Bonus Episode: Using SEO Data to Drive Shopify Revenue Gains with Kai Davis

Kai Davis

When they show up to shop your store, they don't necessarily want to see every single product in your listing scrolling on forever. They want something targeted that matches what they searched for that helps them end that search journey.  

Chase Clymer

Welcome to Honest Ecommerce, a podcast dedicated to cutting through the BS and finding actionable advice for online store owners. I'm your host, Chase Clymer. And I believe running a direct-to-consumer brand does not have to be complicated or a guessing game. 

On this podcast, we interview founders and experts who are putting in the work and creating  real results. 

I also share my own insights from running our top Shopify consultancy, Electric Eye. We cut the fluff in favor of facts to help you grow your Ecommerce business.

Let's get on with the show.

Hey everybody, welcome back to another episode of Honest Ecommerce. Today, I'm welcoming back to the show for maybe the third time, definitely the second time. Kai Davis, he's the founder of Double Your Ecommerce, helps Shopify store owners grow with bespoke SEO strategies and fixed price solutions.  

He's also going to introduce to at least myself and  some people in the audience his new venture, KeywordMagic.ai. Kai, welcome back to the show. 

Kai Davis

It's a pleasure to be here. Thanks so much for having me and yeah, glad to be here. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. We talked beforehand about how I had just gotten an amazing domain name after asking for it for over seven years this morning,  but it made me think about our relationship. I've known you for almost a decade. You're probably like one of the first people I've met in this industry.  

Kai Davis

That touches me. Oh my gosh. I didn't realize it had been that long. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. We met at double your freelancing conference back in, was that 2025? 

Kai Davis

Oh, I think it was 2015. It was either 14 or 15. No, it was 15. In Norfolk. First one, right? Oh, that takes me back. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I slipped and hit my head.  

Kai Davis

I did not remember that part of it.  

Chase Clymer

Neither did I. Awesome, Kai. All right. I gave you a quick intro. You do a lot of fun stuff with SEO. But what's the elevator pitch? When you're introducing yourself out and about, how do you introduce people to what it is that you do? 

Kai Davis

Yeah. So I focus on helping Shopify stores make more revenue with SEO. I think there's a ton of opportunities out there with search engine optimization, even in this day and age, to grow revenue. And unfortunately, a lot of the advice out there focuses on easy to identify lower impact opportunities.

And so over the past few years, I've really focused my practice on helping my clients identify, you know, what are the top opportunities? What are the five levers we could pull today in your Shopify store this month in your Shopify store to help you get more traffic? And oftentimes that comes around to, you know,  are we optimizing the right things? Have you built enough collections in your store? But really, my practice is focused on, hey, how could we help Shopify stores make more money? 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And as you can tell, shop, Kai and I, we go back and we will go on some tangents, but we do have a bit of a rough outline here. So to let people know what we're going to talk about, the first thing we're going to talk about is we're going to talk about collection SEO, which I think is low-hanging fruit for a lot of businesses. Then we're going to talk about product descriptions and obviously AI-generated content and how that can play into your strategy. 

And then we're just going to get a little bit more open-ended and just talk about SEO in 2025 and how people can take some of this conversation and apply it to their business. And hopefully see some cool gains with search engine optimization this year. So without further ado, let's just jump into collection pages. 

Kai Davis

So time and time again, I just see not enough merchants leveraging collection pages. And the metaphor about a year ago that really struck me and made me think about collections in a different way was their aisles for your virtual store. And so I'll often work with a Shopify store and we'll start working. I'll look at their site and they have like three collections, all products, this thing, the other thing. And I'm like, you're missing out on a lot of opportunities here. 

And the brass tacks reason why Google really sees a collection page as being well optimized out of the box for transactional and commercial terms. Like let's say buy chocolates online or buy ceramic vase, commercial and transactional terms. Most stores focus a little too heavily on product SEO because it's sort of the obvious thing. We're selling products, let's optimize the products. Let's just keep optimizing them. 

