For the longest time, I walked around saying, "I'm not sure SEO is that important if nobody's searching for your product." I'm not going to say I was 100% wrong. But everything has changed in the last five years, and a recent conversation with my friend Matt Demers changed my mind.

Matt is an SEO expert, and he's also our very first male coach in the Inner Circle. (Yes, we have a guy now. Yay!) He started in 2017 by helping a friend rebuild her website. It looked great, but it wasn't getting any traffic. So he discovered SEO, and together they grew her side hustle into a six-figure business in a year and a half. In 2019 he landed his first e-commerce client and 10X'd that store's sales within a year. Seeing how it changed that owner's life hooked him on e-commerce, especially when SEO is paired with the basics we teach, like email funnels and conversion rate optimization.

So I asked him to explain SEO to me like I was a total beginner. Here's everything he shared.

Why SEO Is the Marketing That Keeps Paying You Back

SEO is a slow burn, and you need patience. Ads are great when you want results right away. But when you don't want to keep spending money on ads, that's when SEO becomes really important.

And unlike a local business with a capacity limit, your store can keep expanding. You can add products, collection pages, and blog content like guides. If you chip away at it consistently, a little bit each week, the sky really is the limit. You just need a framework so you're not doing a little here and then running over there.

Here's what's changed. Search has gone "long tail." People used to type "waterproof hiking socks." Now they type something like, "I'm a 30-year-old female who likes to run and hike, and I need this for cold weather." And that's great news for us, because as Matt put it:

That's why your product descriptions, and FAQs on your pages, are now absolutely critical. They give you so many more chances to answer specific questions about how your products solve people's problems.

Matt loves where this is all heading. For a while, people were keyword stuffing everything, including their image alt text, to trick search engines. That's getting a lot harder to do. Search is moving back toward its original intent: the best user experience. The store owners who create unique content describing their products, the solutions they offer, and the pain points they solve are the ones who will win going forward.

SEO vs. AEO: The Difference Everyone's Asking About

SEO, search engine optimization, is the work of getting your pages to show up in search engines like Google or Bing. AEO, “answer engine optimization”, is getting your pages to show up in AI search tools like ChatGPT, Perplexity, Copilot, and even Google's AI Mode. These are large language models (LLMs) that give detailed, conversational answers.

You need both. But here's the part I loved: AEO is built on SEO. When Matt's team started figuring out how to show up in ChatGPT, they noticed their clients were already showing up there. The fundamentals haven't changed. AEO just adds layers on top. So we're starting with SEO here, and we'll tackle AEO next.

The One Decision That Makes or Breaks Everything Else

If you only remember one thing, make it this: choose the right keywords. You can fix your page speed and clean up broken links all day long, but as Matt says:

Getting this right comes down to understanding your customers' language and their search intent. Give every single page its own unique keyword. To make this easier, we have an SEO course here at The Social Salesgirls, taught by Sara from our team, called [SEO For Ecommerce]. It includes a really cool keyword mapping sheet that walks you through assigning a unique keyword to each page of your store, and Matt highly recommends using it. And if you have 1,000 products and that feels impossible, start with your collection pages, especially if your products overlap.

Where to find the right words. When Matt asks new clients which keywords they want to rank for, there's often zero search volume when he types them in. That's normal. Instead, mine your customer reviews for real customer language. Then plug a keyword into a tool like Semrush or Ubersuggest to see which keywords a page is actually ranking for. You'll get lots of ideas.

Go long tail. "Protein powder" is a broad, short-tail keyword. "Organic vanilla whey protein powder" is long tail. People searching that are looking for exactly what you have, which makes them far more likely to convert.

How much search volume is enough? It depends on your price point. Matt works with a Moissanite engagement ring brand that makes $2,000 to $3,000 per sale, so 50 searches a month that convert two buyers is absolutely worth it. Even with a high-ticket product, though, he wouldn't go below 20 searches a month. If your margins are low and you're making $10 to $15 a product, shoot for 100 or more.

When you're starting out, aim for positive momentum with lower volume keywords. As Google starts to trust your site, it expands what it will rank you for, and you can go after higher volume keywords.

How long does this take? Matt's team can find keywords for a page in 15 to 30 minutes. If you're new, plan on at least an hour per page.

The Collection Page Secret Most Store Owners Miss

Most of us build collection pages to organize the products we have. Matt says that's a huge miss, because we're not thinking about them from an SEO perspective.

He worked with a bra insert company that organized everything by shape: triangle inserts and oval inserts. That made sense, because the shapes serve different purposes. But there wasn't a single collection page built around the solutions the products provided.

The keyword research showed people were searching for "waterproof inserts" and "swimsuit bra inserts," roughly 10,000 searches a month. Every insert this founder sold was waterproof, because she'd been an Olympic swimwear designer. She actually asked, "Are you sure we should do a page for that? Because they're all waterproof." She trusted the process, they built the page, and traffic flooded in. Over 10X in six months.

