In this insightful interview, Freddie Chatt, a seasoned e-commerce SEO expert, shares valuable knowledge on the latest trends and best practices shaping the e-commerce landscape.
Freddie offers actionable SEO advice for small and large e-commerce brands, covering Google updates, common mistakes, and the role of social media. He also shares insights from his entrepreneurial ventures and discusses balancing technical SEO with client management, providing key takeaways for business owners and SEO professionals alike.
I saw many studies that the latest Google updates reward e-commerce websites over other types of websites. Did you notice this too on your customers’ websites?
100% saw this. Primarily on sites a lot more SKUs – had a couple of clients who were in spaces that I never thought would be affected (positive or negative) from Google updates – but in the last update they both saw a bump of around 25% in traffic, a mix of their product, category and blog posts too so it’s had a meaningful impact on their business.
It definitely feels that these updates are wider-reaching and more volatile now.
What are top SEO mistakes e-commerce businesses typically make?
For small brands, it’s without doubt under-optimizing category pages. You have a jewelry brand that just has a ‘Necklace’ category when their whole brand is focused on being waterproof. They have no hope of ranking for ‘necklace’ but could rank for ‘waterproof necklace’ by tweaking just a few things on their category page.
For large ecommerce sites, they often lack the understanding of how Google is crawling their sites, they don’t utilize more in-depth analysis like using their log files to understand where crawlers are spending the most time on their site. When I first did some log file analysis it truly opened my eyes – and led to a lot more internal linking efforts to improve our crawlability.
Have you ever measured the impact of advertising campaigns on social networks Instagram, TikTok, Facebook, etc. on SEO results when working with clients?
I’ve never personally directly measured the impact in a meaningful way. However, I have seen anecdotal data suggesting that advertising campaigns on other platforms impact brand searches which then impact SEO results for sure. Seeing an increase in people searching for ‘BRAND + CATEGORY’ will likely see you rank higher for just ‘CATEGORY’ for example.
Have you had any offers to become a co-owner of an e-commerce business? Or did you have an idea to find a partner and launch your own e-commerce business?
I launched my own ecommerce business with a friend, he has no ecommerce or digital marketing experience but alongside me loved the niche we launched into (cricket) so it gave more insight into the industry, whilst I used my experience to grow the brand itself.
Outside of that, I’m definitely up for more joint ventures like this. I have a couple of ideas I’d love to pursue, just balancing the time right now with where to focus.
I guess you worked with different content management systems. Which one is the most popular among your e-commerce customers and which one you love the most personally (and why)?
Shopify is probably about 95% of all my clients’ platform of choice. And it’s obvious to see why with the ease of use it has an abundance of apps to be flexible no matter what people sell.
Shopify is great, and having a platform like that, the repeatable nature of the work like what technical things can be fixed and how to fix them means you can get things done quicker.
Although working with custom built sites is always super fun and gives much more flexibility despite needing additional technical time – you can do so much with them.
Recently you launched a new service “10-minutes site audit for $49”. How is it going? I’m worried that in 10 minutes you can only find some very obvious mistakes. Am I wrong?
It’s going really well, at the last count I’ve done about 60 of them, so they are proving pretty popular. You’re absolutely right, you can’t find a lot in 10 minutes but often you can find a few really good opportunities for sites to explore more into. They aren’t designed to be a complete audit, just a top level review.
What has been fascinating about launching it is the variety of customers, I thought it would be mainly taken up by small brands looking to get some idea of what direction to go in. But it is proving really popular with other SEOs and agencies looking to get a second opinion on certain things they have found or any looking at too.
What is the hardest part of being a consultant?
For me, it has been leveling up my skills. When I used to work in-house, there was a budget for training/conferences and it was always easy to allocate time to do these things.
Since becoming a consultant I’ve needed to work harder at carving out this time but now I make sure I allocate a lot more time each month to either take new courses, learn new complementary skills or get out and about at conferences.
Working as a consultant you don’t perform content creation and link building. I believe many customers ask you about that. Why don’t you outsource these services and add them to your portfolio?
This is definitely something that I’ve considered offering, and do actually do this with some clients who want to have it all managed through me rather than have multiple different contact points and invoices coming in.
Whilst I can recommend the specifics around these areas, the physical nature of doing these tasks are much better spent with the specialists themselves and if they can work directly with the client we almost certainly get better results long term.
Have you ever had dissatisfied customers? What were the reasons for this and how did you handle it?
Looking back, more so in my early consulting days, the #1 reason for dissatisfied customers (and ultimately losing them as a client) have been through unrealistic expectations on their part of what results can be achieved from SEO in a specific timeframe with their budget.
I wasn’t very good at setting expectations back then but now have developed a clearer structure to show what could be achieved within their budget so make sure they aren’t expecting worldwide domination on a $2500 per month budget within 3 months.
You are actively working on two channels of acquiring customers for your services: your own website to get organic search traffic and content marketing on LinkedIn. Which one works best for you and why?
To be honest they work perfectly together. LinkedIn can build my reach and direct people to the site and look to get them onto my email list so I can educate them on myself, SEO and their own opportunities.
From an organic search perspective, my site doesn’t get too much traffic, but there are some specific articles which offer direct solutions to common problems brands face with SEO (such as the product URL issue on Shopify), which despite only getting fewer than 100 visits per month, has got me multiple clients off the back of this.