But what I've seen is if you take the time to look at the keyword data for your store in Search Console and Ahrefs, products that your customers are asking for and stand up dedicated collection pages, Google goes, oh my gosh, this is what we're looking for. We want a nicely optimized collection page that lists the products, has a little bit of content on it, and just lets us know what this product is about. Again, it's like adding a dedicated aisle to your store. So I'll work with my clients, I'll come in and they'll have, you know, like one very overpacked collection with 50 products in it. 

And I'll say, okay, looking at the different product types you sell, looking at your search data, looking at your competitor's search data, we could see there's a dozen terms here that get some volume. Let's stand up dedicated collection pages for each one of these with an optimized SEO title, a collection description of on-page content, some internal links pointing to it. And honestly, as I describe it, I'm not talking about rocket science here, but it's what Google wants, so they're able to say, oh, here's a page optimized for this exact term, and it's really what your customers want. 

Because when they show up to shop your store, they don't necessarily want to see every single product in your listing scrolling on forever. They want something targeted that matches what they searched for that helps them end that search journey. So for so many reasons, collections are just almost this magic ingredient for growing your Shopify store. They bring in more relevant revenue generating traffic and they give your customers exactly what they're searching for. I could go on about this for weeks. So if there's a spot where we want to focus and go deeper on, absolutely. But man. 

Chase Clymer

Well, yeah, I guess let's focus on that. Merchants going  from 0 to 1 with their SEO strategy.  They haven't gone beyond  setting up probably  meta descriptions for their products. They probably didn't even realize they could do the same thing for their collections. So if you're going to approach this with an 80-20 rule, what should their game plan be? Where should they start? 

Kai Davis

The simplest thing is going to be product types. Think about the different product types in your store. So maybe you sell, I'm just thinking here of a resonant example. Maybe you sell cotton tea towels and cotton napkins for your kitchen and you've got them all clustered together just by breaking them apart into separate dedicated collections. Basically saying like, hey, we're going to pivot on product type. Just get some standalone based on product type. That helps. That's often an incredibly easy action to take. Beyond that, I like looking at, know, what do your competitors have?

So if you're in this niche and you look at a dozen of your competitor sites and you see like, they have these 15 collections and they keep coming up, it's an educated guess that standing up similar collections will help bring in more search traffic for you. And the third way for somebody just getting started, I think Search Console can be very helpful here. Install Google Search Console on your store, look at the data, even if you're just starting out, there's often hints in that data to say, oh, people are searching for this type of transactional term.

And so that could be a great way just to get hints like, this might be a good one to try, set up that collection page, see if it starts getting traffic. But really, it starts by taking action. It starts by making an educated guess. There's never a perfect plan. But looking at a competitor, looking at your search data often can give you the hints you need.  

Chase Clymer

I'm selling, we're going to just go with your examples of smaller towels and napkins and whatnot. So I built two collections now. And within there, I can see this collection description area within the Shopify admin. Do I need to write a novella? How much should I write? 

Kai Davis

Any amount is the honest truth. I'll work with stores where we put two words there and I'm like, that's better than nothing. Let's get a little more there. So what I typically recommend is 50 to 100 words is typically the sweet spot for the above product grid content. There's also below the product grid content, which we could circle back to in a minute. 

But when you're writing a collection description for a collection, I think 50 to 100 words is a great amount and write it in a conversational style. Even if you don't have a brick and mortar store, imagine you do. You're working in sales. Somebody walked in and was like, hey, do you have any tea towels? What's the deal with your tea towels? What would you say to them as you walk them to that aisle? What would you highlight? What do you like? People love this one. Check this one out first.  Whatever those details are, it just naturally becomes the collection description. So I think that's just such a  wealthy way to think about it. Write it conversationally. Write a short description as if you were explaining the products in this aisle to somebody who wandered into your store. And that will get you good enough out of the gate. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And then we're gonna circle back to  having AI maybe do some of this work for you in a minute. Don't worry. We are definitely going to cover that topic. I just don't want to talk about it now.  Now,  how would you  approach this  from a  different perspective? Say, we do have hundreds. We have a higher  volume of collections. We have a decent merchandising thought out. But we build our business on the back of paid ads. So we never needed to think about this.  What would be a way to approach? Where do I start? There's just so much. 

