SaaS Interviews with CEOs, Startups, Founders
SEO Secrets from Shopify, G2 Head of SEO Strategy
28 Jan 2021
Chapter 1: What are Kevin Indig's qualifications and experience in SEO?
So when we achieve an SEO win, that needs to translate to the sales team and they need to understand what that means and how to bring that to our customers.
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My guest today is Kevin Indig. He leads SEO as director at Shopify and is the creator of the Growth Memo newsletter. Previously, he ran SEO at G2 and Atlassian and worked with companies like eBay, Eventbrite, Samsung, Pinterest, and many others. Kevin, you ready to take us to the top?
Yeah, absolutely. So I've been in this game for a bit over 10 years now. Besides being director of SEO at Shopify, I also mentor startups at the German Accelerator, which is the official startup program of the German government. And yeah, you already mentioned kind of my side project or side hustle, if you will, the growth memo in my own podcast. And where can people find the growth memo stuff?
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Chapter 2: How did Kevin transition from G2 to Shopify?
A bit over $1,000. Okay. So that was decent.
It's interesting because I didn't invest a crazy amount in promoting that. It almost all came organically. So I'm sure I could have squeezed a bit more out of that. But then when you have a day job on the side, there's only so much time you can invest in these things.
Yeah, no, I understand. Okay, so growth memo, that's a side project. Let's pick up at G2. I know you did SEO at Atlassian as well, but let's pick up at G2. So what year did you join G2?
Joined G2 in very early 2019 as vice president of SEO and content. So my goal was basically to grow the marketplace. For those who don't know G2, it's a software, specifically B2B software marketplace. You can find anything from a Salesforce to a Buffer, any kind of software needs, including reviews, comparisons, alternatives, and all that good stuff.
And my job was to grow the marketplace, right? Bring buyers to the marketplace, predominantly through SEO. And I led a couple of teams that were heavily invested in technical SEO and content. What does technical SEO mean?
Technical SEO is basically the technical optimization of a website for a search engine, which spans everything from optimizing the code base to making the site faster, but also making it easier for search engines to find and understand all the relevant content on a website, which sounds pretty simple and straightforward, at least for humans.
But when it comes to machines, they need a lot more help. They need a lot more assistance, and that's where technical SEO comes in.
For any sort of review site, and there's a lot of competitors here, defending your position on a certain keyword, but more specifically a keyword combination like company name plus the word alternatives or company name plus the word pricing, I imagine can be very difficult. You guys have done this very well on some certain keywords in the review space.
Help me understand some super creative, wild things you guys did that helped you really defend that position. Ranking for it is one thing, but defending it over time is a different...
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Chapter 3: What is the role of technical SEO in website optimization?
So when they see that, they understand, oh, okay, I can find that many reviews. It must be very reputable. I probably get the depth of insight that I'm looking for. And that attracted a lot of clicks, and that was rewarded by Google with higher positions in search engines. So we did a lot of that kind of stuff, which I would say was pretty cutting-edge.
There's not a consensus when I look up something like email tool reviews amongst you, you know, G2, Captera, and all the other sort of review sites in terms of which schemas to be using in the metadata.
When I do that for you guys, there are some, it looks like the tests that are being run where you're actually using the FAQ schema and putting a little dropdown so people can review and get answers without actually clicking into the G2 site. Is that good or bad for you? You don't get the search traffic.
Yeah, it depends. It's very counterintuitive. At the very beginning, when Google wrote FAQ schema out, there was a lot of controversy around this and some sites reported lower click rates. We, on the other hand, we noticed the opposite. And it's interesting.
Because it seems that FAQ, or at least the questions that people see in the search snippet or under the search snippet, are more like an appetizer and stimulate people to learn more. And so the hypothesis here is that people, first of all, get a taste of the quality and depth of the content based on the questions. Second of all, because software is a very research-intensive field...
It stimulates people to click through instead of just reading the short little snippet and then not clicking through. So I think it also depends a little bit on what niche or vertical you play in. But for us, it certainly worked pretty well.
Besides putting the number of reviews for a certain taxonomy in the metadata when people searched, what other sort of creative things do you test over, I guess, your one or two years there?
Yeah, you know, there's a lot on the site itself that you can do that's not surfaced in the search snippet. So first of all, we spend a lot of time on SEO hygiene, which is basically a list or catalog of things that you need to do to kind of not waste Google's resources in a nutshell. And that in itself can take...
a lot of time and resources because it's a very huge site and growing very quickly. But then we also experimented a lot with the quality of content that people can find on the site. And that is not just an SEO topic. It's a topic for the business, for UX, for design, for all these kinds of things. So we got pretty in-depth in understanding where people actually find value, where they don't.
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Chapter 4: How does G2 leverage its size for SEO success?
Some follow-up questions on these individual things. When you look at an SEO hygiene list, what tools were you using so that you could spit out that list and then go tackle it?
