:

I love that theory, man. That's smart. Yeah, keep me posted on that. That's super interesting.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, so to be determined, but the correlation is still there. The sites that have a physical address, a phone number, they're in Google my business, they're in the knowledge panel. Those sites were fine. The ones that didn't have a knowledge panel or any of that, they all just got decimated.

Brett Curry:

Got it, got it. Interesting. Okay, super interesting insight there. Thanks for sharing that. What else about this content bucket? What else would you advise or coach us on for our e-commerce store?

Jeff Oxford:

That's pretty much it. I have 200, 300 on category pages. Include your keyword and then just one little pro tip. If you're wondering what related keywords to include in your content, just search your keyword and Google image search and you'll have that refinement bar at the top. Those are all great related keywords that you might want to consider ones that are applicable, including your content.

Brett Curry:

Interesting. Great, great insight there. Cool. So we've got our technical on page, our content.

Jeff Oxford:

What's bucket number four? Bucket number four is link building. You want to get as many other sites linking back to you as possible. Now, if you want to do this, the white hat way, one strategy that can work really well for e-commerce sites is product reviews. If you have a direct to consumer product, you can find some blogs, you send them some product for free, they take some photos, they write about it, and in the writeup, they're going to include a link back. So that's probably one of the best ways to do it. And you can also get some referral traffic from these sites if it has a big enough following. Another strategy that can work well but is extremely difficult is content marketing, creating content, promoting content. And the reason it's so hard is when you're doing content marketing for link building, it's less about what topics will appeal to your customers and what topics will appeal to bloggers.

Jeff Oxford:

So you're probably going to create content that might not even interest your, it could be if we're sticking with gaming laptops, I could do an article about gaming statistics, like what percent of Americans youth spend 10 hours a day or more on video games, which video games are the most popular by hours? I do a whole breakdown on all these statistics that's not really going to interest someone looking to buy a gaming laptop, but it could interest a journalist who's writing about screen time on kids and wants to reference a statistic. Now that's going to get some backlink. So it's why it's so hard to do it is you have to really kind of change your thinking and less of what will my customers want versus what will the journalists and the bloggers want to link to.

Brett Curry:

Super interesting. Yeah. So what are the most used tactics then, and what are you coaching your clients on in terms of practical ways to build links? Because this has always been one of those areas where it's the highest correlation in terms of ranking factors. It's how Google was built based on backlinks, but to do it the right way is really time intensive and really difficult. So what are some of the tips, suggestions, advice that you give to clients?

Jeff Oxford:

So I'd say try go the white hat as much as you can. Definitely do the content marketing or the product reviews. But here's the sad truth about it. If you want to get a link to a product page, if you want to get link to a category page, nine times of the 10, a blogger is going to require payment. You could have the most compelling pitch with the best product. That's truly groundbreaking. But these bloggers, this is how they put food on their table. They live off this. This is their income. And if they check your site, if you were a library or you were a nonprofit, they're probably not going to charge you. If you reach out to them and they click on your site, it's like, oh, this is an e-commerce site. Nine times out of 10, they're going to require payment.

Jeff Oxford:

So they might call it an editorial fee of like, oh, we'll write about you, we'll feature you, but it's going to take time to pull up that post and make the edits and then publish it and do all this stuff. So you can expect anywhere from 50, I'd say, to a hundred dollars of these editorial fees or blog fees to get featured. So that's the sad truth of it. What's even kind of more sad is I wish it didn't work as well. I really wish that the links paid links from blogs didn't work, but they do. And the correlations there, insights rank. Well, the tricky part is deciphering a good backlink from a bad one. So let say have two blogs, trying to determine which blog is going to be helpful and which is going to be harmful is extremely difficult. I see even SEO veterans have been doing this for five to 10 years. They still get it wrong. You have to look at, well, what's the domain rating and domain authority of the site? Is this going to help me? Okay, let's go a step deeper. How much traffic does this have? Does it actually have some rankings in Google?

Jeff Oxford:

But now they're getting smart, and I don't know if you know this Brett, but a lot of sites will manipulate and game their traffic numbers by artificially running a bunch of fake searches on nonsense nonsense keywords and that they ranked for. So now they're inflating that. So you have to go a step deeper and see the keywords that are driving traffic are those keywords related to the site's main focus. So there's so many checks you have to do. We'll even go deep and look at who is this linking out to? Is it linking out to porn sites and escort sites and Viagra sites? So for most people, they stop at level one and level two, they'll look at the domain rating, the traffic, they'll move on, but you'll end up buying links that are just absolute garbage and can hurt your sites. So link billing, it's so hard for that reason. So that's why I say if you're going to do it, the white hat approach, going to real blogs and product reviews and take a stab at content marketing is probably best. But just know of all the four buckets, link billing is the most difficult and the hardest for an e-commerce brand to make a core competency.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it totally makes sense, man. Super, super helpful. So let's then get to maybe the question that was most burning in people's minds. Well then what about ai, SEO? So what do we do? So, okay, this is our core SEO, and that's aimed at Google, but what if we want to rank in Jet GPT or Perplexity or Gemini, which is related to Google or other AI that's yet to come? What's your advice on that?

