Katalaga Hakim — Marketing Notes

You Can Spend Years Learning SEO and Still Miss the Point

Katalaga Hakim — Sun, 04 Feb 2024 00:00:00 GMT

There is a particular kind of SEO knowledge that makes you feel like you understand everything.

You learn technical SEO.

You learn about crawl budgets and canonical tags and schema.

You learn how to structure a website.

You learn keyword research. Content clusters. Internal linking. Search intent. Core Web Vitals.

Eventually, you can look at a website and tell someone exactly what is wrong with it.

And then you discover something slightly annoying.

A website with worse content, worse structure and a much uglier design is sitting above you in Google.

Sometimes it has barely any content at all.

So you start looking at the backlinks.

And there they are.

Hundreds of them.

Some good. Some mediocre. Some that look like they were built by a man who has not seen daylight since 2017.

But the site has links.

And it has traffic.

That is when SEO starts becoming a much less comfortable game.

Because you can spend years learning how to make a website technically perfect while ignoring two things Google has always cared enormously about:

Links and users.

Not the sexy version of SEO.

The boring version.

Authority and demand.

And you can learn more about that by running a simple experiment than by reading another 4,000-word article about topical authority.

Take an old domain

Find an expired domain in a niche that is relevant to the site you are working on.

Don't just grab the first domain with a nice-looking backlink profile.

Look at its history.

Put it into the Wayback Machine.

See what used to live there.

Was it actually a website in the same industry?

Did it have legitimate pages?

Was it a real business, publication, resource or community?

Or was it just another SEO project that somebody abandoned after six months?

This part matters because an old domain isn't automatically valuable simply because it is old.

A domain that used to sell garden furniture does not suddenly become an authoritative domain about accounting software because you bought it cheaply.

The history needs to make sense.

Rebuild the site.

Put the relevant content back.

Make it a real website rather than an empty shell whose only purpose is to pass a link.

Then get it indexed.

Once it starts appearing in search, you have something interesting to work with.

Because now you are not looking at a backlink in a spreadsheet.

You are looking at an actual website with its own history, relevance and ability to attract search traffic.

And that changes the experiment.

Then give it a reason to matter

Send some relevant links to the rebuilt site.

Nothing particularly magical.

The point is simply to see whether the domain can regain visibility and rankings.

If it begins ranking for terms related to the niche, you now have something much more interesting than an expired domain.

You have a website that Google is willing to show people.

Now imagine that one of the pages on that site naturally mentions something relevant on your main website.

You add a contextual link.

Not a random homepage link buried beside twenty other links.

A link that actually makes sense in the paragraph.

The reader has a reason to click it.

Google has a reason to understand the relationship between the two pages.

Then comes the part that most SEO discussions tend to make unnecessarily complicated.

Send people through it.

Run traffic.

It could come from social media.

It could come from advertising.

It could come from a community where the content genuinely belongs.

The exact source isn't really the interesting part.

The interesting part is what happens when a backlink is not just sitting there doing nothing.

People see it.

People click it.

People arrive on the referring page.

Some continue to your website.

Some don't.

And suddenly that link is behaving like something that exists in the real world rather than a row in Ahrefs.

This is where SEO gets uncomfortable

SEO tools make links look very simple.

You have a referring domain.

You have a URL.

You have an anchor text.

You have authority metrics.

Maybe you have traffic estimates.

Everything fits neatly into a spreadsheet.

But the internet doesn't work inside spreadsheets.

A link exists inside a page.

That page exists inside a website.

That website has a history.

It has visitors.

It has a subject.

It has relationships with other websites.

And people interact with it.

That's why I find this kind of experiment more useful than endlessly debating whether one particular link-building tactic is "safe" or whether some arbitrary authority metric is high enough.

You can actually observe what happens.

Take a relevant site.

Build it properly.

Get it ranking.

Place a relevant link where it makes sense.

Get real people to the page.

Then watch your own site.

Rankings.

Impressions.

Clicks.

Crawling.

Referral traffic.

Conversions.

You may learn more from that than you would from another hundred hours of watching SEO tutorials.

The part people get wrong

This isn't an argument that links are the only thing that matters.

They aren't.

A terrible website with no useful content isn't going to become an industry leader because somebody pointed 500 links at it.

And traffic by itself isn't some magical ranking button.

SEO is not a vending machine where you insert visitors and receive positions.

The point is different.

People sometimes spend so much time discussing individual SEO components that they forget what those components are supposed to represent.

A backlink is supposed to represent a relationship or recommendation.

A search result is supposed to satisfy somebody looking for something.

Traffic represents people actually interacting with the web.

Relevance connects all of it.

When you strip SEO down to its most basic form, you're trying to build something that deserves to be found and then build enough signals around it that search engines have confidence showing it.

The tactics change.

The tools change.

The terminology changes every six months.

That part doesn't.

You don't need another SEO checklist

This is probably the biggest lesson.

There are endless ways to stay busy in SEO without actually getting better at SEO.

You can spend Monday fixing image filenames.

Tuesday auditing heading structures.

Wednesday arguing about whether your H2s should contain exact-match keywords.

Thursday writing another article targeting a keyword that nobody was going to click anyway.

Friday you discover that the competitor sitting above you has 3,000 referring domains.

That doesn't mean the technical work was useless.

It means you may have been optimising the smaller part of the problem while ignoring the larger one.

Sometimes the answer isn't another content brief.

Sometimes it isn't another plugin.

Sometimes it isn't another audit.

Sometimes you need to look at who is linking to the sites already winning, why those links exist, whether those sites actually receive visitors, and what happens when people interact with them.

That's where SEO becomes less like filling out a checklist and more like understanding how the web actually works.

And if you've spent years learning SEO without ever testing that for yourself, you may be surprised by what you find.

Because eventually you stop asking:

"What SEO trick am I missing?"

And start asking a much better question:

"Why would Google believe this website deserves to rank?"

That question will take you much further.

If You Want to 10x Your eCommerce Revenue, Get Serious About Operations

Katalaga Hakim — Sun, 05 Jan 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There is a particular kind of Shopify store that looks busy from the outside.

Products are being added.

Ads are running.

Someone is posting videos on Instagram.

There is a blog somewhere.

The Merchant Center account exists.

Maybe there is even an SEO agency sending a monthly report.

And yet the store barely moves.

The usual diagnosis is traffic.

“We just need more visitors.”

So they increase the ad budget. They try TikTok. They publish more content. They hire someone for SEO.

Six months later, they have more traffic and roughly the same problem.

The problem was never just traffic.

It was the operation behind the store.

A growing ecommerce business is not one tactic. It is a collection of systems that have to work together.

The product feed affects Shopping.

Shopping affects the quality of traffic.

Traffic lands on collections and product pages.

Those pages need to convert.

Content brings in additional demand and supports the commercial pages.

Backlinks build authority.

Email brings customers back.

CRO improves what happens to the traffic you already paid for.

If all of those pieces are being managed independently, you can spend a surprising amount of money while making surprisingly little progress.

Start with the product feed

One of the most overlooked pieces of ecommerce operations is the Merchant Center feed.

A lot of stores treat it like plumbing.

Connect Shopify to Google.

Make sure the products are approved.

Forget about it.

But your feed is one of the ways Google understands what you sell.

That means it deserves regular attention.

Titles can be refined based on the searches bringing people to the store.

Descriptions can be made clearer.

GTINs and product categories can be corrected.

Products that consistently waste advertising spend can be reviewed.

New products can be properly categorized before they are pushed into campaigns.

Even something as simple as a product title can make a difference in how clearly Google understands the product.

Compare:

“Classic Hoodie”

with:

“Men’s Heavyweight Cotton Hoodie – Oversized Fit – Black”

The second title gives Google considerably more information about what the product actually is.

It tells you the audience, material, product type, fit and color.

This does not mean stuffing every conceivable keyword into a product title.

It means being precise.

The feed should be treated as a working asset, not something you configure once and forget.

Then look at the content surrounding the products

The same problem appears on the website.

A store might have hundreds of products but very little useful context around them.

The collection page says “Running Shoes.”

The products appear underneath.

That's it.

But people search with much more specific intentions.

Someone might be looking for running shoes for flat feet.

Someone else might want trail running shoes.

Someone else might be preparing for a marathon.

Those are different needs.

A good collection page can explain the category, help the customer understand the differences between products, answer common questions and point them toward more specific collections.

A collection for running shoes for flat feet should not feel like a generic product grid.

It should explain the considerations that actually matter to that customer.

That makes the page more useful for search engines.

More importantly, it makes the page more useful for people.

The same principle applies to product pages.

SEO and CRO are not completely separate activities.

A page that gives someone the information they need to make a decision has a better chance of ranking for relevant searches and converting the person who arrives there.

Your ads should reflect the structure of the store

Once the feed and site structure are in reasonable shape, the advertising account becomes much easier to manage.

One of the first mistakes I see is treating every product as if it deserves the same amount of attention.

It doesn't.

A store with 200 products might have 20 that generate most of its sales.

It might have another group with healthy margins.

It might have clearance inventory.

It might have brand-new products that need testing.

Putting everything into one undifferentiated bucket makes it harder to understand where the money is going.

Segmenting products by business value can give you much better control.

Best sellers can be treated differently from low-margin products.

High-margin products can be given room to scale.

Clearance products can have their own logic.

New arrivals can be tested without allowing them to distort the performance of established winners.

The goal is not complexity for its own sake.

The goal is knowing what you are buying and why.

Don't throw Performance Max at a broken store

There is also a temptation to launch Performance Max and let Google figure everything out.

That can be useful in the right account.

It is not a replacement for doing the groundwork.

If the product feed is weak, the campaign is working with weak information.

If the conversion tracking is wrong, the campaign is learning from bad data.

If the website does not convert, more traffic does not fix the website.

If your product structure is unclear, you lose control over where the budget is going.

The sequence matters.

Get the feed right.

Get the tracking right.

Get the site and product structure right.

Understand the search demand.

Then give the campaigns enough data to make useful decisions.

Automation works much better when the system underneath it is already reasonably healthy.

Content should do more than fill a calendar

The same operational thinking applies to organic content.

A skincare brand does not need to spend every day posting another picture of a bottle with the words “Shop now.”

There are hundreds of better conversations available.

Why is your vitamin C product not producing the results you expected?

What does a simple morning routine look like for oily skin?

What are common mistakes people make when choosing skincare products?

What does each ingredient actually do?

That content can educate someone before they ever visit the product page.

It also gives the brand something useful to distribute across short-form video, social media, email and the website.

The best content systems do not constantly ask, “What should we post today?”

They start with the questions customers already have.

Then they turn useful answers into multiple pieces of content.

That is an operation.

Not a content calendar for the sake of having one.

SEO should support the money pages

There is a similar problem with ecommerce SEO.

Stores publish dozens of blog posts, then wonder why organic traffic has not translated into much revenue.

A blog about winter hiking can be useful.

But if the article never points the reader toward the winter hiking boots you actually sell, you have created content that is disconnected from the commercial side of the business.

A better system connects the two.

A buying guide about choosing winter boots can link to the relevant collection.

That collection can link to related categories.

Those categories lead to products.

Now the content is supporting the commercial architecture of the store.

The same applies to backlinks.

You do not need to chase random links just to increase a number in an SEO report.

Relevant supplier mentions, product roundups, comparison articles, niche publications and other legitimate references can help build authority.

And some of that authority should reach the pages that actually matter commercially.

Then there is CRO

A store does not have to rebuild its entire website every month to improve conversion.

Sometimes the changes are remarkably small.

Move reviews higher on the product page.

Make shipping information easier to find.