She didn't make anything new. She simply raised what her ideal customer was looking for to the top.

Matt uses an easy acronym to brainstorm collection pages. Think about the FACTS:

Your broad keyword stays the same, and you filter it through each letter. And you don't even have to do the brainstorming yourself. Plug the acronym into ChatGPT and ask it to expand on your products.

Where Your Keyword Actually Needs to Go

Once you have your keywords, here's where to put them. (Matt shared his full checklist with us, and you can grab it below.)

SEO title. This is the most important spot. In Shopify, it's different from your product title. Put the keyword in the first words, because that's what searchers scan for.

Meta description. It isn't a ranking signal, but Google bolds the words that match a search, which helps your click-through rate.

Product title. Include the keyword whenever you can, unless you use artsy product names.

Description. Use it in the first sentence, whether it's a product, collection, or blog post. Aim for one to two uses per 100 words, a keyword density of 1% to 2%. The free tool wordcounter.net makes counting easy.

Image alt text. Alt text exists to describe photos to people who use screen readers. Don't stuff it. Just describe the photo, and since it's a photo of your product, your keyword fits naturally.

File names. It's a tiny sliver of SEO, so don't obsess. But don't upload "image1023." Name it after your product, especially since lots of shoppers use Google Images.

URL slug. Use your keyword in new URLs, but please don't go change all your existing ones. If you do change one, Shopify will prompt you to set up a 301 redirect, so say yes. Think of it like address forwarding when you move. This is middle-to-low priority, and if you're new, the risk of breaking something is high, so skip it if you're not comfortable.

FAQs. These matter most on product pages, though they work on collections too. They help with conversion, AEO, and those long, conversational searches.

Internal links. Link between your own pages using each page's exact keyword. If every link just says "bra inserts," Google can't tell your pages apart, and they'll compete with each other. That's called keyword cannibalization.

Here's how the hierarchy worked for the bra insert brand. The collection page targeted "waterproof bra inserts for swimsuits," a double whammy covering both searches. Each product page targeted its shape. The collection works like a big funnel that feeds shoppers to the product pages. You can still mention features like "waterproof" or "silicone" on every page. You just don't optimize for them.

The SEO "Fixes" That Are Actually Wasting Your Week

Matt says the biggest time suck is technical SEO that doesn't matter yet. Run Google PageSpeed on mobile and you'll probably be disappointed. But if your page loads in three to four seconds, you're fine. Check your big competitors, and you'll often see their scores aren't great either. Compress your images with TinySEO on Shopify or Hummingbird on WordPress, and that will probably do most of the work.

You can safely ignore lots of the errors these tools throw at you, like duplicate meta descriptions on pages you don't use. Matt's team aims for a site health score of about 85 in Semrush, not perfection.

What does matter? Broken links. Matt's team checks for them weekly and fixes them immediately. Internal links turn your site from a rural road with one way in and out into a superhighway for shoppers and Google's bots. A broken link wrecks that:

The other technical piece is crawl depth: how many clicks it takes to get from your homepage to a page. Don't panic over a list of deep pages. Fix it over time, and start by linking your top products and collections on your homepage. We just worked on this in our Inner Circle homepage bootcamp, because it signals to Google which pages matter most.

Where to Start If You Only Have One Hour a Week

Start with your hero product. To me, your hero product is your vehicle for acquiring customers. Most of us don't have a half-million-dollar ad budget. If you've got $25 a day, splitting it across a bunch of products is like throwing spaghetti at the wall. Pour your energy into the product most likely to win you a new customer, then let your email marketing bring them back again and again.

Matt agrees. As he put it, "just narrow that scope and be a sniper about it." Choose the right keyword for that page. Build a supporting collection (a hero collection, since collection pages are a little easier to rank), refine your product page, and create blog content around it. You'll build topical authority, and backlinks can help too. Matt's team sometimes picks the product with the most potential rather than the most sales today.

How much time does this take? Matt recommends one hour a week minimum, two if you can. And try to create a blog post each week. (Yes, in an hour. He's sharing how next time.)

Most importantly, track your progress. Matt has quite a few 10X stories, but he's a pro. 

A structured, trackable system like Sarah's course keeps you going.

If you're an Inner Circle member, book a coaching call with Matt. He'll help you map out your own keyword hierarchy and get expert eyes on your store. Not a member yet? This is exactly the kind of support waiting for you inside. Tap HERE to get on the waitlist.

(Next up: AEO, and how to start showing up in AI search.)

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RELATED LINKS:

You can find more of Matt's free content at diffusedigitalmarketing.com, on Instagram at @diffuse_digital, and on YouTube.