On the very basic level, there's a tool from Google itself, which is free and called Google Search Console, where Google will report problems that they find on your site. These problems sometimes are very easy to solve, but sometimes they're also very complex, especially when Google reports that they find the content on your site of very low quality. And that's a fuzzy, broad concept, right?
So there's some follow-up work where you have to understand what they actually mean and how to improve that. But there are also other tools which help you understand how Google understands your site. One of the most effective is what we call a log file analyzer. And there's a list of brands out there that provide log file analysis.
And that's a very in-depth technical exercise or tool where you really look at... Who's the best at that? If someone wants to go hire them, who would they go hire? Yeah. Let me list a couple here. UnCrawl is a great solution. UnCrawl? UnCrawl, yeah. Botify is a really good one. DeepCrawl is a great one. Screaming Frog is a fantastic one. And I'll probably forget one or two here.
But these are all fantastic solutions. And the basic idea is you plug them into your systems or you connect them with your servers, and they will tell you exactly, oh, Google looked at this site and at this time, and this is what they did after that.
And when you aggregate all that data and you summarize it, you aggregate it over a couple of thousands or maybe millions of pages, you get a pretty accurate picture where Google gets stuck and where you can optimize your site from a technical standpoint of view so that Google visits your site a lot and looks at your content in a nutshell.
Talk to me a little bit. There's a lot of psychology happening on these review sites. When you can convince people to put a G2 top-ranked badge on their page, on their footer even, and get a backlink, that obviously really helps. How did the psychology of those badges influence SEO strategy, if at all?
It does, to a great degree. And one of my goals was always to make G2 something like a Michelin star, where when people see the badge on a software vendor's site, they would see, okay, they're rated well on G2. That means they must be of high quality. That was kind of the meta goal or the North Star. And so... It's funny because an SEO would say, oh, cool, we got a backlink from that site.
That's so valuable. And sure, that's true, but it's even more valuable as a trust signal than getting the brand out there. Backlinks, still important in SEO, but the overall perception and visibility of the brand is much more important, right? So we think that Google even looks at unlinked mentions on other sites, meaning you don't even need a backlink.
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Chapter 5: What creative strategies did G2 implement for SEO?
And it's basically to help successful and technology with a positive impact to become successful and get greater reach. And I think that's much closer at Shopify. Shopify is much closer to my mission than G2 actually is.
So that's why I eventually made that decision. Besides, what was your first move at Shopify in terms of creative recommendations for growing SEO value?
Yeah. I have a couple of SEO teams at Shopify. And it is a... It is a terrible cognitive bias to come into a company and look at it from the outside and say, oh, why are you not doing all these kind of things that are so obvious? There's usually a very, very good reason. And so I tried to come to Shopify with a kind of, you know, kind of an empty mind or an open mind, better said.
And like really... Learn about the business and there's a ton to learn. Understand why certain things are the way they are. On the other hand, you cannot just rest for six months and just say you're learning. So you have to be active in some ways. And so I look for a couple of quick wins and just ends that I can tie together to help people out, connect people.
Because as a director, there's a certain visibility that you have that other people on your team might not have.
On the other hand, you need to... So what are some of those loose ends that you close very quickly to show value fast?
Yeah, sure. So connecting certain people in certain teams, that's a huge value that you can provide as an executive that some people in a team cannot because you just know where certain projects are. So I saw, for example, that there are a couple of things that different teams are working on that would have a heavy overlap.
So by just bringing those teams together and make them talk to each other, it's a quick win where you can help them out. However, I also brought some of the things that I learned from G2 to the Shopify team. So we're very, very heavy on test, measure, learn at Shopify. And I had done some of that work at G2 previously. So I felt very confident in bringing that over to Shopify.
Can you name some actual SEO tactics you implemented where when people hear it, they go, I should go try that?
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Chapter 6: How does team structure impact SEO strategy at G2?
You need to understand how strong is your brand there. And that has SEO implications. Google does give strong brands a bonus in the service.
So how? Quantify that. I mean, Kevin, everything you just said is very fluffy. No one knows. Someone's going to say my brand is weak or not weak. Where can we go quantify that?
Yeah, for example, with backlinks or search volume. Search volume is a super simple one. So you can just simply look at how many people in different markets look for your brand. You can even compare that on something like Google Trends. You can go to Google Keyword Planner.
You can use a third-party tool like Moz, SEMrush, Ahrefs, and just simply compare the number of monthly searches for your brand name across different countries. And that will give you a relatively accurate picture.
Very good. Love that. Okay, where can people learn more from you?
Yeah, so I already mentioned my site, my newsletter. So kevin-indig.com on Twitter. You can find me on kevin-indig.com. Sorry, scratch.com. It's just kevin-indig. And just Google my name for everything else. I have links to my podcast on my site as well.
Guys, Kevin Indig, G2, Shopify, building something special, everything SEO. Kevin, thanks for taking us to the top. Appreciate it.
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