Clarify the return policy.

Test a product bundle.

Remove unnecessary friction from the purchase process.

Make the value proposition easier to understand.

Individually, these changes might look insignificant.

At $50,000 a month, a 1% improvement can already be meaningful.

At $500,000 a month, the same improvement is a very different number.

This is why optimization becomes more valuable as a business grows.

You do not always need another 100,000 visitors.

Sometimes you need to get more from the visitors you already have.

Speed is part of the operation too

Then there are the things nobody notices until they go wrong.

The store loads slowly on mobile.

There are twelve Shopify apps doing jobs that three could handle.

Old scripts are still running.

Product images are unnecessarily large.

The mobile layout is awkward.

A customer taps the checkout button and spends several seconds wondering whether the page is broken.

None of these problems makes a dramatic appearance in your marketing strategy.

They simply leak revenue quietly.

That is why technical maintenance belongs inside ecommerce operations.

You do not wait until the store becomes unusable before checking its health.

You don't need a giant team

This is also where I think ecommerce businesses sometimes make things unnecessarily complicated.

A store doing under $1 million a year does not automatically need fifteen specialists.

It needs people who can actually operate.

One person manages SEO.

Another only touches Google Ads.

Someone else handles Meta.

Another person manages content.

Someone else manages Shopify.

Then nobody is really responsible for how all of those things interact.

For a smaller store, a strong multi-skilled Shopify or ecommerce operator can sometimes create far more leverage.

Someone who understands Shopify, SEO, Google Ads, Meta Ads, product feeds, content workflows and basic technical work does not have to be the world's best specialist at every discipline.

They need to understand enough to keep the machine moving and know when something requires a deeper specialist.

That coordination has real value.

The advantage is in the connections

The real edge is not one magical tactic.

It is the relationship between the tactics.

A better product feed gives Google better information.

Better campaign structure puts the right products in front of the right searches.

Better collection pages give that traffic somewhere useful to go.

Content creates additional demand and supports those collections.

Internal links connect the site.

Backlinks build authority.

CRO improves the percentage of visitors who become customers.

Email gives you another chance to monetize the customers you already paid to acquire.

Each improvement makes the others more valuable.

That is what compounding looks like in ecommerce.

It is not necessarily one campaign suddenly producing ten times more revenue.

It is a series of relatively ordinary improvements that stop working against each other.

Most stores operate in bursts

Run ads.

Stop ads.

Try SEO.

Stop SEO.

Post videos for three weeks.

Stop.

Launch email flows.

Forget about them.

Redesign the homepage.

Move on to something else.

There is always another tactic to try.

What is harder is building the boring systems that continue operating when nobody is excited about them anymore.

The feed gets reviewed every week.

Campaigns get cleaned up.

Collections get improved.

Content keeps answering customer questions.

Links continue to be built.

CRO tests continue.

Technical issues get fixed.

Email flows get reviewed.

Products are segmented according to what the business actually needs.

That sounds less exciting than finding the next growth hack.

It is also much closer to how durable ecommerce businesses are built.

If you want to 10x revenue, you may not need a miracle product.

You may need to stop treating your store as a collection of disconnected marketing activities.

Revenue grows when the operation gets better at turning attention into customers, customers into repeat buyers, and every part of the store into support for the others.

The feed supports the ads.

The ads support the products.

The collections support SEO and conversion.

The content supports the collections.

The links support the content and commercial pages.

CRO makes the traffic more valuable.

Email gives the customer another reason to come back.

That is the system.

And most stores are not nearly as far away from it as they think.

They just need to become much more disciplined about how the pieces work together.

Google Shopping Isn't Just Uploading Products and Letting Google Run the Ads

Katalaga Hakim — Mon, 03 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There is a particular kind of Google Shopping setup that looks finished long before it actually is.

The products are in Merchant Center.

The campaign is live.

The budget is running.

A few days later, the store owner opens Google Ads, looks at the numbers and wonders why sales are inconsistent.

The usual response is to change the budget.

Or change the bidding strategy.

Or create another campaign.

Sometimes the problem is much earlier in the process.

Google Shopping is not simply a matter of uploading products and letting Google figure everything out. The system is making decisions based on the information you give it, the structure you create around that information, and what happens when the shopper reaches the product page.

If those foundations are weak, more automation does not fix the problem.

It usually just makes the same problem harder to see.

Your Product Feed Is Your Targeting

Shopping campaigns work differently from traditional Search campaigns.

You are not sitting there building a keyword list for every product and telling Google exactly which query should trigger which ad.

Instead, Google reads your product data.

Titles.

Descriptions.

Product categories.

GTINs.

Brand information.

Color.

Size.

Product type.

Custom labels.

All of that information helps Google understand what you are selling and decide when your products are relevant to a search.

This is why the product feed deserves far more attention than it usually gets.

Your feed is effectively part of your targeting system.

If the information is vague, incomplete or inconsistent, Google has less useful information to work with.

Consider a product called:

"Classic Sneakers."

That might make perfect sense to the person who manages the store.

It does not tell Google very much.

A more descriptive title such as:

"Men's White Leather Sneakers – Lightweight Casual Shoes"

gives the system considerably more context.

It tells Google the audience, color, material, product type and an important characteristic of the product.

That is not keyword stuffing.

It is simply describing the product properly.

A Weak Feed Can Make a Good Campaign Look Bad

Some of the most common Merchant Center problems are not particularly complicated.

Generic product titles.

Missing GTINs where they are available.

Incorrect Google Product Category mapping.

Missing color or size attributes.

Poorly structured variants.

Inconsistent product information.

Products that are out of stock but still being pushed through the feed.

These things can seem like administrative details.

They are not.

Google cannot reliably match a product to a search if it does not properly understand what the product is.

This is one reason I am cautious whenever someone wants to solve a Shopping problem entirely inside Google Ads.

Sometimes the campaign is not the problem.

The data underneath it is.

Standard Shopping and Performance Max Are Not the Same Thing

Once the feed is in good shape, there is another decision to make.

Standard Shopping and Performance Max both use product feeds, but they give you very different levels of control.

Standard Shopping is more deliberate.

You can segment products into product groups, control bids more directly and get more visibility into how different parts of the catalogue are performing.

That makes it useful when you want to test products, control spend or understand what is happening inside the account.

Performance Max takes a much more automated approach.

It can use the product feed alongside audience signals, creative assets and Smart Bidding, then distribute traffic across Google's inventory, including Search, Shopping, YouTube, Display, Discover and Gmail.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

The problem is assuming that more automation automatically means better performance.

It doesn't.

Automation is only as good as the information and signals it receives.

A clean feed, accurate conversion tracking and a sensible product structure give Google's systems something useful to work with.

A messy feed and unreliable tracking simply give automation more freedom to make decisions with bad information.

Don't Put the Entire Catalogue in One Bucket

Another common setup is to put every product into one campaign, give the campaign one budget and let Google decide everything.

It is easy.

It is also often a poor way to manage an ecommerce catalogue.

Your best seller might have a completely different economics from a slow-moving product.

A high-margin product can tolerate a different acquisition cost from a low-margin product.

A seasonal product may deserve aggressive spending for three months and almost none for the next nine.

A clearance product has a different job again.

So why should they all compete for exactly the same budget?

They shouldn't necessarily.

The point is not to create dozens of campaigns simply because segmentation sounds sophisticated.

The point is to separate products when there is a meaningful business reason to do so.

Best sellers can be grouped together.

High-margin products can have their own budget.

Clearance products can be isolated.

Seasonal products can be managed separately.

Now your campaign structure reflects the business instead of treating the entire catalogue as one thing.

Custom Labels Give You Another Layer of Control

Merchant Center custom labels are particularly useful here.

You can use them to classify products according to information that matters to the business.

Margin tier.

Price range.

Best-seller status.

Season.

Inventory level.

For example, imagine a store has 2,000 products but only 80 are responsible for a large portion of its revenue.

Those products should not necessarily be treated the same way as the other 1,920.

Custom labels make it possible to identify those groups and build campaign structures around them.

This is where Shopping starts becoming less about "running ads" and more about managing an ecommerce catalogue.

The advertising system is connected to the economics of the store.

That is a much better place to be.

Titles Deserve More Attention

Product titles are one of the easiest places to improve a Shopping account because they directly influence how Google understands the product.

The important attributes should generally appear early.

Instead of:

"Classic Sneakers"

you might have:

"Men's White Leather Sneakers – Lightweight Casual Shoes."

The second title gives the system much more information.

It also gives the shopper a better idea of what they are looking at before clicking.

That distinction matters.

You are not writing a title for an SEO tool.

You are describing the product clearly enough for both Google and the person searching.

Descriptions matter too, although they do not play exactly the same role as titles.

They provide additional context around the product and can help Google's systems understand its relevance, particularly within more automated campaign types.

Keep them clear.

Keep them useful.

Describe the product naturally.

There is rarely a good reason to turn a product description into a wall of repeated keywords.

Then There Is the Bidding Problem

Eventually you have to decide how Google should bid.

This is where many advertisers start making changes before they have enough reliable information.

Smart Bidding can be extremely useful, but it needs good conversion data.

If tracking is inaccurate, conversions are delayed, important purchases are missing, or events are firing incorrectly, the bidding system is learning from a distorted picture.

That can lead to very expensive mistakes.

Depending on the account and its data, strategies such as Maximize Clicks, Maximize Conversions or Target ROAS can make sense at different stages.

But there is no bidding strategy that can compensate for broken conversion tracking.

If Google thinks you are getting ten purchases when you are actually getting five, it is making decisions based on fiction.

Before increasing budgets, audit the tracking.

It is one of the least glamorous parts of the job and one of the most important.

Search Terms Still Tell You What Is Happening

Even though Shopping is feed-driven, you still need to pay attention to the searches that trigger your products.

Particularly with Standard Shopping, search-term data can reveal irrelevant queries that are consuming budget.

Negative keywords can help prevent that traffic.

The important thing is to treat search terms as diagnostic information, not just something you check when performance collapses.

Sometimes the search terms tell you that the product title is attracting the wrong intent.

Sometimes they reveal that a particular product is being shown for queries you never intended to target.

Sometimes they expose a problem with how Google is interpreting the catalogue.

The account is giving you clues.

You have to look at them.

Getting the Click Is Only Half the Job

This is where Shopping campaigns often get blamed for a problem they did not create.

A shopper clicks a product ad.

They land on a slow product page.

The price is difficult to find.

The product appears different from the image they clicked.

There are no reviews.

Shipping information is buried.

The item is unavailable.

The description tells them almost nothing.

Then they leave.

Google gets blamed for the poor conversion rate.

But the ad did its job.

It found someone interested enough to click.

The product page lost the sale.

Shopping traffic is often high-intent traffic, which makes the landing page particularly important.

The product page should load quickly.

Pricing should be obvious.

Availability should be accurate.

Reviews should be easy to find.

Shipping and returns should be clear.

The product shown in the ad should be the product the customer finds on the page.

The promise made before the click should match the experience after it.

A good Shopping campaign cannot rescue a product page that gives the customer reasons not to buy.

Stop Looking at ROAS as a Single Number

ROAS is useful.

It is also not an explanation.

If ROAS falls, you need to know why.

Did click-through rate fall because the product titles became less compelling?

Did conversion rate fall because the product page changed?

Did costs increase because competition changed?

Is the campaign limited by budget?

Are the search terms becoming less relevant?

Are products with poor margins taking too much of the spend?

Is tracking working properly?

These questions lead somewhere.

"ROAS is down" does not.

A useful Shopping audit looks at the drivers underneath the headline number.