Kai Davis

It's almost an overgrown garden. We might have spun up collections because they're great landing pages for paid ads. We haven't put thought into an organic strategy. But it's just like, we got a sprawling mess in the metaphorical garden.

I like looking at Search Console here first and foremost. If we have a bunch of existing pages, even if it's overgrown, there's going to be search data there. I put together a free resource, my keyword magic spreadsheet that we'll link to in the show notes exactly for this. It pulls in your Search Console data and it basically just pre-filters it into, hey, here's all the keywords that are heading towards a product page. 

Here's all the keywords that are headed towards collection pages. And so I'll use a resource like that or just slunk around in the Search Console data to understand, okay, well, maybe we got 50 collection pages of various quality sitting around. What keywords are they ranking for? What keywords are they on the cusp for? Where could we create a new page with better content? So  if you have a site where you've been driving traffic with paid ads, it's a bit overgrown. You haven't had an SEO strategy looking at search console data could give you that first sense of, okay, what do we need here?  Beyond that, though, I find a competitor analysis very helpful when it's a more established store.

If you have half a dozen competitors you could think of, looking at them and just seeing who has built out an SEO strategy, who has obviously optimized collection landing pages,  that could give you a sense of the shape that they're aiming for. And at least act as a first draft. Okay, they've done A, B, and C. C doesn't apply to us. A and B do. Let's build on that. So those are the two vectors I'll often look at for a more established store. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And then I just want to broach this subject without having my opinion come out. But when you're doing this competitor analysis, would you also be looking at say these collections as they exist on behemoths like Amazon or Walmart or Target? 

Kai Davis

In some cases, yes. In some cases, no. I found that looking at the super huge competitor pages can be useful. But oftentimes, like the Walmarts, the Amazons, they're playing a different game than most Shopify stores because they've got humongous backlink profiles. They've got the brand equity of the small startup Amazon.com. And so it's not quite the same game.

When I see them in the search results though, I'll take note of it because like if we search a transactional term by cotton tea towels and the top result is Amazon and the second is Walmart and the third is Etsy, I'll tell my client this might be too competitive of a term. We might be playing a game where the best we could rank is four if we do everything right because like our small Shopify story isn't going to outright Amazon here without a ton of work. So I think it's useful to note and observe when you see the behemoths show up in the results.

But sometimes there isn't as much you could pull away from the actual architecture of their pages. Again, they're playing a different game. 

Chase Clymer

Alright. So collections, you think, are some of the lowest hanging fruit, to use that term, in getting some more SEO traffic to your website. But let's go a little bit further down the funnel to the product.  How often do you see a client actually having a well optimized product description for their hero product or best sellers?

Kai Davis

Sometimes they do have it for like the hero product, the best sellers, if they've got a hundred different products in their store, the three or five they've invested a lot of energy in  and sometimes that's paying off well for them. But sometimes the product they see as their hero product might not be one that's ranking well in search. 

And so as store owners, we could inadvertently be optimizing the wrong things just because we're looking at, Hey, this is our most popular product. That's kind of not doing anything over at SEO land. So it gets a little squishy. I like looking at a bunch of data to understand product performance.

What are your best selling products overall? What are your best selling products by channel? What are your best ranking products for organic SEO? What keywords are you ranking for organic SEO? And just start to tie that data together to see like, okay, you have this great performing product. It's ranked 30th for SEO. Okay, this might be one where we really put some fuel on that fire to see if we could rank it higher, but it does get squishy with product SEO. 

One thing I've noticed is on every client project, I do what I call a page type performance analysis. And I just break down like, how much traffic is coming to all your products in aggregate? Same for collections, same for homepage and same for blog. 

What I've noticed is products can drive a ton of traffic to your store, but people often convert at a lower conversion rate on average than with collection pages or even your homepage because people are comparison shopping when they search for a product specific term. They're open up, you and 10 of your competitors and reading the descriptions and picking the one that's the best deal. 

People don't quite behave in that way when they're doing collection-focused search or searching terms that are bringing up collection pages. They open the collection, they open up 10 of your products, they browse through your store, and then they make that purchasing decision. So should we focus too much on products? Should we focus on collections? It depends store to store, depending on what your own mix is made up of. 

