Denim

Every week someone tells me they’re going to do their own SEO. Wishing them the best. Here’s everything that goes into SEO for an ecom brand: > Pulling every non-branded keyword your competitors rank for > Mining your Google Ads data for keywords that actually convert > Checking the top 5 results for every keyword to see if there's a weak page you can beat > Finding every keyword you rank #7-15 for and optimizing the ranking page to push it into the top 3 > Googling every keyword you decide to target to see what type of page to map it to > Splitting keywords with different intent onto different pages > Fixing keyword cannibalization issues > Building a collection page for every long-tail, transactional keyword in your niche > Adding the keyword to the meta title, meta description, H1 and URL slug > Adding it to an H2, too > Writing 400-500 words of content for every collection page > Covering what the product is, who it's for and why yours, plus an FAQ, on every one > Adding internal links to related collections on every collection page > Adding important product and collection pages to the main navigation menu > Making sure no page is buried more than three folders deep > Reverse-engineering the competitor product pages ranking #1 > Rewriting your product descriptions to beat them > Working the keyword into your product titles > Combining product pages that are just variants of the same product > Writing "[Brand] vs [Competitor]" posts for every competitor > Writing "[Competitor] alternative" posts, with you as the top alternative > Publishing supporting blog posts that internally link to every collection page > Deleting old blog posts with zero rankings and zero traffic > Refreshing the ones worth saving > Finding niche-relevant sites with a DR of 30+ and real organic traffic > Negotiating a price for every single link > Telling every site which article gets the link and what the anchor text should be > Watching the anchor text percentages on every page so your link building looks natural > Building as many links as your competitors have > Building half your links to the homepage > Building no more than 1-2 links a month to any collection page > Spotting negative SEO attacks when they happen and disavowing the spam links > Entering every target prompt into ChatGPT, Claude and Gemini to see what gets cited > Analyzing the word count, product count and ranking criteria of every cited listicle > Writing a "best X" listicle with your product ranked #1 > Getting 5-10 variations of it published on 3rd-party sites > Fixing broken links and broken backlinks > Canonicalizing paginated pages > Ensuring each page has an H1 tag > Making sure there are no crawl and indexing errors > No-indexing ad landing pages, filter pages, tag pages and blog category pages > Checking that your meta titles are being read by Google > Ensuring schema markup is properly setup > Waiting 4-6 months to see if any of it worked > Going back to the drawing board if it didn't > Diagnosing every traffic drop after a Google core update > Figuring out what the update actually changed > Redoing your SEO to match it until rankings return > Watching competitors' SEO and adjusting your strategy every time one outranks you > Rebuilding your entire strategy every 2-3 years because SEO keeps changing Oh, and you'll still need to pay for: > Ahrefs or Semrush > Screaming Frog SEO Spider > Backlinks > 3rd-party listicle placements Or you could just hire an SEO agency.