Ryan McMillan

PMax is great and all but don’t let it do ALL the heavy lifting if you plan to truly maximise profit from Google Ads. PMax can be seen as a discovery campaign. Use it to discover new things that work. Once discovered, those new things should be implemented into manual campaigns where you improve the ROI through more strategic management of things like targeting and creative. If you’re a busy biz owner running your own ads, I forgive you for only using PMax if that’s what you are doing. But if you’ve hired an agency or person and THEY are only doing PMax despite them being a full time Gads pro, this warrants some concern.

2

I’m still trying to figure out the exact format I want to use, but I think I’ll just start by giving you updates on the 3 Shopify EMD projects, on a weekly basis and I’ll let the format develop over time. Out of the 3 EMD projects, 1 targets the US, and 2 target Australia, we’ll call the US project, Project A, and the Australian projects, B and C. Here are the updates! Project A) Spent the week arranging a lot of the access, moving billing details from one card to another, getting a VA in place with my business partner, to fulfill the orders, and identifying a great potential candidate to run the operations and manage the project. We’re still figuring out exactly what we’re going to do with the prices (we believe we need to increase prices to become profitable on Google Ads), but we’ll give it some more time. Until then, the main focus is collecting as many 5-star reviews as possible, and getting Google Ads profitable, we’ll also start building out some email flows/automation shortly. Project B) This is the project that made 4 sales last week, exclusively from organic traffic with no links, no content, no collection texts, just 100-something collections created, on-page optimized, and indexed, along with about 250 products added to the store. This week we added about 200 additional products from new suppliers to further fill out the collection pages, and the majority of the week was dedicated to image enhancement. Unfortunately, the images we get from suppliers usually aren’t of the highest quality (this is a super good opportunity for any supplier to up their game by the way - improve your image quality). Because of that, we’ve bulk-exported all product images, and we’re using an AI image enhancer to bring up the quality of the images and make the entire brand look more premium. We should have this fully done in the next few days, and on Friday we have a meeting to launch Google Ads, which I’m incredibly excited about. Project C) This one is the most insane because we literally haven’t even created any collections, we haven’t added anything to the homepage and the site doesn’t even have a navigation menu… Yet, somehow we got a $300 order in last week. Absolutely nuts. This is a higher ticket store, which has the potential to do a few million a month in revenue once it’s running at full speed… But because the project is so massive, with so many product categories, it is taking us quite a while to plan out all the keyword research, as we’re going to be targeting over 6M keywords. I’ll be getting an update shortly from my team on when this will be ready, but other than that, this week we mainly planned out the homepage, the theme we’re going to use and we’re going to start with the site layout build-out process. Other than that, I also added all 3 projects into our indexing tool a few days ago, to ensure as many product pages get indexed as possible, and that’s that. Any feedback on the format of this post?

24

7 Comments

#throwback I'm looking through the archives and found this article I wrote for GoDaddy Australia in 2018. SEO - aka Search Engine Optimization (Optimisation) content is still relevant. Keywords continue to be important to help customers and clients find you online. You can DIY it if you have access to the backend of your website, but it's smarter to outsource it to experts like web developers and content writers who understand SEO. Where to put keywords 👉 Title tag 👉 Meta description 👉 Page URL 👉 H1 heading 👉 Image names 👉 Alt tags https://lnkd.in/gis55dcW

11

Are you measuring the money you’re ACTUALLY making from Google Ads? Return on Ad Spend (ROAS) measures revenue, but this of course only tells half the story. Profit is where it’s at. That’s why we think Profit on Ad Spend (POAS) is generally best, especially if you’re an e-commerce brand. We wrote a blog explaining the differences between the two metrics, and how to make the switch. Check it out👇 #ROAS #POAS #GoogleAds

9

$277,760 more sales in the last three months I've been working with this client for around 18 months and revised their previously stagnant SEO strategy. Here are the four biggest levers we pulled: 👉 Optimised collection pages - updated page titles, improved their existing content and internal links between collection pages. 👉 Created genuinely helpful pain-point content for their audience (1/week cadence). People are now finding their product as a solution to their problems. 👉 Leveraged digital-PR to build highly authoritative & relevant links. They've added around 130 links over the past 12 months. 👉 Built out more content on product pages, added FAQs, collected (A LOT of) reviews and added structured data. We've also helped DOUBLED their email list through content upgrades too, with their email channel now driving 600% more revenue than last year. I love it when SEO helps out other channels too.