Chase Clymer

And I alluded to this 5-10 minutes ago. Now that ChatGPT and there's other solutions out there. That one's the household name. They won the race with establishing a moat per se  until something better comes along here in a couple months. We'll see. But how is ChatGPT playing into how you're solving things for clients? Are you teaching clients how to use ChatGPT within their businesses? How do we compete in this world with writing awesome copy against computers that are never asleep? 

Kai Davis

You're asking a really good question. So I am teaching my clients how to use ChatGPT in a very specific way. What I found is that out of the box, ChatGPT or any of these  AI tools like Claude are great at writing average level content. And so that could be a huge win if you're a dropshipping store, you got 5,000 products, all are using the manufacturer's product description and you're like, we aren't writing for anything. Well, the reason is you have the same content as everyone else. So just out of the box, using a tool like ChatGPT can improve it a bit, get it to be a little more above average.

What I've started doing as a service offering with clients recently is building them a custom GPT, a custom ChatGPT, loading it with their store voice information, their brand information, their product information, to get to the point where a store employee could paste in a product URL and get back an optimized product description. It'll go out, it'll crawl the product, it'll look at related products, and it'll say, okay, based on everything you gave me, here's a 500 word description for what was a 50 word description before. And what I found is ChatGPT can do really well at taking a couple bits, you know, it's a cotton towel, it has a bunny on it, it's red, and writing a bit of a narrative prose description so it reads a little more engagingly and helps with SEO. 

What I found though is there's no true shortcut here. What works well is using ChatGPT to generate sort of an informed first draft version of this content, and then you yourself or somebody on your team, just read through it, make sure it's saying the right things, optimize it a bit, and then publish it. And I found that works well just to get something up there that's better than the two sentences you might have dashed off three years ago or the manufacturer's product description that you just imported. 

So I wouldn't say it's better than writing content yourself. If you understand your products, your audience, their needs, you're always going to write a better copy than the robot will. But if you're time constrained, if you have a large amount of skews, if you're like, I got 10,000 products, there's no way I'm going to be able to write 10,000 product descriptions, then a tool like ChatGPT plugs in very well to help minimize that effort.

Chase Clymer

One of the best use cases for AI in copywriting is going from zero to one. It's helping you because looking at a blank slate is the bane for any artist. If you want to consider yourself an artist when you're talking about writing copy, but just anything. And I find myself being so much more productive just getting my ideas out on a paper through it. And then immediately, I know exactly where I need to go from there. And it just cuts out just a lot of the time of staring at a blank page.

Kai Davis

Absolutely. The one thing I'll say from my own experience is it ends up cutting out the time you're staring at the blank page. It doesn't really cut down the overall time. I find myself doing more edits, more refinements, more like, oh, it got me from zero to one. Let me refine from one to two. So I think it gets better at the end. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. 

Kai Davis

But it's not like, oh, I got the same thing in a tenth of the time. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. Now, so we're approaching these products, right? And if I was going to be lazy about it, I would just go into my Shopify admin, click on products, bestsellers. And it's like, that's the order that we're going to start optimizing these. You mentioned a few other ways to look at it. But what if I want another shortcut? Is there a way to plug ChatGPT right into Shopify and just have it do the damn thing? Or is that a little one step removed?

Kai Davis

I think that's still one step removed. Shopify does have some built-in product description crafting. I might be wrong about it being one step removed. I just haven't seen it. Magic is a thing. I'm not familiar with whether or not it's good. It's called Shopify keyword. 

No, it's not keyword magic. That is your tool. But there's something else Shopify has that's called magic. Yeah, yeah. Maybe it's their chatbot assistant. I'm not sure. But I have played around with their product description crafting before. I found it  okay. I don't think it's terrible. I think it's better than nothing.

I didn't find it to write a compelling narrative or like decent enough. So  there isn't a way to plug it in directly yet. Once we get there, I think it'll be a great step. I do like for smaller product, for stores with a smaller amount of products, and exporting that product listing. Now you have it in a spreadsheet. Now it's a bit easier to, you know, work through. got a hundred products. Let's block and tackle just the most important ones. 