CTR tells you something about the relationship between the product and the search.

Conversion rate tells you something about what happens after the click.

Cost per conversion tells you about acquisition efficiency.

Impression share can reveal whether budget or competition is limiting visibility.

Search terms reveal the quality of the traffic.

Together, those numbers tell a story.

Scaling Should Not Be Emotional

Once you find products that consistently perform, scaling becomes much easier to reason about.

You can isolate the winners.

Increase budgets gradually.

Protect profitable segments.

Keep the feed updated.

Improve the product pages.

Remove products that consistently waste spend.

Adjust the structure when the business changes.

That last part matters.

Shopping campaigns are not something you build once and forget.

Inventory changes.

Prices change.

Margins change.

Products sell out.

New products launch.

Seasons come and go.

The feed needs to reflect those changes.

The campaign needs to reflect those changes.

The product page needs to reflect those changes.

That is why ecommerce advertising is operational.

You Don't Need Twelve Shopping Campaigns

For a smaller store, complexity can become its own problem.

You probably do not need twelve campaigns, seventeen bidding strategies and a spreadsheet that requires a meeting to understand.

You need a clean feed.

Logical segmentation.

Accurate tracking.

Strong product pages.

A sensible campaign structure.

Then you need someone paying attention to what the data is telling you.

A smaller account with those fundamentals in place can be much easier to manage than a complicated account built on weak foundations.

Structure beats complexity.

This Is Where Ecommerce Operations Matter

There is also a practical reason Shopping works best when advertising and store operations are treated as connected systems.

Someone needs to keep Merchant Center clean.

Someone needs to improve product titles.

Someone needs to manage custom labels.

Someone needs to notice when inventory and the feed stop matching.

Someone needs to coordinate product-page improvements.

Someone needs to monitor diagnostics.

That work is often handed to a Shopify or ecommerce VA, but the useful version of that role is much more than uploading products.

The person managing the store should understand how the catalogue affects advertising.

The person managing the ads should understand what happens on the store.

Otherwise you end up with two people optimizing separate pieces of the same customer journey.

The feed says one thing.

The ad says another.

The product page says something else.

Then everyone wonders why the numbers do not make sense.

Shopping Performance Usually Starts Before the Campaign

When a Shopping campaign is struggling, increasing the budget is one of the easiest things to do.

It is also one of the first things I would question.

Look at the feed.

Look at the titles.

Look at the product attributes.

Look at the campaign segmentation.

Look at the conversion tracking.

Look at the search terms.

Then look at the product pages.

By the time you have gone through those areas, you usually have a much better idea of what is actually wrong.

Google Shopping is not a machine where you throw products and money into one side and wait for sales to come out of the other.

It is a system.

The feed tells Google what you sell.

The campaign structure determines how you control it.

The bidding system decides where to spend based on the signals it receives.

The product page determines what happens after the click.

And the business itself determines which products are actually worth scaling.

Get those pieces working together and you have something worth putting more budget behind.

Do it the other way around and a bigger budget simply gives a weak system more money to waste.

How Much Does Google Ads Actually Cost for eCommerce?

Katalaga Hakim — Wed, 05 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There is a question that comes up whenever someone starts talking about Google Ads for an ecommerce store.

“How much should I spend?”

Someone will say $500 a month is enough.

Someone else will say you need $5,000 or even $10,000 before Google Ads can produce anything meaningful.

Both answers can be right.

And that is precisely why neither answer is particularly useful on its own.

The real question is not how much money you have available for Google Ads. It is whether the economics of your store can support the cost of acquiring a customer.

That starts with a few numbers most store owners would rather not think about.

Your average order value. Your gross margin. Your conversion rate. Your target ROAS.

Once you know those numbers, the budget starts making sense.

Without them, you are mostly guessing.

Google Ads is a math problem

Imagine you sell phone cases for $25.

Your gross margin is 60%, which gives you roughly $15 in gross profit before advertising and other costs.

Suppose you want a 2x ROAS.

That means you cannot casually spend $20 to acquire a $25 order and expect the business to work. Your allowable acquisition cost has to fit inside the economics of the sale.

Now add the website.

If the store converts at 2%, you need roughly 50 clicks to generate one order.

If your average CPC is $0.50, those 50 clicks cost $25.

You have now spent the entire revenue from the order just getting the customer through the door.

The problem is not necessarily the $500 advertising budget.

You could give the account another $5,000 and still have the same problem.

The economics are broken before the budget ever becomes interesting.

Maybe the conversion rate needs to improve. Maybe the average order value needs to increase. Maybe the targeting is attracting the wrong searches. Maybe the margins are too thin for the product to support paid acquisition.

This is why I get uncomfortable when someone asks for a “minimum Google Ads budget” without telling me anything about the store.

There isn't one.

The same budget behaves very differently in different businesses

Now take a completely different example.

Imagine a furniture company selling products with an average order value of $1,200 and a 40% gross margin.

That is $480 in gross profit on an order.

Spending $200 or $300 to acquire that customer can still make sense.

But there is another problem.

The clicks may be considerably more expensive.

If the average CPC is $3 or $4, the same $500 budget that bought hundreds of clicks for the phone-case store might only buy a little over a hundred clicks here.

The business can afford the customer acquisition cost.

It simply needs more capital to generate enough traffic and sales.

This is the part people often miss when they compare advertising budgets between industries.

Your category influences CPC.

Your website influences conversion rate.

Your product price influences how much revenue each conversion is worth.

Your margins determine how much you can afford to spend acquiring that customer.

And your customer lifetime value can completely change the equation again.

So, is $500 enough?

Sometimes.

If your CPC is low, your competition is manageable, your website converts well, and your product has enough margin to support paid acquisition, $500 can be a perfectly reasonable starting point.

But there is an important distinction between a testing budget and a scaling budget.

$500 can buy you data.

It does not automatically buy you scale.

At a $1 average CPC, $500 gets you roughly 500 clicks.

At a 2% conversion rate, that produces around 10 orders.

That may be enough to start seeing patterns.

It may not be enough to make confident decisions about every part of the account.

And if the CPC is $3 instead of $1, suddenly that same $500 only buys around 167 clicks.

This is why budget discussions without CPC and conversion-rate assumptions are mostly noise.

The budget is simply the amount of fuel.

The important question is how far the vehicle can travel on it.

What I usually want to know before spending more

When looking at a new ecommerce store, I would rather start with the economics than start with the budget.

What is the average order value?

What is the actual gross margin?

What is the current conversion rate?

What does the business consider a profitable customer acquisition cost?

What ROAS does the business need to break even?

What does the customer usually do after the first purchase?

That last question matters more than people think.

A customer who buys a $50 product once is a very different customer from someone who buys four times a year.

If the second customer is likely to generate several hundred dollars in revenue over their lifetime, you may be able to accept a higher acquisition cost on the first purchase.

That changes how you think about Google Ads.

It stops being purely a machine for generating individual transactions.

It becomes a way of acquiring customers who may be worth much more than their first order.

Of course, you still need the margins and retention to actually support that assumption. Customer lifetime value is not an excuse to lose money forever.

Don't use more budget to hide a bad account

There is another problem with the obsession over budget.

People often increase spending when the real problem is somewhere else.

The search terms are wrong.

The campaign structure is messy.

The product feed is weak.

The ads do not match the intent behind the searches.

The landing page does not make a convincing case for buying.

Conversion tracking is broken.

The store itself has friction that nobody bothered to fix.

Increasing the budget does not solve any of those things.

It simply gives the problems more money to work with.

If your targeting is poor, you buy more irrelevant traffic.

If your landing page converts badly, you pay for more people to leave.

If your tracking is unreliable, you spend more money while having less confidence in the numbers.

There is a point where the answer is not “spend more.”

It is “stop and fix the foundation.”

Starting small can be useful

For a new store, I often prefer starting somewhere around $5–$20 a day rather than immediately throwing thousands of dollars into an unproven system.

The purpose at that stage is not to scale.

It is to validate.

Are the clicks relevant?

Are people actually reaching the right products?

Does the website convert?

Does the offer make sense to the market?

Is conversion tracking working properly?

Are the search terms what you expected?

Can the account generate purchases at an acquisition cost the business can actually tolerate?

Once those questions start producing good answers, increasing the budget becomes much easier to justify.

You are no longer paying Google to discover whether the business works.

You are putting more money behind something that has started to prove itself.

What about $1,000, $3,000 or $5,000?

There is no magic number, but for many ecommerce businesses, somewhere around $1,000–$3,000 per month can provide a more useful testing environment than a few hundred dollars.

At $5,000 or more, there can be enough volume for an account to operate with greater consistency.

But that only matters when the underlying economics and account structure are sound.

A $5,000 budget on a broken campaign is not more sophisticated than a $500 budget on a broken campaign.

It is just a more expensive mistake.

The same principle applies to management fees.

If you spend $1,000 on advertising and another $1,000 on management, your business is really spending $2,000 to run that acquisition channel.

That management cost has to be included when you calculate whether the channel is profitable.

Otherwise, you can end up celebrating a campaign that looks good inside Google Ads while making very little money for the business.

Tracking is part of the budget

There is one thing that deserves more attention than it usually gets: conversion tracking.

If purchases are not being tracked correctly, you do not actually know what your advertising is producing.

You might think a campaign is profitable when it isn't.

You might pause something that was working.

You might move budget toward the wrong products.

You might spend weeks “optimizing” based on numbers that were never accurate in the first place.

That is not an advertising problem.

It is a measurement problem.

And measurement comes before optimization.

Before you decide on a budget, do the math

Before asking whether you should spend $500 or $5,000 a month, work backwards from the business.

What is your average order value?

What is your gross margin?

What is your realistic conversion rate?

What is the average CPC in your market?

What is your break-even ROAS?

How many clicks are likely to produce an order?

How much can you afford to spend acquiring that customer?

If you use Google Keyword Planner to get a sense of search costs in your category, you can start building a much more realistic picture of what your budget might actually produce.

Then the question changes.

Instead of asking, “Is $500 enough?”

You can ask, “What can $500 realistically buy me, and does that fit the economics of my store?”

That is a much better question.

Some businesses can make a small budget work.

Some need substantially more capital before the numbers become meaningful.

And some should not be increasing their Google Ads budget at all until they fix the product, website, tracking, targeting, or margins.

The budget does not determine whether Google Ads works.

The economics do.

You do not scale an account because the budget feels comfortable.

You scale because the numbers give you a reason to.

Most eCommerce Stores Are Using Google Search Campaigns the Wrong Way

Katalaga Hakim — Thu, 06 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There are two ways most ecommerce founders seem to approach Google Search campaigns.

Some ignore them almost completely.

They put their money into Shopping or Performance Max and assume Search is either too complicated or no longer important.

Others go in the opposite direction. They collect a long list of broad keywords, put them into a campaign, write a few ads and wait for Google to find the customers.

Neither approach makes much sense.

Search is one of the few places in ecommerce advertising where you can directly tell Google what kind of demand you want to capture.

You choose the keywords.

You choose how closely those keywords should match a search.

You write the message.

You choose where the customer lands.

That control is valuable.

But it also means Search campaigns punish sloppy structure much faster than people expect.

Search Is About Intent

The biggest difference between Search and Shopping is not simply that one uses keywords and the other uses product feeds.

It is the level of intent you are working with.

Someone searching for "buy vitamin C serum" is telling you something.

Someone searching for "waterproof hiking jacket men" is telling you something else.

Someone searching for your brand name is giving you another signal entirely.

Then there are searches such as "how to fix dry skin" or "are pheromones effective."

They may eventually lead to a purchase, but the person is not necessarily ready to buy right now.