30

10 Comments

Small ranking boost (or drop) in local SERP 🚀 I read an article from Joy Hawkins (link in comments) a while back regarding a ranking boost happens when you acquired the 10th review on GBP. Did a test on a service-based client in Sydney. The local ranking started spread across Sydney CBD when they acquire the 10th review early Oct as seen on 6 Oct screenshot. It works! The experiment doesn't end here. I wasn't intentionally going to test the next part. 😅 Google decides to remove one of the reviews end of October for whatever reason. Within a week, the local ranking went back to the original state. It is interesting to see how local search algo reacts to the this. Just because you see a ranking boost after reaching your 10th review doesn't mean continuing to add more will produce the same results. Other factors will come in to play to improve the local rankings.

4

1 Comment

Scaling a trade business from $1m/year to $4m/year isn't hard if you're in Sydney. It looks like this: 1) High-converting website (meaning a lot of website ad traffic becomes quote requests because you look trustworthy) 2) A semi-decent sales process (your estimator can bang out 5-10 quotes a day) 3) A good team that can finish the job at a high-quality standard Very simple & achievable. Most business owners can achieve this but don't. Why? Well simple answer to that is ask yourself why YOU haven't tried (only if you're not at $4m+ yet) Going from $4m -> $10m however... Different ballgame there.

9

1 Comment

Paid cannibalisation is something that comes up a lot at the moment, so we built a super simple report using data from Macaroni Software. This looks at brand queries from Search Console that have seen a drop in impressions and clicks while rankings have stayed the same or improved. If there is a big drop in clicks in particular, it's usual a sign of paid cannibalisation, usually from Pmax. From here, we can experiment on redistributing budgets for better performance. There's so much waste in #Shopify digital marketing and this is a great example of how it can be trimmed.

9

Looking for some design inspiration for your next website build? In ep 53 of eCommerce Australia, I ask Nick Lehrain from Oliver Grace to give us some examples of great looking websites he likes the look of, and some he has worked on himself! Comment below if you have any eCommerce websites you love the design of! #ecommerce #ecommerceaustralia #shopify #klaviyo #okendo #retailfest2024 #remarkabledigital #olivergrace

29

3 Comments

After 10 years in SEO, I now have a legitimate excuse to talk about Newcastle United after their domain migration and redesign over the past few months. The redirects overall are fairly messy, with a lot of redirect chains and temporary redirects in place (which could be on purpose if they are looking to expand into different countries). Pretty much every URL on nufc.co.uk 301 redirects to .com and then temporary redirects to .com/en The majority of redirects are like for like, apart from match reports which end up on the relevant teams squad page (E.G. https://lnkd.in/ekF78sN7), this is despite the fact they exist E.G. https://lnkd.in/euJq9-fY. They also have different versions/duplicates of match reports which now exist E.G. https://lnkd.in/eH6S7zPd however are broken. It’s meant they will likely be losing a lot of traffic from old match reports. Despite this, the website looks so much cleaner, so well done to the team(s) who were involved. It’s clear they’ve migrated with a view to expanding into different countries to target a more global audience, however currently only have an English version, so it will be interesting to see how they manage that. Newcastle United Football Club If you need any support, give myself or the Evolved team a shout (a few away tickets for next season will be sufficient)