But there is still some amount of effort there. When we get to the point where we could plug GPT or Claude into the Shopify store itself and be like, okay, great. Here's a prompt. Here's some context information. I think that it really will be like magic. But we aren't at that point yet. 

Chase Clymer

Now, walk me through your new product that you're talking about. We talked about earlier today KeywordMagic.ai. What is a good use case for that? How is that helping merchants?

Kai Davis

So Keyword Magic.ai is something new I'm working on. It's still in stealth mode. To start off, it's going to be a collection of tools and resources. 

Chase Clymer

Do we need to beep this out?  

Kai Davis

No. It's fine to talk about, but it's a collection of tools, resources, and products to help merchants surface keyword insights and keyword data. The AI is sort of a tongue in cheek joke on my side. It's not like, okay, we're going to have the AI do everything for you. I think of it like augmented intelligence. We're going to have an AI that's like a genie in a bottle where you can ask questions or can help surface the most impactful opportunities to focus on, rather than just doing it yourself. 

So I've got a couple of tools and resources I'm working on that I'm planning to release in Q2.  And so if you go to KeywordMagic.ai, you can get on the email list and be the first to  get access to those. But something new I'm working on is splitting off some resources that I built within Double Your Ecommerce. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. And it's a great transition to  what is going to be going on in 2025 for SEO. This won't come out for a couple of weeks. Obviously, the first things people will do if they want to take SEO seriously in 2025 is go to keywordmagic.ai, sign up for your newsletter, see what the tools are. But also, what else should they be doing? How should they spend their time this year? 

Kai Davis

I think we're at a really interesting transition point for SEO. We've got AI overviews coming in. We have people more on the bleeding edge starting to use GPT, search GPT to browse the web and find information. It feels like we were very, very focused on Google for a while. And now we're just starting to open and widen up. 

It's not like at the snap of a finger, everything is different. But when I look at the years ahead, I'm like, oh, this feels a little new. It feels like new energy is coming in. so with a transition point like this, like should stores be doubling down further on SEO? Should they be focusing on getting into AI overview? Should they be focusing on paid? What I think is the most important thing is to understand your funnel overall. What are the top of the funnel traffic sources that are actually bringing people into your store? Maybe it's paid ads, maybe it's social media, organic social.

Maybe it's SEO. Think about the middle of your funnel. How are you converting these people if they aren't purchasing today? Are you driving them to an email list? Are you offering them a coupon? Are you providing a, learn about our products, get on the list here type of offer?  Understanding what your funnel looks like will just give you more resilience as things change. If AI overviews suddenly pick up a bunch of energy and we see a drop in traffic, you want to understand where your traffic has been coming from historically, how you've been converting that, and how you can move it forward.

I don't think you want to be focused on a single channel right now. You really want to be thinking about traffic diversification, even if it's just like, ah, we've mostly been on organic social media. Let's try spending 50 bucks a week or 50 bucks a month on paid Facebook or paid Google. Diversification will just help insulate you and make your business a little more robust as things change. And we don't really know what direction everything is going to go in. I'll predict SEO is still going to be around. People are still going to be searching for products in Google and other search engines. It is important just to understand what that funnel looks like for your business. So you know if part of it drops out, what do we need to get in? How do we repair or replace this leaky funnel? 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. And I would even go as far as to say that the work that you put into search engine optimization. There's going to be a future where people are asking  the ChatGPTs of the world their shopping related questions and we get leads from ChatGPT. It happens because we have a very crawlable website where our information is out there very, very well laid out. That comparison shopping, that shopping that people used to go to Reddit to find. 

Try an unpaid opinion per se. I think that the work that you put into SEO, if you do it right, will resonate within these AI models. I don't think we're too far off from AI or machine learning optimization as a service that is akin to search engine optimization? 

Kai Davis

Full agreement. I'm already seeing some services and some businesses pop up around that. We'll include a link in the show notes. Nota AI. And they're basically like a search console for AI rankings. Know what you're ranking for in the different  AI search engines. And so I think, yeah, we are approaching a point where people are going to be doing more AI optimization for folks having a crawl. 