Treating all of these searches as if they represent the same customer is one of the fastest ways to make a Search account messy.

The keyword matters.

But the intent behind the keyword matters more.

Start by Separating the Intent

Imagine a skincare brand setting up its first serious Search account.

It could throw everything into one campaign.

Brand terms.

Product searches.

Competitor searches.

Informational questions.

Everything together.

Google would have plenty of keywords to work with.

The business would have very little control.

A cleaner structure might separate branded searches from high-intent non-brand terms, competitor searches and research-stage queries.

The exact structure will depend on the size and economics of the account, but the principle is simple:

Different kinds of demand should not automatically receive the same treatment.

Someone searching for your brand already knows you exist.

Someone searching for "buy vitamin C serum" is actively looking for a product.

Someone searching for "how to fix dry skin" may still be deciding whether they even need one.

Those are three different conversations.

Your campaigns should reflect that.

Branded Search Is Its Own Thing

Branded searches are often among the easiest searches to convert because the customer is already looking for the business.

If someone types your store name into Google, you want your result there.

You control the messaging.

You control the landing page.

You can protect that space from competitors bidding on your brand terms.

And because the customer already knows who you are, the conversion behaviour can look very different from a completely cold non-brand search.

That is why I generally would not mix branded and non-branded traffic together and then use one blended number to judge performance.

You want to know what is happening.

If branded traffic is carrying the account while non-brand traffic is struggling, a combined ROAS figure can hide the problem.

High-Intent Non-Brand Search Is Where Search Gets Interesting

Now consider someone searching for:

"buy vitamin C serum"

or:

"waterproof hiking jacket men."

These searches contain commercial intent.

The person is not simply researching the subject.

They are closer to making a purchasing decision.

That makes them particularly valuable for ecommerce brands, but it also makes relevance important.

The keyword should be closely related to the product or category you are selling.

The ad should reflect what the person searched for.

And the landing page should give them exactly what they expected to find.

This is where tighter match types can be useful, particularly when you are building around important commercial terms and want more control over what enters the account.

You can expand later.

You do not need to start by opening the gates to everything.

Research Traffic Needs a Different Approach

Now take a search like:

"how to fix dry skin."

It would be tempting to send that person directly to a product page and ask them to buy.

But that is not necessarily what they came to Google for.

A better experience might be an educational guide explaining common causes of dry skin, what people can consider when choosing products and where a particular product fits into that process.

The same applies to searches such as:

"best supplements for sleep."

Or:

"are pheromones effective."

These searches can eventually become commercial, but the person may need information before they are ready for a product page.

That changes the landing page.

It changes the messaging.

It changes what you should expect from the traffic.

Not every click needs to produce an immediate purchase.

The mistake is paying for research-stage traffic and judging it as though it were a bottom-of-funnel product search.

Broad Match Is Not a Strategy

Broad match gets blamed for a lot of bad Search campaigns.

Sometimes fairly.

Sometimes not.

The problem is usually not that broad match exists.

The problem is using broad targeting without enough structure, data, negative keywords or a clear understanding of what the campaign is supposed to accomplish.

If you are spending money on searches that have nothing to do with your products, you are buying noise.

That is why I would rather start with control around important commercial terms, monitor the search terms closely and expand when the account gives you a reason to expand.

Search term reports are particularly useful here.

They show you what people actually typed, not what you hoped they would type.

That distinction can be revealing.

You may discover irrelevant queries.

You may find new keywords worth targeting.

You may notice that one product is attracting a completely different type of search than expected.

You may also discover that your landing page is not aligned with the way people are searching.

Negative keywords then become part of the ongoing maintenance.

Search campaigns reward that discipline.

Your Ad Is Part of the Landing Page Experience

There is another mistake that is easy to make.

An advertiser treats the ad as decoration.

The keyword goes into the campaign.

The ad says something generic like "Shop Our Collection."

Then the customer lands on a page that barely resembles what they searched for.

That creates unnecessary friction.

If someone searches for "men's waterproof hiking jacket," the ad should make it obvious that you sell men's waterproof hiking jackets.

The landing page should continue that conversation.

The customer should not have to figure out whether they arrived at the right place.

This is part of what makes Search different from many other forms of advertising.

You have an opportunity to create a very direct chain:

Search → ad → landing page → product → purchase.

The closer those pieces match, the less work the customer has to do.

Quality Score Is Really About Relevance

Quality Score is often treated as a number to chase.

It is more useful to think about what sits underneath it.

Google looks at factors including expected click-through rate, ad relevance and landing page experience.

You cannot write a clever headline and magically solve a poor landing page.

If the keyword says one thing, the ad says something vague and the page says something else entirely, the whole experience is weaker.

Relevance is not just an advertising metric.

It is the relationship between what the person wanted and what you gave them.

That relationship affects the economics of the campaign.

Don't Send Everything to the Homepage

This is one of the simplest Search mistakes to fix.

Someone searches for a specific product.

They click the ad.

You send them to the homepage.

Now the customer has to navigate through your site to find the product they were already looking for.

Why make them do that?

If the search is for a specific product, show that product.

If the search is for a specific category, show the relevant collection.

If the search is comparison-oriented, give the person comparison information.

If the search requires education, give them an educational page.

The landing page should match the job the searcher is trying to accomplish.

Search Gives You Control Shopping Doesn't

This is where Search becomes particularly useful alongside Shopping.

Shopping is heavily dependent on your product feed. Google reads your catalogue and determines when products are relevant.

Search gives you a different kind of control.

You can deliberately isolate high-margin products.

You can build campaigns around important product categories.

You can protect branded demand.

You can test specific commercial terms.

You can exclude low-value traffic.

You can write different messages for different types of searches.

That does not make Search automatically better than Shopping.

It makes the two systems different.

Shopping is very good at matching products to existing demand through product data.

Search lets you work much more directly with the language and intent behind that demand.

A strong ecommerce account can use both.

Bidding Comes After the Foundation

Eventually, bidding becomes important.

But it should not be the first thing you reach for.

With sufficient reliable conversion data, strategies such as Maximize Conversions or Target ROAS can make sense.

With limited data, you may need a more controlled approach while you gather information.

The exact strategy depends on the account.

What does not depend on the account is the need for accurate tracking.

If purchases are missing, duplicated or incorrectly attributed, your bidding system is learning from bad information.

That makes every later decision harder.

Before asking Google to optimize aggressively, make sure you can trust the signals you are giving it.

A Small Account Doesn't Need Twenty Campaigns

There is another trap on the opposite side of the problem.

Once someone learns that structure matters, they sometimes create so much structure that managing the account becomes the job.

A smaller ecommerce store usually does not need twenty tiny campaigns just to prove that the account is sophisticated.

A branded campaign.

A high-intent non-brand campaign.

Tightly organized keyword groups.

Clean negative keywords.

Relevant landing pages.

That can be a perfectly sensible starting point.

You add complexity when there is a business reason for it.

A premium product line may deserve separate treatment.

A high-margin category may justify its own budget.

A competitor campaign may need different messaging and expectations.

But structure should solve a problem.

It should not exist simply because someone likes complicated Google Ads accounts.

The Store Has to Support the Ads

This is where Search management stops being purely an advertising job.

The person managing the ads may discover that a keyword is valuable, but the relevant product page is weak.

A search term may reveal that customers are looking for a comparison that the site does not currently provide.

An important product category may need its own landing page.

The ad messaging may promise something that the current collection page does not explain.

These are not problems Google Ads can solve on its own.

This is where a strong Shopify or ecommerce VA can create real leverage.

Not by simply "running ads," but by connecting the advertising work to the store itself.

They can help improve product pages.

Build or coordinate research-stage landing pages.

Structure collections around actual search intent.

Keep messaging consistent between ads and the website.

Monitor search-term trends and turn useful discoveries into site improvements.

The ad account and the store should be informing each other.

Otherwise you are optimizing one half of the customer journey.

Search and Shopping Solve Different Problems

The easiest way to understand the relationship between the two is to think about where the information comes from.

Shopping relies heavily on the product feed.

Google reads the catalogue and decides when products are relevant.

Search starts with the query.

You decide which keywords and types of intent you want to pursue, then build the ad and landing-page experience around them.

Neither approach needs to replace the other.

A store selling thousands of products may get substantial value from Shopping.

The same store may use Search to protect its brand, capture specific high-intent searches and build campaigns around products or categories where tighter control matters.

The important part is understanding what each campaign type is actually doing.

The Real Problem Is Usually Structure

When a Search campaign is underperforming, the instinct is often to change the bid.

Then the budget.

Then the keyword.

Then perhaps the entire campaign.

I would start somewhere else.

Look at the intent.

Look at the keyword structure.

Look at the search terms.

Look at the negative keywords.

Look at the ad relevance.

Then follow the click all the way to the landing page.

Does the customer see what they expected?

Can they find the product quickly?

Does the page answer the questions standing between them and the purchase?

Is tracking accurate enough for Google to learn from the result?

Those questions are less exciting than finding a new bidding hack.

They are also much more useful.

Good ecommerce advertising is not really about running Search or Shopping campaigns.

It is about building a system where the right demand reaches the right product through the right message.

Search gives you control over intent.

Shopping gives Google more responsibility for matching products to demand.

Both can work extremely well.

But neither can compensate for weak structure, poor data or a store that is not ready for the traffic.

The campaign is only one part of the system.

Build the system properly, and the ads have something to work with.

SEO Is Simpler Than We Make It

Katalaga Hakim — Wed, 12 Feb 2025 00:00:00 GMT

SEO has become one of those things where you can spend an absurd amount of time learning about it and somehow end up doing less actual SEO.

There is always something new to worry about. Google released another update. Someone discovered a new ranking factor. Someone else announced that listicles are dead. Then Reddit starts showing up everywhere and suddenly there are 47 posts explaining what Reddit citations in ChatGPT mean for your SEO strategy. Your DR is too low. AI content is finished. Actually, AI content is the future. Google changed something again.

You can spend an entire afternoon reading about all of this and, by the end of it, have learned absolutely nothing that helps the website you're working on.

The funny thing is that the fundamentals are much less exciting.

And they haven't changed nearly as much as the SEO industry would have you believe.

You need relevant content. You need backlinks. You need a website or product that is actually useful. You need to pay attention to what is happening, test things, make adjustments, and keep doing the work.

That's most of it.

Start with the content.

If you sell accounting software, you should probably have useful pages about the things people searching for accounting software actually want to know. If you run a plumbing business, you should probably have pages that answer the questions people ask before they call a plumber.

This sounds painfully obvious, which is probably why people keep finding ways to make it complicated.

The goal isn't to publish 200 articles because a keyword tool found 200 keywords. It is to build pages that deserve to exist. Pages that answer something properly. Pages that are relevant to the business and useful to the person who searched.

Then there are links.

You can dress this up with whatever terminology you like, but other websites linking to your website still matters. A relevant link from a website that people actually use is useful in ways that a spreadsheet of 400 random referring domains isn't.

You don't need to turn every backlink into a philosophical discussion about authority.

Build good links. Build relevant links. Keep building them.

And then there is the part that gets strangely neglected in SEO discussions: actually having something worth ranking.

You can spend six months obsessing over keywords and backlinks, finally get someone onto the first page, and then send them to a website that looks like it was assembled during a lunch break in 2014.

The SEO did its job. The website didn't.

If someone reaches your site and immediately wonders why they should trust you, buy from you, contact you, or even stay there for another thirty seconds, your ranking isn't the biggest problem you have.

Make the product good. Make the website useful. Make it easy for people to find what they need. Give them a reason to stick around.

SEO can get someone through the door. It cannot make a bad business interesting.

