22% of E-commerce Sales Come From Organic Google SEO, while Facebook Ads are just 4%. (And How AI Transforms SEO, and Ecom If You Know These Secrets…)

Bradley Long here,

There’s an astonishing evergreen goldmine in E-commerce, and few know it exists, and even fewer know how to leverage it.

It’s so important that Shoptimized.net will, going forward, swiftly take greater and greater advantage. 

This news is doubly good for my email subscribers and fans of our blog because it’s taking on an all-new dimension, bringing to you things I never could have brought you, such as next-level training and community, even a few short years ago!

Before I get into the Shoptimzied.net news, and why it’s such a win for you, let’s start off with the “reason why” behind the whole thing. A secret that it seems like everybody should know.

Why is it such a well-kept secret that 22% of E-commerce sales come from organic Google SEO?

Compared to just 4% for Facebook ads?

I say Facebook ads themselves are partially to blame. Both their popularity starting around 2014, and now because of all of the news from frustrated FB ads users trying to navigate one account penalty or shutdown after the next, to mention skyrocketing ad costs and plummeting performance.

So Facebook has been somewhat of a circus sideshow distracting from the real main attraction.

But there’s another more hidden reason. Few know how to do organic Google SEO for e-commerce and fewer know how to do it in a way that’s sustainable and cost effective.

What sparked this curiosity for me though is a new player to the online money-getting game: AI.

This blog post reveals both a new way of doing Google SEO that’s super powerful, yet few know it…

…But it also will introduce you to Alex and Mike, who are taking the e-commerce world by storm with this very method to the tune of an innovative 8-figure brand, and any number of AI SEO e-commerce proof of concept projects adding up to millions more in success!

Here’s the rundown:

If you’re like me, you’ve probably heard a lot about how AI can do things like help you with your e-commerce funnels.

And that is true. But what’s lesser known, and potentially much more explosive, is how AI can help you get traffic.

Not just any old traffic, just surfing the net checking pictures, like on Facebook (called interruption advertising, because you’re trying to catch somebody’s attention while they are going from A to B)…

…But targeted buyer intent traffic, where the person is at A, and they are going to B, where B is your Ecom Business.

These are what I call ‘wallet-out’ shoppers. They’re actively looking for a solution to their problem and will make a purchase as soon as they find what they need.

Now before, one of the big limitations of Organic Google SEO is that original valuable content isn’t free.

Most of what you see on the front page of Google is either content written by the site owner, or by hired gun writers, either in-house staff, or from a freelancer site with a database of writers.

The going cost for a so-so article, which you probably had to go back and get a revision and then rewrite yourself is around $150 for a 1000-word article.

But now comes an application of AI that’s probably quite different than what you might have been hearing about.

Because if you set things up the right way, and use AI like a car that you can drive, instead of like a car that’s supposed to drive itself, then YOU can be the one going from A to making BANK remarkably quickly, and with jaw-dropping sustainability.

After all, it’s not just that with traditional interruption marketing that you have to win a wrestling match every day with Facebook…

…It’s that much of what actually works for Facebook advertising is fad based, and burns out very quickly.

And every time the offer burns out it’s back to the drawing board.

This is a rich gets richer, and poor gets poorer scenario, and too many people don’t realize it until it’s too late.

These Ecom sellers lapping up a vast 22% of overall Ecom sales just from their SEO traffic sites, which act like their own mini “Times Square” in New York City, a hub of traffic and money.

Just like Times Square visitors come every day and they come in huge amounts.

How much easier is it to build a quality brand when you’ve got the headline billing on the most searched site in the world?

Brands make massive amounts of money on Google. Whereas fads jump up and drop back down, and you’re left with irrelevant funnels and spotty data.

Facebook long ago turned its back on the little guy, much like Amazon before it.

Comparatively, Facebook traffic only wins 4% of online e-commerce sales, but it’s the most popular method with newer Shopify store owners, leading to saturation, and again the little guy gets squeezed and squeezed.

Mark Zuckerberg never intended for the little guy to make it big. He just wanted to use the little guy’s energy, and money, to get their start, until they could attract the audience he really covets – big business.

Google has already gone through its growing pains, and it is true that its Pay Per Click network acts in many ways with the same “screw the little guy” mentality.

But Google’s Organic search results is the drawing card that powers up their own Google website with billions of visitors.

Without the organic search results, there would be no paid ads.

You might say, well isn’t Google putting up more and more ads?

Sure, Google has lots of ads, and the more sophisticated people typically scroll past them, just like when people swipe past any ad they don’t want to see, to get to the juicy stuff they want.

The point is that Google has already done its worst and then some to tamp down on “the little guy” in their organic search results, and yet the one place on all of the internet where “the little guy” thrives and turns into a huge hit, again and again, with SO much more constancy, and SO much less time and risk, is Organic Google search.

This brings us to where we are today where Google SEO is the 800-pound gorilla of the Ecom traffic world!