68

8 Comments

How to get the most from an outsourced marketer if you're an accountant (from an accountant's mouth)... Did a refreshing sales call with an Brisbane accountant last week. His preparation for the call was first rate. He shared his results and goals including: - Revenue from last FY - Target revenue for this FY - New revenue added, split between sales to existing/new clients - Split of A/B/C/D clients (and clear definitions of each) - # of new clients he wanted this FY split by above categories - Target industries they want to work with - Marketing budget Plus he shared marketing stuff they'd done in the past and would like to do in future. He was also honest about how much he'd like to do vs outsource. In 30 mins, I was able to understand his firm and how we could best help them. Even if we can't, it was an in-depth chat we both took value from. If you want to get the most from an outsourced marketing firm like Bizink, the above is what you should share. Just like you want openness from a business owner client, especially around the numbers. Budget is one area people have been "trained" to be coy on with sales people. It's a mistake. I help firms with budgets for $200 to $20,000. But obviously what I recommend is dependent on where you sit in that spectrum. It just wastes time if you're not clear about it. So much sales training out there. Anyone heard of any buyer training? Would get a better result for buyers and sellers if there were IMO.

10

6 Comments

Google's Search Generative Experience (SGE) is set within the coming days to Australia. This will no doubt reshape our local Google digital landscape. As SEO professionals, it's crucial we stay ahead of the curve. I have already been speaking to clients and other professionals about this since SGE launched overseas. Here's what my top level action plan be for SGE when it launches: 📊 Analyse SGE's Impact: -Identify which queries and search intents trigger SGE results -Assess the potential impact on various client niches -Spot current gaps and opportunities in SGE results 🧪 Experiment and Adapt: -Develop and run tests to understand how we can influence SGE results Some key experiments will include: a) Targeting long-form, conversational queries b) Creating content that directly addresses specific questions c) Optimising existing content to align with SGE-featured information d) Implementing structured data to enhance content understanding 🔄 Iterate and Refine: -Monitor changes in SGE results after implementing strategies -Continuously edit, test, and learn from the findings If you enjoyed this content please give a follow or like. I will be more active on LI 😁 P.S I took inspiration from Edward Bate early post to talk about this topic. #SEO #SGE #searchgenerativeexeprience

11

2 Comments

If you’re new to Google Ads and want to gain a basic understanding of how they work and the average investment required in order to drive attractive results, I recommend checking out this blog I recently wrote for Digital8 !💫👩‍💻 #googleads #ppc #googleadstips

13

2 Comments

Let's talk about why #SEO agencies struggle to deliver results for most #Shopify stores... It's not about strategy, Google updates, or any of that. It’s about the sheer volume of work needed each month. At Macaroni, we aim to double revenue within 12 months. We've done this repeatedly and know what's required. For most Shopify stores, 60% of revenue comes from people landing on a category or product page, via organic search or Google Ads. Optimising these pages is crucial. But the real challenge is the scale. Imagine you have 100 categories generating revenue. Adding another 100 could significantly boost your earnings. But how long does it take to do the keyword research for 100 new categories? And then create the pages, add products, write content, and go live? Keyword research alone can take a whole day. Creating and optimising each page might take 45 minutes. That’s over 80 hours of work in total. Here’s the problem: How much time does your agency dedicate to this kind of work? Excluding "strategy" and other tasks, it’s often no more than 10 hours a month. So, it could take them at least 8 months to finish. This is why SEO projects drag on for months before seeing any returns. But say you want to go faster? Most store owners can’t afford the amount of work needed, and agencies just can’t deliver it. This is the reason we built Macaroni Software. Creating categories, optimising pages, internal linking - doing this at scale is our bread and butter. If you are a Shopify business with over 100 products (because that's where this approach works best of all), we'd love to show you how we can help. #eCommerceSEO #SEOAutomation

14

Email Sign Up Optimisation Tip: Progressive Profiling Approach Implement progressive profiling in your post sign-up form strategy. Craft content that gradually collects more information from subscribers over time, minimising initial friction and improving conversion rates. Gradual engagement leads to more complete profiles!

1

Email Sign Up Optimisation Tip: Progressive Profiling Approach Implement progressive profiling in your post sign-up form strategy. Craft content that gradually collects more information from subscribers over time, minimising initial friction and improving conversion rates. Gradual engagement leads to more complete profiles!

2