The other thing you need is a willingness to test things instead of treating every SEO opinion as a law of nature.

Try something.

Track what happens.

Look at rankings, organic traffic, clicks, enquiries, sales, whatever actually matters to the business. If something improves, figure out why. If it doesn't, change it.

This sounds obvious too, but a surprising amount of SEO is built around repeating things because somebody once said they work.

You don't need to believe me. Test it yourself.

That is one of the better habits you can develop in SEO. Stop asking whether some tactic is supposed to work and start looking at what happens when you use it on your own site.

And then there is the final ingredient, which is probably the least exciting one of all.

Consistency.

This is where most people eventually disappear.

SEO is not particularly difficult because every individual task is complicated. It is difficult because there are a lot of relatively ordinary things that need to be done repeatedly.

You publish the page.

You improve the pages that aren't performing.

You build some links.

You look at the data.

You find another opportunity.

You fix something that is broken.

Then you do it again next week.

And the week after that.

There is no shortage of things that can distract you from this. Google will release another update. Someone will announce that a particular type of content is dead. An SEO tool will introduce another metric. A new platform will become the place everyone insists you need to be.

You can chase all of it if you want.

Or you can keep working on the things that were already moving the website forward.

That doesn't mean Google updates don't matter. They obviously can. And new tactics are worth testing. But there is a difference between paying attention to changes and building your entire SEO strategy around whatever the internet is talking about this week.

The sites that tend to survive aren't necessarily the ones whose owners predicted every Google update correctly.

They're the ones that kept building useful things, earning links, improving the website, watching the numbers and adjusting when something stopped working.

SEO is not quite as mysterious as we make it.

Relevant content.

Good links.

A useful website or product.

Testing and measurement.

Consistency.

The annoying part is that none of this is particularly exciting.

You just have to keep doing it.

And that's probably why it works.

What I’d Fix First in a Shopify Store Doing Under $1M a Year

Katalaga Hakim — Thu, 17 Apr 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I have seen ecommerce stores spend money on Google Ads, hire SEO people, publish content, install apps and bring in freelancers for almost every task imaginable.

From the outside, they look busy.

Inside the store, the important pieces are often disconnected.

The product feed is messy.

The collection pages are thin.

Product pages have little useful information.

Reviews are barely visible.

Google Ads is running, but nobody is looking closely at the search terms.

Someone is publishing blog posts while the pages that actually make money are being ignored.

Then the founder decides the store needs more traffic.

Often, it doesn't.

For a Shopify store doing under $1 million a year, I would look at the fundamentals first.

Not because advanced strategies are useless.

Because there is little point building a more sophisticated growth system on top of a weak one.

Start With the Product Feed

If the store is using Google Shopping or Performance Max, Merchant Center deserves serious attention.

Google is using the information in your product feed to understand what you sell and where your products may be relevant.

That means product data is not just back-office information.

It affects advertising.

Look at a typical catalogue and you will often find the same problems.

Generic product titles.

Missing GTINs where they are available.

Weak descriptions.

Incomplete attributes.

Poor variant information.

No meaningful custom labels.

Then someone looks at the Google Ads account and asks why the campaign is attracting poor traffic.

The problem may have started before the campaign was even created.

Your feed gives Google the information it needs to understand your products.

If that information is weak, you are asking the advertising system to make decisions with incomplete context.

Stop Writing Product Titles Like They're Just Keywords

A product title should tell Google and the customer what the product actually is.

Take:

"Men's Leather Jacket."

It is technically accurate.

It is also not particularly informative.

Something more specific, such as:

"Men's Slim Fit Black Leather Jacket for Winter"

gives considerably more context.

The important attributes are now obvious.

Gender.

Fit.

Color.

Material.

Use case.

You do not need to turn every title into a sentence containing every keyword you have ever researched.

You need to describe the product properly.

That becomes increasingly important as search systems get better at understanding context rather than simply looking for an exact phrase.

Product Descriptions Should Help Someone Decide

The same problem appears on product pages.

A description like:

"High-quality magnesium capsules."

does almost nothing for someone trying to decide whether the product is right for them.

A better description explains what the product is intended for, what makes it different and what someone should know before buying it.

The goal is not to stuff keywords into the page.

It is to answer questions.

What is this?

Who is it for?

Why would I choose it?

How is it different from the alternatives?

How do I use it?

What should I know before buying?

That is useful for customers.

It also gives search engines more context about the product.

Then Look at Your Reviews

Once the feed is clean, I would look at the product pages.

One of the first things I notice on weaker stores is how little evidence there is that other people actually buy from them.

Three reviews.

No customer photographs.

Old feedback.

No visible questions and answers.

Very little information about returns or shipping.

The founder may know the business is legitimate.

The customer doesn't.

They are seeing the store for the first time.

Reviews, customer-generated content, ratings and clear policies reduce some of that uncertainty.

And this matters even more when the visitor came from paid traffic.

You have already paid to get that person onto the product page.

You do not want the page to immediately give them reasons to hesitate.

Do not just collect reviews, either.

Think about where they appear.

A strong review should not be buried six screens below the product description if the customer needs that reassurance before buying.

Surface useful social proof around the decision points.

Near the product information.

Around the price and purchase area.

On collection cards where appropriate.

And make sure the underlying review data is implemented properly where relevant.

Trust is part of the conversion system.

Your Collection Pages Are More Important Than You Think

A lot of Shopify stores treat collections as folders.

Create a collection.

Add some products.

Give it a name.

Done.

But collection pages can do much more than that.

They can target meaningful search intent.

They can organize the catalogue.

They can become landing pages for advertising.

And they can help customers find the right products without forcing them to search through the entire store.

Compare:

"Shop All Jackets"

with:

"Men's Winter Jackets"

"Waterproof Hiking Jackets"

"Lightweight Summer Jackets"

The second structure tells both the customer and the search engine more about what each page is actually about.

A strong collection page should have a clear H1, useful introductory content, sensible internal links and a clean product structure.

It does not need 2,000 words of SEO copy sitting above the products.

It needs enough useful information to explain the category and help the shopper.

The products should still be the main event.

Build the Site Around Intent

This is where I would rather see a Shopify store have ten excellent collections than fifty meaningless ones.

Think about what people are actually looking for.

Someone may search for "waterproof hiking jackets."

Another person may want "lightweight jackets for summer."

Another may be looking specifically for "men's winter jackets."

Those are different needs.

If the catalogue supports those distinctions, build the site around them.

The same thinking applies to product pages and informational content.

Your website should gradually become a map of the questions and purchasing decisions surrounding your products.

That makes the store easier to navigate.

It also gives SEO and paid advertising better landing pages to work with.

Build Authority Around the Pages That Matter

Backlinks are still part of the equation.

But I would not measure SEO progress by how many links you managed to acquire this month.

Ask where the authority is going.

If a useful guide earns links, that is great.

But if the guide never links to the relevant collection, and the collection has no authority of its own, you have created an island.

For an ecommerce store, important collection pages and high-value commercial pages deserve attention.

The homepage can naturally attract links.

Useful guides can attract links.

But the authority should ultimately support the pages that matter to the business.

SEO is not just about getting traffic to the website.

It is about getting the right pages in front of the right people.

Don't Stop at Commercial Keywords

There is another group of pages many ecommerce stores ignore.

The pages for people who are not ready to buy yet.

Someone searching for a product comparison.

Someone trying to solve a problem.

Someone asking which product is best for a particular situation.

Those searches can be valuable even when they do not immediately produce a sale.

Suppose you sell pheromone products.

You might build useful content around questions such as how pheromones are discussed in relation to attraction, whether pheromone fragrances are effective, or what people should consider when choosing one.

The point is not to force a product into every paragraph.

Answer the question first.

Then give the reader a natural path toward the relevant products if they decide they want to explore them.

Good informational content can support SEO, remarketing and future branded demand.

Someone who discovers your brand through useful information may not purchase today.

That does not make the visit worthless.

Be Careful With Performance Max

Performance Max can be useful.

It can also become a convenient place to hide problems.

Put 200 products into one campaign.

Give Google a budget.

Upload some assets.

Wait.

When performance is poor, increase the budget.

That is not a strategy.

Your products have different margins, demand levels, inventory situations and business priorities.

A hero product should not necessarily compete for budget in exactly the same way as a low-margin clearance item.

Seasonal products have different requirements again.

That is where segmentation can help.

You might separate hero products, seasonal products and low-margin or clearance inventory where there is a genuine business reason to do so.

The objective is not to create as many campaigns as possible.

It is to give the system useful boundaries.

Automation works much better when the inputs and the structure make sense.

You Probably Don't Need Ten Employees

This is probably the part founders underestimate most.

A store doing under $1 million does not necessarily need a giant marketing department.

It needs people who can actually connect the pieces.

One capable Shopify or ecommerce operator can be surprisingly valuable if they understand more than one narrow task.

They can manage the product feed.

Improve collection pages.

Work on product-page structure.

Monitor Merchant Center.

Keep products and inventory organized.

Understand basic SEO.

Spot CRO problems.

Monitor Google Ads trends.

Manage review systems.

Coordinate backlink work.

Help make sure the website reflects what the advertising is promising.

That is very different from hiring someone whose only instruction is to upload products or publish blog posts.

The difference is judgment.

A task-based VA waits for instructions.

An operator notices that something is wrong and starts asking why.

That difference matters.

The Store and the Ads Should Talk to Each Other

This is one of the biggest opportunities for smaller ecommerce teams.

The person managing the ads sees which searches are becoming valuable.

The person managing the store sees which products are converting.

The SEO work reveals what customers are asking.

The product pages reveal where shoppers are hesitating.

Those observations should feed back into one another.

If customers keep searching for a particular product attribute, perhaps the collection or product titles should reflect it.

If a product gets plenty of traffic but barely converts, inspect the product page before buying more traffic.

If a particular category has strong margins and demand, perhaps it deserves more attention in the campaign structure.

The store is generating information all the time.

You just have to connect it.

Under $1M, Complexity Can Become Expensive

There is a temptation to solve every ecommerce problem by adding something.

Another app.

Another freelancer.

Another campaign.

Another content writer.

Another SEO tool.

Another automation.

Another dashboard.

Eventually the founder has six people working on six pieces of a system that nobody fully understands.

I would rather see a smaller team with clear ownership.

One strong ecommerce operator.

A good media buyer when the advertising volume justifies it.

The founder staying involved in positioning, offer and the direction of the business.

Then bring in specialists when there is a specific problem that requires them.

Lean does not mean doing everything yourself.

It means knowing which work actually needs another person.

Most Stores Don't Have a Traffic Problem

They have a structure problem.

The feed is weak.

The collections are poorly organized.

The product pages do not answer enough questions.

The reviews are thin.

The landing pages do not match the campaigns.

The internal links are random.

The advertising is disconnected from the economics of the catalogue.

Then the founder says:

"We need more traffic."

Maybe.

But I would want to know what happens to the traffic you already have.

Because if the store cannot convert qualified visitors properly, buying more of them is just an expensive way to discover the same problem at a larger scale.

For a Shopify store under $1 million a year, I would start with the things closest to the sale.

Clean the feed.

Improve the product pages.

Build useful collections.

Strengthen trust.

Fix the internal structure.

Make the campaigns reflect the catalogue.

Create useful content around the questions customers are actually asking.

Then look at what still needs fixing.

AI can make many of these processes faster.

It can help analyze data, generate ideas and automate repetitive work.

But it does not remove the need for good inputs.

It does not make a weak product page persuasive.

It does not turn a messy catalogue into a logical one.

And it certainly does not replace someone who understands how all of these pieces fit together.