Chase Clymer

Which is wild. 

Kai Davis

Yeah. I mean, you go back three years and you're like, SEOs, guess what's coming down the pipeline? And you're like, is this a science fiction novel? But we're living through it. 

Chase Clymer

Yeah. I remember when we got our first lead from ChatGPT. I took the call but quickly learned that leads aren't the best quality. And that's the thing. ChatGPT feels like magic to us as business owners. People are going to ask the robot, hey, what's an agency to help me with my SEO? And they'll say, oh, go hire Kai Davis like it gets squishy. And in that example, it's given  one result. But when we search an SEO agency for Shopify now, you get pages of results. 

So I'm interested in seeing how those two get threaded together. There's not just one agency there. There's not just one that wants to rank in the GPT. So what exactly will that look like? I don't know. But I think it'll be interesting.  

Chase Clymer

We talked all about just things that people could do themselves. But if I've got too much to do and not enough time and I want to hire someone like Kai Davis, what are you helping people do  one on one? How can I give you money?  

Kai Davis

That's always the million dollar question. So I've got a couple of core services I'll quickly reference. The main service I sell these days is my SEO opportunity report. It's a detailed, bespoke by hand audit of your site, your competitors, your keywords, your products, your rankings, basically all the data I could get my hands on. And then I go look at your site and everything in a half a dozen tools or so just to understand what are the opportunities for you.

And then distill it down to, there's a million things out there. Let's just focus on these top five things. They'll actually make a difference. So that's the main service I start all of my clients with just so I could understand their niche, their business, their audience, and make recommendations that point towards growth, not the other way. Past that, I am working on a new offering I just launched, one-on-one SEO coaching. 

This is perfect for merchants who are like, hey, I'd love to learn more about SEO. I'd love to be able to do it myself, but I'm just not quite sure where to start. I'd love to work with somebody who could say, focus on these things, review your copy, review your content and just provide that feedback. And so that's an offering I just launched last week or so and I'm starting to talk about on the mailing list. 

Chase Clymer

That's amazing. Awesome. Now, you mentioned the mailing list there. Is that at DoubleYour Ecommerce.com, I'm assuming? 

Kai Davis

It is DoubleYourEcommerce.com. I send out an email every few days or so just with tips, resources, and the latest interviews I've done. I try to provide value.

Chase Clymer

You do provide a lot of value. That's a great newsletter to be on, Kai. Is there anything I didn't ask you about today that you think would resonate with our audience? 

Kai Davis

There's one new free thing I released recently that I'd love to call out a 35-point Shopify SEO checklist. And you can find that at ShopifySEOchecklist.net. And there's a ton of checklists out there. This one's mine. I just was tired of crummy advice on a lot of the checklists that felt like they were made back in 2004. Focus on tagging for your Shopify products. And I was like, well, that doesn't really apply anymore. 

So this is 35 tips coming from my SEO opportunity report, the more than 100 Shopify stores I've worked with just focusing on, hey, if you do nothing else, try to focus on these essential areas. And it covers your homepage, your product pages, your collections, your blog, and just really provide some actionable next steps. 

And you can opt in there and get a pretty PDF of all the tips as well. So if you're looking at doing your Shopify SEO yourself, and you're like, hey, I need some ideas on what to work on next ShopifySEOchecklist.net. Great free resource. 

Chase Clymer

Absolutely. And like everything else we've mentioned today, it'll all be linked in the show notes below. Kai Davis, Double Your Ecommerce. Thank you so much for coming on the show today. 

Kai Davis

It's a pleasure. Thanks for having me and thanks for listening.  

Chase Clymer

We can't thank our guests enough for coming on the show and sharing their knowledge and journey with us. We've got a lot to think about and potentially add into our own business. You can find all the links in the show notes. 

You can subscribe to the newsletter at https://honestecommerce.com/ to get each episode delivered right to your inbox. 

If you're enjoying this content, consider leaving a review on iTunes, that really helps us out. 

Lastly, if you're a store owner looking for an amazing partner to help get your Shopify store to the next level, reach out to Electric Eye at electriceye.io/connect.

Until next time!