Strengths and challenges of eCommerce SEO agency: experience of Sam Wright

Blink SEO (blinkseo.co.uk) is a specialist SEO agency focusing on eCommerce for small and medium businesses.

MakeBeCool Shopify experts team (makebecool.com) is conducting a series of interviews to study how Marketing and Web development agencies work with Shopify businesses. Our team spoke with Sam Wright, Managing Director of Blink, for this interview.

What makes Blink SEO different from other digital marketing agencies?

We are very much focused on eCommerce SEO – it's around 80% of our work. We do eCommerce SEO day in, day out, and we are particularly focused on small and medium enterprises (SMEs).?

Our main customer profile is stores turning over between ￡250,000 and ￡5 million. We’ve been working with businesses like this for over a decade and it’s an audience we know extremely well.??

There are good reasons for this. Companies with a turnover of below ￡250,000 may not have established product fit, for example. There are always exceptions and we do work with some businesses at launch, for example, but the earlier stage a store is in, typically our focus is more on strategy - in particular, positioning and categorisation - than executing a tactical SEO campaign.?

At the other end of the scale businesses with a turnaround of more than ￡5 million might have a relatively mature marketing department, including dedicated SEO specialists. We can - and do - work with businesses like this too, but this is usually more consultancy work than execution.???

?Do you focus on SEO only or do you provide a wider range of services?

SEO is our main service, but we do offer others, particularly development and paid advertising.?

I would say from a development point of view, the majority of our work is about implementing the work needed for our SEO campaigns rather than new builds.?

At the same time, we've got a bunch of really successful PPC campaigns running. In particular, we use our PPC campaigns to try out tactics that will benefit the site from an SEO point of view as well - testing out the validity of certain keywords and approaches, for example. From a strategy point of view, we also use it to validate messaging, again, particularly around positioning and categorisation.?

You are a member of the Shopify Partner League. So is Shopify the main part of your audience? Or is it just one of many platforms you work with?

We work with a number of platforms, including WooCommerce, BigCommerce, Magento, Aero Commerce etc. We also work on custom CMS platforms, as well as some less well-known ones such as Cratejoy.

Still, Shopify is about 40% of our client base and is definitely one of our core services.

From your point of view, what are the advantages and disadvantages of Shopify as a platform?

Overall the Shopify ecosystem can be great, but it can also be restrictive too. If there’s an app for what you need, great, but for a lot of businesses that need more complicated integrations or customisations, it’s not always the best fit.??

Still, we always say the following: if a business has a relatively low number of SKUs, then Shopify is always a pretty solid platform. It's got its quirks from an SEO point of view, particularly around folder structures, but nothing that can’t be worked around.??

There's some kind of quirks in how Google’s PageSpeed Insights grades page speed. But most of the time this doesn't really have a real impact on SEO.?

What are the main challenges that you face and how do you cope with them?

There are a number of challenges that we face working in the eCommerce sector, particularly in the SME space that we're in.

A lot of the reasons why eCommerce projects fail are not down to the execution of an SEO campaign. It's down to more strategic stuff that happens at an earlier stage. We’ve already talked a little about categorisation and positioning, but this is incredibly important to the success of a project.?

As we mentioned, a lot of the businesses that we work with may not have a particularly well-developed marketing team in-house. Often we work with owner-managed businesses and while often there may be a marketing manager or specialist, sometimes they won’t be coming from a traditional marketing background — instead, they may have been promoted because of their product expertise.

In these cases, they often lack experience in tasks such as developing customer personas and identifying pain points, and even some categorisation work might not be done in advance.?

This means that when we come in, we can't really execute a good campaign until all of that stuff is done. So what we find ourselves doing is stepping in and helping carry out that work. I think this is also something that sets us apart from other agencies of our type.

...and even some categorisation work might not be done in advance. And that means that when we come in, we can't really execute a good campaign until all of that stuff is done. So what we find ourselves doing is stepping in and helping carry out that work.

There’s another important point to make here. There are plenty of branding and positioning agencies out there, but what we find is that a lot of them don’t have enough expertise into what this actually means when it comes down to execution.?

Recently, one of our clients hired a branding agency to carry out some positioning work. The strategy they sent over included slides saying things like, “Your business is a water buffalo” and comparing it to a whole bunch of different animals.?

There was nothing about what category they were competing in, no pain point analysis, or any insights into what made them different from their competition.?

This is all information that is essential if you are going to run a successful digital marketing campaign. This insight tells you what your audience is looking for, particularly from an inbound point of view. Without it even basic tasks like keyword research can be quite difficult.?

This process is something we work quite hard on - it is getting that branding positioning stuff right, but in a way that you can actually use it to run successful campaigns.

This process is something we work quite hard on - it is getting that branding positioning stuff right, but in a way that you can actually use it to run successful campaigns.

?This is also related to client education. They often come to us because they want to sell more, and they think that SEO is a channel that can help them do that. And, you know, sometimes we can just go in and carry out the SEO work, and that will happen.?

But often it's a case of fixing that strategic stuff at a slightly higher level and we need to work with clients to understand that process and what you need to go through.?

Another important challenge that we have is recruitment. We are growing quite consistently at the moment - as are lots of businesses in this space - and it's a competitive market for hiring.

For this reason, it's important for us that we come across as a great place to work and people can understand that if they join us, they can really develop their careers.?

To do this we've got a number of incentives in place. We work a four-day week, which is great for wellbeing, engagement and productivity. Everybody is a big fan of the four-day week schedule. We run a profit share scheme as well, in which everybody shares in the success of the business. We also have a dedicated wellbeing officer and wellbeing budgets and various other things.??

it's important for us that we come across as a great place to work and people can understand that if they join us, they can really develop their careers.?

But I think all of the “perks” are secondary to creating a business where people understand that they're part of their team, are given the time and space to work on projects properly, and have the right level of support.

We also have dedicated experts that do regular one-to-one training with our team as well, so they can really develop their subject expertise. But it's really about creating an environment where people feel listened to, they know that they can experiment and they understand the direction of the business. Creating this means that you can keep good people and you can attract new ones. That's been quite a big thing for us.

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