The stores that grow consistently are rarely the ones with the most complicated setup.

They are usually the ones where the basic parts are working together.

Clean data.

Useful pages.

Good products.

Trust.

Relevant traffic.

A sensible structure.

And someone paying enough attention to notice when one of those pieces starts slipping.

What I’d Fix First in a Shopify Store Doing Under $1M a Year

Katalaga Hakim — Wed, 07 May 2025 00:00:00 GMT

I have seen ecommerce stores spend money on Google Ads, hire SEO people, publish content, install apps and bring in freelancers for almost every task imaginable. From the outside, the business looks busy. There is always something happening. A new campaign is being launched, another blog post is being published, someone is working on the website and somebody else is probably inside Merchant Center trying to figure out why a product has been disapproved.

But when you actually look inside the store, the important pieces are often disconnected.

The product feed is messy. Collection pages are thin. Product pages do not contain enough useful information. Reviews are difficult to find. Google Ads is running, but nobody is looking closely at the search terms. Someone is publishing articles while the pages that actually make money are being neglected.

Eventually the founder looks at the numbers and reaches the same conclusion: the store needs more traffic.

Sometimes it does.

Quite often, it needs something else first.

For a Shopify store doing under $1 million a year, I would start with the fundamentals. Not because advanced strategies are useless, but because there is little point building a sophisticated growth system on top of a weak foundation. If the catalogue is poorly structured, the product pages are unconvincing and the advertising does not line up with the products, adding more traffic simply gives you more people discovering the same problems.

Start With the Product Feed

If the store is using Google Shopping or Performance Max, Merchant Center deserves considerably more attention than it usually gets.

Google is using the information in the product feed to understand what you sell, which searches your products might be relevant for and how the products should be represented in its advertising systems. Product data is therefore not just some administrative information sitting in the background of the store. It becomes part of the advertising system.

Look through a typical catalogue and you will often find the same problems: generic product titles, missing GTINs where they are available, weak descriptions, incomplete attributes, poor variant information and custom labels that provide little useful segmentation.

Then somebody opens the Google Ads account and wonders why the campaign is attracting poor traffic.

The problem may have started before the campaign was ever created.

Your feed gives Google the information it needs to understand your products. If that information is incomplete or vague, you are asking the advertising system to make decisions with incomplete context. There is only so much optimisation you can do later when the underlying product information is weak.

This is why I would inspect the feed before assuming the advertising account itself is the main problem.

Stop Writing Product Titles Like They're Just Keywords

Product titles are another place where ecommerce stores often make things harder than they need to be.

A title should tell Google and the customer what the product actually is. That sounds obvious, but plenty of stores treat titles as little more than places to insert keywords.

Take something like "Men's Leather Jacket." It is technically accurate, but it does not tell you much beyond the broadest description of the product.

A more specific title such as "Men's Slim Fit Black Leather Jacket for Winter" gives considerably more context. The gender, fit, colour, material and use case are immediately clearer.

That does not mean every product title should become a paragraph containing every keyword discovered in a research tool. The objective is not to make the title look optimised. The objective is to describe the product properly.

The same principle applies across the catalogue. If an attribute genuinely helps someone understand what the product is, and that attribute is relevant to how people search for it, it should be represented clearly.

Search systems are increasingly capable of understanding context rather than simply matching an exact phrase. A clear, descriptive product title gives both the customer and the system more useful information to work with.

Product Descriptions Should Help Someone Decide

The problem becomes even more obvious when you move from the feed to the product page.

A description such as "High-quality magnesium capsules" tells a potential customer almost nothing. It identifies the product category, but it does not help someone decide whether that particular product is appropriate for them.

A useful product description should answer the questions that naturally appear during the buying decision. What is the product? Who is it intended for? What makes it different? How is it used? What should someone know before purchasing it?

That is more useful than filling the page with variations of the same keyword.

The best product descriptions are not written primarily for a search engine. They are written to remove uncertainty for a person who is considering spending money.

That distinction matters because useful information serves both purposes. A customer gets the context they need to make a decision, while the search engine gets a clearer understanding of what the page and product are actually about.

If the product page cannot explain why someone should choose the product, there is not much value in getting more people onto it.

Then Look at Your Reviews

Once the feed and product information are in reasonable shape, I would look closely at the product pages themselves, particularly the evidence that other people have bought from the store.

One of the first things I notice on weaker ecommerce sites is how little evidence there is that real customers actually use the products. There might be a handful of reviews, no customer photographs, old feedback, no visible questions and answers, and very little information about shipping or returns.

The founder already knows the business is legitimate. The customer does not.

For a first-time visitor, the store is an unknown company asking them to part with their money. Reviews, ratings, customer-generated content and clear policies help reduce some of that uncertainty.

This becomes especially important when the visitor has arrived through paid advertising. You have already spent money getting that person onto the product page. You do not want the page to immediately give them reasons to hesitate.

Collecting reviews is only part of the job, though. Placement matters as well. A useful review should not be buried several screens below the product information if that reassurance is important to the customer's decision.

Think about where uncertainty appears in the buying process and place evidence where it can actually address it. Reviews might belong near the product information, around the purchase area or on collection cards where appropriate. The exact implementation will depend on the store, but the principle is simple: trust should be visible when the customer needs it.

Your product page is not just a place to display a product. It is where the customer decides whether they believe the store enough to buy from it.

Your Collection Pages Are More Important Than You Think

A lot of Shopify stores treat collections as little more than folders. Create a collection, add some products, give it a name and move on.

That misses a large part of what collection pages can do.

A well-structured collection can target meaningful search intent, organise the catalogue, provide a useful landing page for advertising and help customers find the right products without making them work their way through the entire store.

There is a significant difference between a collection called "Shop All Jackets" and useful category pages such as "Men's Winter Jackets," "Waterproof Hiking Jackets" or "Lightweight Summer Jackets."

The second structure gives the customer a clearer route through the catalogue. It also gives search engines a better understanding of what each page is intended to represent.

A good collection page does not need thousands of words of SEO copy sitting above the products. It needs a clear heading, enough useful introductory information to explain the category, sensible internal links and a clean product structure.

The products should still be the main event.

The purpose of the content is to help the customer understand the category and make the page useful, not to push the products halfway down the screen because somebody decided the collection needed a certain word count.

Build the Site Around Intent

This is where I would rather see a Shopify store have ten excellent collections than fifty meaningless ones.

Start with the way customers actually search and shop.

Someone searching for "waterproof hiking jackets" has a different need from someone looking for "lightweight jackets for summer." Someone searching for "men's winter jackets" may have a different purchasing decision again.

If the catalogue supports those distinctions, the website should reflect them.

This applies beyond collection pages. Product pages should serve specific product intent, while informational content can address the questions and problems that exist before someone is ready to purchase.

Over time, a good ecommerce website becomes a map of the decisions customers are making around the products. The navigation helps people move through the catalogue, commercial pages capture purchasing intent and informational pages answer the questions that come before the purchase.

That makes the store easier to use, but it also gives SEO and paid advertising better pages to work with.

Instead of sending every visitor to the same generic destination, you begin to have pages that actually correspond to what that person is looking for.

Build Authority Around the Pages That Matter

Backlinks are still part of SEO, but I would not judge the quality of an ecommerce SEO campaign simply by counting how many links were acquired during a particular month.

The more useful question is where that authority is going.

Suppose a useful guide earns several good links. That is a positive result. But if the guide never connects to the relevant collection page, and the collection itself has very little authority, you have created an island.

For an ecommerce store, the pages that generate revenue deserve attention. Collection pages and important commercial pages should not be treated as secondary simply because they are less exciting to work on than a large informational article.

The homepage will naturally attract some links. Useful guides can attract others. The important thing is making sure the authority built around the site ultimately supports the pages that matter to the business.

Internal linking is part of that process. A useful article can point people towards a relevant collection. That collection can connect to its products. Other relevant pages can reinforce those relationships.

SEO is not simply about getting traffic into the website. It is about getting the right pages in front of people with the right intent.

Don't Stop at Commercial Keywords

There is another group of potential customers that many ecommerce stores ignore entirely: people who are interested in the problem but are not ready to buy yet.

They might be comparing products, trying to solve a particular problem or researching which type of product is appropriate for their situation.

Those searches can still be valuable even when they do not immediately produce a sale.

Suppose you sell pheromone products. There are obvious commercial searches around the products themselves, but there are also questions surrounding the category. People may want to understand how pheromone fragrances are discussed in relation to attraction, whether they are effective or what they should consider when choosing one.

The mistake is turning every informational article into a disguised sales page.

Answer the question first.

If the reader finds the information useful, give them a natural route towards the relevant products if they want to explore further. The connection should make sense rather than appearing every few paragraphs simply because somebody decided the article needed more product links.

Someone who discovers your brand through useful information may not purchase that day. That does not mean the visit was worthless.

They now know the brand exists. They may return later, search for it directly, subscribe to something, share the information or eventually become a customer.

Not every piece of useful content has to close the sale immediately.

Be Careful With Performance Max

Performance Max can be useful, but it can also become a convenient place to hide problems.

It is easy to put a large catalogue into one campaign, give Google a budget, upload some assets and wait for the system to figure everything out. When performance is disappointing, the temptation is to increase the budget and hope the additional spend fixes the problem.

Usually, it does not.

Your products have different margins, levels of demand, inventory situations and business priorities. A product that is central to the business does not necessarily deserve to compete for budget in exactly the same way as a low-margin clearance product. Seasonal products can have completely different requirements again.

That is where sensible segmentation can help.

You might separate hero products, seasonal products or low-margin and clearance inventory when there is a genuine business reason to do so. The point is not to create twenty campaigns simply so the account looks sophisticated. The point is to give the system useful boundaries that reflect how the business actually operates.

Automation does not eliminate the need for structure. It makes structure more important because the system is making more decisions on your behalf.

Give it better inputs and clearer boundaries, and there is a much better chance that the automation will work in a way that makes sense for the business.

You Probably Don't Need Ten Employees

This is one of the things founders tend to underestimate.

A Shopify store doing under $1 million a year does not necessarily need a large marketing department. What it needs is people who understand how the different parts of the business connect.

One capable ecommerce operator can be extremely valuable if they understand more than one narrow task. They can keep the product catalogue organised, monitor the feed, improve collection pages, work on product-page structure, watch Merchant Center, understand basic SEO, identify CRO problems and keep an eye on what is happening in Google Ads.

They can also coordinate review systems, support backlink work and notice when the website no longer reflects what the advertising is promising.

That is very different from hiring someone whose only responsibility is uploading products or publishing blog posts.

The difference is judgment.

A task-based VA waits for instructions. An operator notices that something is wrong and starts asking why.

If a product is receiving traffic but not converting, they do not immediately ask for more traffic. They look at the product page.

If a category is selling well but has poor visibility, they may look at the collection structure and advertising.

If the feed contains poor product information, they recognise that the problem could affect the advertising before somebody starts changing bids.

That kind of person can become a force multiplier for a smaller ecommerce business because they are not looking at each task in isolation.

The Store and the Ads Should Talk to Each Other

This is one of the biggest opportunities for smaller ecommerce teams.

The person managing the advertising sees which searches are becoming valuable. The person managing the store sees which products are actually converting. SEO research reveals what customers are asking, while the product pages reveal where shoppers are still hesitating.

Those observations should not live in separate departments.

If customers repeatedly search for a particular product attribute, perhaps the product titles or collection structure should reflect it. If a product receives plenty of qualified traffic but barely converts, inspect the product page before buying more traffic.