Jeff Oxford:

It's a great question. There is some overlap. If you're doing SEO, right, a lot of it's going to carry over to chat GPT. So one thing that chat GT does is a lot of times they'll show the sources of where it's pulling information from and it's pulling from the web. So content marketing and blocking can be great if you have some posts and anyone to this, if you want to show up better in chat g bt, first thing you should do is do a best gaming laptops, best protein powder, whatever your product is, create a buyer's guide or a product roundup about it. So those get picked up very frequently in chat GBT, so you get a little more influence on swaying the model, whatever you think is best. So blogging, content marketing is one. Link building is another one. We see if there's getting mentioned on other websites, getting your product reviews on authoritative sites, those are also getting picked up as sources. So that can help. It's like a PR play where the more sites and webpages in the web that mention your products,

Jeff Oxford:

The higher chance you have of being cited in these large language models. But if you want to be just kind of go straight to the jugular on how you're going to rank, well search your keyword or go into a chat, GPT type best protein powder, whatever your keyword is in there, scroll down, look at the sources, it's going to tell you exactly where it's pulling from to generic this result and try to get your product featured in those. So it's going to show you all these top 10 protein powder, top eight protein powder type pages. You're going to want to reach out to them. You're probably going to have to send them free product. You'll probably have to send them an affiliate link to make it worth it. You'll probably have to have a compelling pitch on why they should include you. But that what I'm seeing is the biggest impact. We did some correlation research on this, and it was like we talked about links being highly correlated with 0.3 when it came to chat GPT and getting your product included, it was like 0.45 correlation of the number of different product roundups you were cited in. So the more product roundups your product is found in, that's in the sources, the much higher chance you're going to have of showing up in those chat GBT shopping carousels.

Brett Curry:

Yeah, it totally makes sense. And in some ways it's similar to product reviews. And what I mean by that is looking at Amazon reviews, product reviews make a big difference in terms of ranking and conversions and all those things. And the issue is that they can be gamed, right? People can manipulate them. There's tons of fake reviews. So it's like, well then won't Amazon just get away from that? And the real answer is no, they can't. There's no better signal. Every user or every shopper wants to see reviews. And so it's got to get better at weeding out the crappy reviews. And I think it's the same thing with these roundup blogs, with backlinks, with things like that. These are signals that when done right are the clearest, most powerful signals that are out there right now. And so really just got to do it the right way, build those things the right way. But it makes sense to me that those are going to continue to be a ranking factor for SEO and for AI SEO.

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, I would a hundred percent agree with that. Cool. Cool.

Brett Curry:

Awesome, man. Well, this has been fantastic. I really want to pick your brain on AI as well. So how about, let's do this. Let's be like a little teaser. We'll do another ai, let's do an AI focused episode. This will be the little teaser for it. What models are you playing with the most right now? What are you most excited about with ai and specifically like AI and working with your agency and automation and stuff like that? And is there one cool thing you can share with the audience related to ai?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, so models wise, I was using Claude 3.7 a bunch, and then four for a while, but then I started using Gemini 2.5 pro, and I think that's my favorite one right now. What I love doing for fun, I'm not a coder, I've always wanted to be a programmer, but I dunno how to program. So I've been using this tool Rept, which is like an AI code generator, and I've been able to build some pretty powerful apps that can take a screenshot of a blog, pass that screenshot to an AI model, analyze it, and then from that analysis also pull on keyword ranking data for page and then generate title tags, meta descriptions and headers. So basically automating the SEO process where you take a screenshot of a page, you pull on the ranking data, you give all this to the AI model and have it optimize the page. So as far as your teaser goes, literally just last week I pulled the trigger and hired three full-time AI automation specialists. And we're doing an experiment to build a fully autonomous AI agency where there'd be no people. It's just I'm going to see how many of the SEO steps can I automate with ai? And instead of having an actual account manager, you have your AI account manager. So this is something that we're building out.

Brett Curry:

Dude, can't wait to see that. Okay. That was a good teaser right there. That was powerful. Definitely going to do an AI episode coming up next. And so looking forward to that. But Jeff, as people are listening to this and they're like, dang, alright, I got to think about seo. I got to think about ai seo. I need to talk to Jeff. How can people reach out to you? How can they work with you?

Jeff Oxford:

Yeah, you can go to my website. It's just 1 8 0 marketing.com, 180 marketing.com. Or you can just shoot me an email directly. My email is Jeff at 1 8 0 marketing.com. Happy to hear from you guys.

Brett Curry:

And Jeff, as you can tell, just super cool dude, the kind of guy you want to hang out with. Grab a beer with talk, SEO and talk e-commerce with. And so with that, Jeff, awesome job, man. Thanks for the time and looking forward to that AI episode. Thanks, Brett. This has been fun. Awesome. And as always, thank you for tuning in. Would love to hear from you, connect with me on LinkedIn or shoot us a note about the pod. Or if you like this episode, share it with somebody that you think will enjoy it. And with that, until next time, thank you for listening.

‍