Which begs the multi-million dollar question: How do you harness lightning with Google SEO?

The answer turns out to be a “perfect storm” combination in 3 parts.

Part 1 is a commanding knowledge of how Google works and the skills and technology to leverage it.

Part 2 is a similarly deep understanding of what Artificial Intelligence can do very well right now, and what it can’t yet.

And

Part 3 is again, a powerful mastery, this time of E-commerce itself, from product to funnels to reviews to email marketing mastery.

Let’s go into some depth on each of these three parts, because they are all vital, and quite exciting.

Here’s Part 1: The way Google works these days has changed quite a bit from days gone by.

There was a time when the #1 thing that Google was looking for in terms of impact for generating actual traffic through SEO was something called a link (or a backlink) from other valuable websites.

If you’re thinking – “do you mean the kinds of links I click all the time on websites” then the answer is yes.

Now what makes one website’s link back to your site more valuable?

If you guessed links from other valuable sites, then you’re spot on!

If you’re also spotting a bit of a seemingly circular issue with how things work, then you deserve extra bonus points!

Because it seems like a big cycle of popularity just as manufactured as popularity at any high school, then you guessed right.

Why did Google do it this way?

Because, at the time they started hardly anybody even knew how to make a website and get good content on those sites.

And it wasn’t all that easy, years back, for Google to quickly detect a site that is nothing but a bunch of word spam there to trick the Google search engines into ranking a junk site #1.

As Google got better and better at detecting good content, and organized content (here is where AI starts making its presence felt!) Google has become more and more content-friendly.

It used to be that you could rank a site with just a few pages, say 3 to 5, and very little content on those pages, just by powering up that site with links.

Now it’s gotten harder and harder to rank those “shallow” sites as links have become more commoditized and as there are simply more sites out there than ever before you can get links from.

In fact the equation has flipped, where now the #1 factor in ranking your site is going to a compelling organized SEO funnel that visitors love and that leads to lots of purchases.

Now instead of a 3 to 5-page website, with each article being around say 500 words, you would be thinking more like 30 to 50 pages, or even a hundred or more, with many of those articles being at least a thousand words each.

But the more content you have, the more important the organization of your site matters, and the more your SEO funnel matters as well!

For example, if you do a great job of capturing emails with what’s on your SEO website (your funnel) then that’s a huge multiplier for sales.

And it actually helps you get even MORE SEO traffic, because Google sees those visitors coming in from your emails, and they factor that into the quality score of your site for lots of bonus snaps.

(Did you know that Google’s mail service Gmail sends about 1 out of every 4 emails sent worldwide?)

Other examples of important SEO techniques include compelling images, videos and social media embeds.

Now anybody who’s thinking, gee 50 articles that are as much as 1000 words or more, plus pictures and setting up YouTube and other social media embeds…

…Along with all the other less visible stuff like tagging your photos, marketing up your content with something called schema (which is somewhat like the invisible pipes that run through your house carrying valuable water in and out)…

…If that sounds like a lot to you, it is.

And that is one of the biggest reasons people stayed away from Google SEO all these years.

It was just prohibitively expensive for most people to afford to outsource the content or to skill up and do it yourself.

Especially since the very site map you create that is like the foundation of your home is so little understood!

Rather than being sour grapes about the incredible market share Google offers, that staggering 22% of the Ecom pie compared to the piddly 4% everybody is wrestling over, I decided to go deeper into my understanding.

Which leads us to Part 2, a deep understanding of the current state of Artificial Intelligence, which is the POTENTIAL answer to the bottlenecks we just discussed in Part 1.

As I mentioned earlier, much of what’s been revealed about AI in the e-commerce world has to do with using it to create marketing funnels for Facebook ads and the like.

Now of course using AI for content isn’t an unknown idea.

But it is, actually in most cases correctly, assumed that it’s not great for Google SEO.

Why isn’t it good?

Let’s say I were to ask Chat GPT, or another AI software, to write me a 1000-word article.

What do I tell it?

Prompt: “Hey Chat GPT! Write me an article on a hot new Ecom item that I can easily source so it ranks #1 in Google!”

Output: PFFFFFFFFT

Actually, PFFFFFFT would be preferable in many cases to what you’re going to get back.

And the SEO value of such an article is nil.

What if you already know what you want to sell? Let’s say it’s “blue widgets”.

Prompt: “OK Chat GPT! Write me an amazing 1000-word article on “blue widgets” and tell people why they should buy them from me!”

Output: Think of a fifth grader writing a book report on a book that they’ve never read other than glancing at a few pages and picking out some character names.

As in: In this very very very good book there are many many many amazing stupendous spectacular characters like x, y, and z! The characters face many very very very hard struggles! And the ending is a big surprise! (Don’t worry! I won’t spoil it for you!)

Now there will be gurus out there and software that claim their one-size-fits-all magic prompts will cut you to the front of the line, but such claims range between nonsense and outright fraud.