If a category has strong demand and healthy margins, perhaps it deserves more attention in the campaign structure. If a product consistently underperforms, perhaps the problem is the offer, the page, the positioning or the economics rather than the advertising itself.

The store is generating information all the time.

The opportunity is to connect that information.

When the website, SEO, advertising and ecommerce operations are being managed as completely separate activities, useful information gets trapped inside each one. When they are connected, an observation from one part of the business can improve another.

That is often where smaller teams have an advantage. There are fewer layers between the person seeing the problem and the person capable of fixing it.

Under $1M, Complexity Can Become Expensive

There is a temptation to solve every ecommerce problem by adding something.

Another app. Another freelancer. Another campaign. Another content writer. Another SEO tool. Another automation. Another dashboard.

None of these things is automatically bad. The problem appears when every new problem produces another layer instead of fixing the underlying system.

Eventually, the founder can end up with six people working on six pieces of a business that nobody fully understands.

I would rather see a smaller team with clear ownership.

One strong ecommerce operator can handle a surprising amount of the day-to-day work. A good media buyer can be brought in when the advertising volume justifies one. The founder can stay focused on positioning, the offer and the broader direction of the business. Specialists can be brought in when there is a specific problem that genuinely requires specialist knowledge.

Lean does not mean doing everything yourself.

It means understanding which work actually requires another person.

There is a difference between being understaffed and being surrounded by people who each own a tiny piece of a system nobody is responsible for as a whole.

Most Stores Don't Have a Traffic Problem

At this point, the pattern should be fairly obvious.

The feed is weak. The collections are poorly organised. The product pages do not answer enough questions. Reviews are difficult to find. Landing pages do not match the campaigns. Internal links are random. Advertising is disconnected from the economics of the catalogue.

Then the founder says, "We need more traffic."

Maybe.

But before buying more traffic, I would want to know what happens to the traffic the store already has.

Because if the store cannot properly convert qualified visitors, buying more of them is just an expensive way to discover the same problem at a larger scale.

For a Shopify store under $1 million a year, I would start with the things closest to the sale. Clean the feed. Improve the product pages. Build useful collections. Strengthen trust. Fix the internal structure. Make the campaigns reflect the catalogue. Create useful content around the questions customers are actually asking.

Then see what is still broken.

AI can make many of these processes faster. It can help analyse data, generate ideas and automate repetitive work. But it does not remove the need for good inputs. It does not make a weak product page persuasive, and it does not turn a messy catalogue into a logical one.

More importantly, it does not replace someone who understands how all of these pieces fit together.

The stores that grow consistently are rarely the ones with the most complicated setup. They are usually the ones where the basic parts are working together: clean data, useful pages, good products, trust, relevant traffic and a sensible structure.

And there is usually someone paying enough attention to notice when one of those pieces starts slipping.

What an Ecommerce Manager Actually Does All Day

Katalaga Hakim — Tue, 24 Jun 2025 00:00:00 GMT

When people hear "Ecommerce Manager," they often imagine someone sitting inside Shopify all day.

Uploading products. Changing prices. Updating banners. Checking orders.

That is part of it, but it is a fairly small part of the job.

I've been working as an Ecommerce Manager at a small to medium-sized store for the past two years, and the job is much closer to keeping a small machine running than simply managing a website.

There is rarely a perfect morning where everything is working, the numbers look great, every order is moving through fulfillment, and you can calmly spend the afternoon planning next month's marketing.

Usually, something needs your attention.

So I start with operations.

Before worrying about campaigns or conversion rates, I want to know whether the basic business is actually functioning. Are orders coming through properly? Are there failed transactions sitting somewhere that nobody noticed? Are payments working? Is fulfillment moving? Are couriers collecting orders on time? Has anything gone wrong overnight?

Because there is not much point celebrating a great day in Google Ads if customers are placing orders and those orders aren't getting fulfilled.

This is one of the less glamorous parts of ecommerce, but it is also one of the easiest places for money to disappear.

A failed payment might look like a small technical problem until you realise the customer never came back.

A fulfillment problem might start with one delayed order and turn into a pile of unhappy customers.

A courier issue might have nothing to do with marketing at all, but the customer doesn't care. As far as they're concerned, they bought something from your store and the store didn't deliver it.

So if something is broken, that comes first.

Once the basic machinery is working, I move into performance marketing.

This is where the day gets more interesting.

I'm looking at Google Ads, including Search and Shopping, as well as paid social. Depending on what the store is doing, that can mean building campaigns, launching promotions, adjusting budgets, checking search terms, looking at which products are getting the spend and trying to figure out whether the money is actually producing anything useful.

The important part is that the budget shouldn't simply keep running because nobody remembered to touch it.

If one campaign is producing profitable sales and another is quietly eating money, there is a reason to look at the difference.

Sometimes the answer is obvious.

Sometimes it isn't.

A campaign can have a decent return while still selling the wrong products. Another campaign can look expensive until you realise it is bringing in customers who buy repeatedly. A product can get plenty of clicks and barely any orders.

This is why I don't like looking at advertising in isolation.

Eventually you have to leave the ad platform and look at what happened after the click.

That brings me to the numbers.

Revenue.

Average order value.

Conversion rate.

What is scaling?

What has slowed down?

Where is money being wasted?

Which products are carrying the business?

Which ones are getting attention without producing much in return?

The numbers are useful because they stop you from relying entirely on instinct. But they also have to be connected to what is happening on the site.

So while I'm looking at performance, I'm also looking at the website.

Heatmaps are useful here because analytics can tell you that something happened without always making it obvious why.

You might see that people are reaching a product page but not continuing.

You might find that an important section is being ignored.

You might discover that people are clicking something you didn't expect them to click.

Or you might simply find that the page makes much more sense on a desktop than it does on a phone.

These aren't always dramatic problems.

Sometimes the problem is a small piece of friction that appears at exactly the wrong moment.

The customer has questions about shipping and can't find the answer.

The product information is buried.

The checkout feels unnecessarily complicated.

A button isn't where someone expects it to be.

The page takes too long to load.

None of these things make for particularly exciting marketing meetings. But they can make a very real difference to whether someone buys.

And then, throughout the day, there are the marketplaces.

Amazon.

eBay.

Etsy.

Each one has its own little collection of things that need attention.

Listings need updating. Prices change. Products need monitoring. Performance needs checking. Sometimes something that works well on one marketplace doesn't work particularly well on another.

So the job becomes a constant movement between systems.

Shopify.

Google Ads.

Meta.

Analytics.

Heatmaps.

Merchant Center.

Amazon.

eBay.

Etsy.

Fulfillment.

Payments.

Customer behaviour.

Financial numbers.

It doesn't always feel like one job.

That's probably because it isn't.

An Ecommerce Manager sits in the middle of a lot of different parts of the business and has to understand how they affect one another.

A marketing problem can turn out to be a website problem.

A conversion problem can turn out to be a product problem.

An advertising problem can turn out to be a margin problem.

A revenue problem can turn out to be an operations problem.

And sometimes the thing that looks like a traffic problem isn't a traffic problem at all.

That's why I think the job is better understood as managing the entire customer journey rather than managing a Shopify store.

Someone sees an ad.

They click.

They land on the site.

They look at a product.

They add it to the cart.

They pay.

The order gets fulfilled.

The customer receives it.

Maybe they come back and buy again.

There are a lot of places for that journey to go wrong.

The Ecommerce Manager's job is to keep looking for those weak points.

Where are we losing people?

Where are we losing money?

What is working better than expected?

What deserves more budget?

What needs fixing?

What should we stop doing?

And perhaps most importantly, what is the next problem worth solving?

That last question matters because there is always something you could work on.

You could spend three hours changing product descriptions while a payment issue is preventing customers from completing checkout.

You could increase an ad budget while the landing page is leaking conversions.

You could celebrate a strong ROAS while most of the revenue is coming from products with terrible margins.

You could spend the morning improving a listing that accounts for almost none of the store's revenue.

There is no shortage of work in ecommerce.

The difficult part is deciding which work actually matters.

That is what I think separates managing a store from managing an ecommerce business.

The job isn't simply to keep Shopify updated and make sure the homepage looks nice.

It is to understand what is happening across the business, find the places where things are breaking or money is being wasted, fix them, and then keep looking.

Some days that means working on ads.

Some days it means fixing a checkout problem.

Some days it means staring at a heatmap wondering why everyone is clicking the same completely unexpected thing.

And some days it means going through orders and discovering that the problem has nothing to do with marketing at all.

That's ecommerce.

A lot of moving parts, very little room for assuming everything is fine.

The store is the centre of it, but the job is much bigger than the store.

SEO Has Changed. The Fundamentals Haven’t.

Katalaga Hakim — Tue, 08 Jul 2025 00:00:00 GMT

SEO has a way of making simple things look complicated.

There is always a new algorithm update to discuss, a new tool to test, a new content format everyone suddenly claims is essential. One month it is AI-generated content. The next it is some new schema trick. Then there is a new platform, a new search feature, a new acronym, and another prediction that SEO as we know it is finished.

Meanwhile, plenty of Shopify stores are still struggling with the same problems they had years ago.

The site is slow.

The collection structure makes little sense.

Important pages are buried.

Product descriptions say almost nothing useful.

There are hardly any links pointing to the site.

And the pages that matter most are barely connected to one another.

The technology around search keeps changing. The fundamentals underneath it have not changed nearly as much.

A strong technical foundation, useful content, authority, and a logical internal structure still do most of the heavy lifting.

Start with the part nobody gets excited about

Before worrying about backlinks or publishing another hundred articles, look at the site itself.

If Google cannot crawl the store properly, if important pages are buried, if links are broken, or if the mobile experience is painfully slow, everything built on top of that foundation becomes harder than it needs to be.

The basics are not glamorous, but they matter.

Pages should load quickly on mobile. URLs should be understandable. Heading structure should make sense. Images should not be unnecessarily heavy. Broken links should be fixed. The sitemap should accurately represent the pages you actually want search engines to discover.

Even the URL can tell you something about how a store thinks about its structure.

Compare:

/collections?id=1234&ref=abc

with:

/collections/mens-waterproof-hiking-boots

The second one tells you what the page is before you even open it.

It is clearer for the customer, clearer for the site structure, and much easier to understand as a search destination.

None of this is an advanced SEO tactic.

That is precisely why it gets ignored.

A page needs to exist for a reason

The next problem usually appears when you start reading the content.

A collection page says:

“Shop our premium hiking boots made from quality materials.”

There is nothing technically wrong with the sentence.

It just doesn't do much.

A person searching for waterproof hiking boots may want to know whether they will work in snow, whether they are insulated, what kind of terrain they are designed for, whether they come in wider fits, and how waterproof they actually are.

The page should help answer those questions.

A useful collection page might explain the differences between insulated and lightweight boots, discuss waterproof materials, explain traction, and help someone understand which type is appropriate for different conditions.

That is much more useful than putting a paragraph above a product grid because someone said every collection needs SEO copy.

The same principle applies to blog content.

There is a big difference between writing an article called “Top 10 Boots” because it sounds like a keyword and writing something like “How to Choose Waterproof Hiking Boots for Winter Conditions” because someone might genuinely need the answer.

The second topic gives you somewhere to go.

You can explain insulation, waterproof membranes, traction, sizing and the differences between various types of boots.

The article becomes useful before it becomes promotional.

That distinction matters.

Search engines have become better at understanding intent, but the underlying principle is remarkably old: make the page useful for the thing the person is searching for.

Then comes authority

A good page still needs a reason to be trusted.

This is where backlinks come in.

There has been no shortage of predictions that links are becoming irrelevant. Yet websites still benefit from being referenced by other relevant, credible websites.