But there is a way to do it right. Here’s an interesting brain teaser…

Have a look at these three pictures, which were made with AI?

Image 1:

Image 2:

Image 3:

Did you make your guess?

And why?

I asked a friend recently, he said the girl in the middle is AI and the other two are real.

His reasoning was the girl is too cute to be real since there are more and more fake Instagram accounts, and the other pictures are too real to be AI.

So what was your guess?

If you guessed the opposite of my friend, then you guessed right!

The girl is real, she’s Bella Akira, a big Instagram influencer.

The two guys are generated by artificial intelligence… with the right skill set behind it!

Also note that the two AI pictures are geo-tagged, which means they actually have the coordinates of where the picture was taken.

The first one is on Bourbon Street in New Orleans. The third image is in the Bronx, a borough of New York City. 

This gives these images, and the pages they will be placed on, additional SEO value! Quite a lot of it!

How crazy is that?

In the past to get pictures that look like this you’d have to hire a good-looking model, a lighting crew and a photographer!

Not to mention have that crew set up for a shoot in a busy downtown area that might even require permits to do so!

This example I’ve just provided you of highly skilled AI content work for SEO is very visual.

And, we’ll get to this more in a bit, in the same way that AI can be a powerful tool assisting you with making incredible images, the likes of which would have been uber expensive/impossible before, then so too can you go to incredible extremes with AI written content for SEO!

Which leads us to Part 3! Having a robust understanding of e-commerce from what niches and industries to focus on, how to make products, how to make funnels, all the way to the holy grail: Email marketing and lots and lots of 5-star reviews!

The deep skill of e-commerce can be broken down into a few components, each of which relates to all of the other steps.

Component 1 is distinguishing a hot target audience that you can reach.

Component 2 is bringing a hit product to that market, from idea to the product, branding/packaging.

Component 3 is forming a funnel around that product, including gaining a sense for what other products will be needed in the overall funnel.

Component 4 is arguably the most important part of that funnel, the email marketing component, which powers all of the magic.

Component 5 is delivery, reviews and customer service, and getting delivery, reviews and customer service properly integrated with all of the other steps.

Component 6 is then tying this whole product and funnel back to the traffic souce, in this case Google SEO powered by AI (which we just covered in Parts 1 and 2)

Please note: If any one of these 6 components is a flat tire the whole process slows to a crawl.

Including, if it was working Monday morning, that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s going to keep working, even Monday afternoon.

But there’s another key layer here that many don’t realize:

Doing this critical balancing and integrating act with these 6 components is either going to be empowered by your traffic source, or it’s going to be undermined by it.

Again that’s why the focus here is on Google SEO powered by AI.

Because when you’re doing that critical invention process with a modern ecom product and funnel, then doing it under stress while every stroke of the clock is against you, because of mounting advertising costs, then you’ve added a seventh component.

A very undesirable seventh component. 

Those reading my blog are a mixture of smart-minded beginners, seasoned veterans and a surprising number of highly successful movers and shakers in the Ecom world.

So even if you haven’t experienced it first hand you’ve probably heard the stories and seen the fallout from people trying to make paid ads work for a new Ecom business…

…Much less maintaining this vital tightrope walk week after week and month after month.

That’s one of the biggest reasons why, if not the biggest reason, so many ecom ventures go under!

Run through the math in your head. You’ve got this important 6 component process that you have to keep working together like the way a music band needs to be on the same page to sound good.

And then you have all this racket coming from ad costs and all of the modern headaches of account bannings, and social media cock ups in a market that changes faster and faster every day.

Yet people get up every day by the millions and all make a mad dash to be one of a dwindling number of winners with 4% of the Ecom market coming from Facebook ads and other ad networks.

All the while there’s Google SEO whistling and taking a leisurely walk like an Englishman in New York, with Google SEO’s staggering 22% market share, yet such low competition.

That’s where Alex and Mike come into the story for us all…

Let me explain…

At the start of this epic blog post, I told you that the face of Shoptimized.net is changing in exciting ways that benefit you!

Alex and Mike have bootstrapped any number of winning e-commerce brands with the fundamental system I described just now.

Step 1: Let SEO affiliate sales show you the market.

Step 2: Come in with a powerhouse high-quality brand in that market.

Here’s a screen grab from a few great days on Alex’s most recent hit website:

4 days, $48,222, and that’s all from Organic Google SEO plus email list power, built from that very SEO traffic.

And now with AI, the sky is the limit!

Of course, as we revealed in the video introduction to this blog post, we’re not talking about spamming low-quality disorganized content!

You still want the genius organization that Alex and Mike use with their SEO projects to create the root structure.

But from there, nothing is stopping you!

What does this mean, specifically, for Shoptimized members? 

It’s great news and a win win win!

Because as I’m now returning to the SEO world part of what I’m excited to do is share that journey with you!

Post your comments, below, and let us know what you think! Alex, Mike and I are keen to hear your feedback!