The important part is the word relevant.

A hundred meaningless links from unrelated websites are not the same thing as a handful of genuine mentions from places that make sense for the business.

For an ecommerce store, that might mean industry publications, relevant niche websites, supplier pages, useful directories, product roundups, comparison articles or other websites that have a legitimate reason to reference the brand.

Even suppliers can sometimes become useful sources of authority. If a manufacturer works with a retailer, there may be a natural opportunity for that retailer to be listed or referenced on the supplier's website.

These opportunities are not particularly mysterious.

They just require someone to look for them consistently.

Reddit is useful when you treat it like a community, not a link farm

Reddit deserves a separate mention because it is often approached in exactly the wrong way.

Someone discovers that a subreddit discusses their product category and immediately starts dropping links.

That is not SEO strategy.

That is how you get ignored.

If someone asks for recommendations for waterproof boots for snowy conditions, the useful response is to actually answer the question. Explain what matters. Mention the differences between the options. Help the person make a decision.

If you have a detailed guide that genuinely answers the question, there may be a natural reason to reference it.

The contribution comes first.

The link, if one belongs there at all, comes second.

That distinction matters because online authority is not created simply by placing URLs in as many places as possible. A brand that repeatedly appears in useful conversations, relevant publications and genuine recommendations is building something much more valuable than a pile of artificial links.

Internal links are the part Shopify stores leave lying on the floor

You can spend months trying to earn backlinks and then waste much of that authority with a poorly connected website.

Internal linking is one of the simplest ways to improve that.

Take a store selling protein products.

There might be a main Protein Powder collection, with separate collections for Whey Protein, Plant-Based Protein and Mass Gainers.

There might also be products such as shakers and accessories, alongside a useful guide explaining how much protein someone actually needs.

These pages should not exist as isolated islands.

The main collection can point visitors toward the more specific collections. Relevant guides can link back to commercial pages. Related collections can reference one another where it helps the customer.

Now there is a structure.

Google can discover relationships between pages more easily. Customers can move through the store without repeatedly returning to the homepage. Authority that reaches one part of the site can also be distributed through relevant internal links.

This is where SEO and UX stop being separate disciplines.

Good structure helps both.

Important pages should not be hidden

There is another simple test worth applying to a Shopify store:

How many clicks does it take to reach the pages that actually matter?

Your important collections should generally be easy to discover from the homepage and other relevant areas of the site.

That does not mean putting every collection into a gigantic navigation menu.

It means giving important pages sensible routes into the site.

Contextual links can help. Featured collections can help. Breadcrumbs can help. Footer links can help when used appropriately.

The goal is not to create the most complicated internal linking system possible.

It is to make the hierarchy obvious.

If a collection is commercially important but practically buried, the website is sending mixed signals about its own priorities.

This is where authority and structure meet

Think about what happens when you build a good backlink to the homepage.

The authority arrives there.

Internal links can then connect the homepage to important collections. Those collections connect to relevant sub-collections and products. Guides can reinforce those relationships with contextual links.

The result is not just a homepage with a few backlinks.

You have created a connected site where information and authority can move through the pages that matter.

That is how SEO compounds.

It is also why fixing one thing in isolation rarely produces the result people expect.

A great article sitting on a badly structured site has a problem.

A beautifully structured site with no useful content has a problem.

Excellent content with no authority has a problem.

Hundreds of backlinks pointing toward a store that gives visitors a terrible experience has a different problem.

The pieces need to work together.

The problem with chasing advanced tactics

This is where many store owners get distracted.

They hear about AI content at scale, complicated schema implementations, automation systems and whatever new SEO tactic is making the rounds that week.

Some of those things can be useful.

But they are not a substitute for the fundamentals.

It is difficult to justify an elaborate content automation system when your collection pages barely explain what you sell.

It is difficult to worry about sophisticated schema when the site is painfully slow on mobile.

It is difficult to obsess over publishing frequency when the internal linking structure makes your most important pages almost invisible.

Sometimes the most advanced SEO strategy is fixing the thing that should have been fixed six months ago.

SEO is mostly an operational discipline

This is also why SEO becomes much easier when someone actually owns it.

Not someone who publishes a blog post every Tuesday because that is what the content calendar says.

Someone who looks at the store and notices that three important collections have no useful copy.

Someone who builds an internal linking map and actually implements it.

Someone who checks whether new products are connected to relevant collections and guides.

Someone who coordinates legitimate backlink opportunities and keeps the process moving month after month.

Someone who reviews the site when something changes instead of assuming it will remain healthy forever.

This is one of the reasons a strong Shopify or eCommerce VA can be so useful.

Their value is not simply in uploading products or completing isolated tasks.

They can become the person keeping the SEO machine moving.

Technical cleanup.

Collection optimization.

Internal linking.

Content updates.

Backlink coordination.

Ongoing checks.

None of these jobs is particularly exciting when considered individually.

Together, they create a store that becomes easier to crawl, easier to navigate, easier to understand and more useful to the people searching for what it sells.

And that is the part people sometimes miss about SEO.

There is no single switch you flip that makes a store rank.

It is a series of sensible decisions made consistently over a long period of time.

Algorithms will change.

Search results will change.

The tools will change.

The tactics will change.

But a technically sound website with useful content, genuine authority and a logical internal structure will never be a bad place to start.

The fundamentals are not old-fashioned.

They are the part that survives every update.

Trends come and go.

Fundamentals compound.

How a good eCommerce / Shopify VA can change everything

Katalaga Hakim — Tue, 05 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There is a familiar stage in the life of a Shopify store where everything starts to feel slightly out of control.

Products are sitting in the catalog that nobody has looked at in months. Collection pages exist, but some are barely connected to the rest of the site. The product descriptions still look suspiciously similar to whatever the supplier sent over. Google Ads is running, but nobody has checked the search terms properly this week. The email flows were set up once and then forgotten.

Meanwhile, the founder is trying to keep up with customers, suppliers, inventory, marketing, orders, content and whatever else decided to become urgent that morning.

Eventually someone says, “We need more traffic.”

Sometimes that is true.

But a surprising number of Shopify stores don't have a traffic problem at all. They have an execution problem.

There is traffic coming in. The problem is that the store is not being managed well enough to turn that traffic into consistent growth.

And usually, the underlying issue is simple: nobody properly owns the store.

That is where a strong Shopify or eCommerce VA becomes much more valuable than the title suggests.

A Shopify VA should be managing the machine, not just the catalog

The phrase “Shopify VA” can make people think of someone sitting in the admin panel uploading products all day.

Upload the product. Add the price. Copy the supplier description. Publish.

Next product.

That is not particularly difficult work, and it is not where the biggest opportunity usually sits.

A good Shopify VA should be looking across the store and asking where small improvements can create a better customer journey, more organic visibility, better advertising performance, or more repeat purchases.

That can mean working on product pages in the morning, checking the Google Shopping feed later, reviewing search terms in the afternoon, and coordinating content or email campaigns before the day is over.

It sounds like a lot because it is.

But ecommerce is interconnected. The same product exists in the store, the feed, the ads, the email system, the SEO structure and the customer's experience.

Someone has to understand those connections.

Start with the product page

The product page is where a lot of stores quietly lose the sale.

A supplier description gets pasted in. Three product images are uploaded. Maybe there is a review widget somewhere underneath everything.

Published.

The problem is that the product page was treated like a database entry instead of a sales page.

A better approach starts with the question the customer is actually asking: Why should I buy this?

The description should make the product easier to understand, not simply repeat its specifications. Benefits should be obvious. Important questions should be answered before the customer has to ask them. FAQs can remove uncertainty. Images should be ordered deliberately, with the strongest information appearing early rather than forcing someone to scroll through a gallery to understand what they are looking at.

Related collections and products can be linked where they make sense. Reviews can be placed where they help resolve hesitation rather than simply being dumped at the bottom of the page.

None of these changes is particularly dramatic on its own.

That is the point.

Ecommerce growth is often a pile of relatively small decisions made correctly, over and over again.

Then there are the collection pages nobody talks about

Product pages get most of the attention because that is where the purchase happens.

Collection pages are often treated like folders.

A name. A grid of products. Done.

But collection pages can do much more.

They help customers navigate the catalog, give search engines context about what the store sells, and create another place to target useful search terms.

A well-managed collection page might have useful supporting copy, sensible internal links, consistent formatting and a clear relationship with the rest of the site.

The structure matters too.

If an important collection takes five clicks to reach from the homepage, it probably isn't being treated as important.

The best Shopify stores tend to make their hierarchy understandable. Homepage to collection. Collection to product. Related collection to related collection.

The customer should not need a map.

And neither should Google.

The product feed is part of the storefront too

There is another piece of the store that often gets ignored because customers cannot see it directly.

The product feed.

This is where a lot of brands make the mistake of thinking that because the products are correctly displayed in Shopify, everything must also be fine inside Google Merchant Center.

It isn't always.

The feed powers important parts of the paid acquisition system, including Google Shopping and Performance Max. Product titles, identifiers, categories, brand information and other attributes all affect how those products are understood and matched to searches.

A strong operator does not simply let the feed exist in the background.

They look for bad titles, missing GTINs, incorrect categories, messy product data and unnecessary SKUs. They can also start thinking about segmentation based on product performance and margins rather than throwing the entire catalog into one undifferentiated bucket.

The feed is not just backend housekeeping.

It is part of how the store gets discovered.

Then Google Ads starts telling you things

This is where having someone who understands both Shopify and marketing becomes useful.

Launching a campaign is the easy part.

Keeping the campaign clean is the real work.

Search terms need to be reviewed. Irrelevant queries need to be excluded. Negative keywords need attention. Conversion tracking needs to be checked rather than blindly trusted. Landing pages need to make sense for the searches generating the clicks.

And product segmentation matters.

If 200 products are sitting together in one campaign with completely different margins, demand levels and conversion behaviour, you can end up with a very blurry picture of what is actually working.

The store owner sees a campaign.

The operator should see a collection of individual business decisions hiding inside that campaign.

That difference matters.

SEO is not publishing 20 random blog posts

SEO has its own version of the same problem.

A store starts publishing articles because someone said blogging is good for SEO.

Six months later, there are dozens of posts nobody reads, while the important commercial pages are still poorly structured.

The problem was never a shortage of words.

A Shopify store needs structure first.

Collections need to make sense. Products need to be connected logically. Internal links should help both customers and search engines discover related pages. Important commercial pages should have a reason to exist and a clear place within the site's hierarchy.

Then you can start building authority through things such as supplier links, relevant mentions, product roundups, comparison pages and other genuinely useful references.

Content works much better when it is connected to the store's commercial structure.

Otherwise, you are just adding more pages to a building whose floor plan is already confusing.

Email is where the store starts making money from people it already paid to acquire

Paid traffic is expensive.

That makes retention important.

A store that spends money acquiring a customer and then does almost nothing after the first purchase is leaving part of the economics on the table.

The basic email flows are not complicated, but they need to exist and work properly.

Abandoned cart. Abandoned checkout. Browse abandonment. Post-purchase communication. Win-back.

Then there are the campaigns that keep the store alive between automated flows: restocks, bundles, seasonal products, product education and other reasons to give existing customers a reason to return.

This is another area where a Shopify VA can take ownership.

Not by sending emails just to fill a calendar, but by understanding what the store is trying to sell and when customers would actually have a reason to hear about it.

Retention is not just a marketing metric.

It changes how much you can afford to spend acquiring the next customer.

The same person can help keep the organic side moving

There is also a growing gap between “content” and “traffic.”

A useful product video can become a TikTok, a Reel and a Short. A product question can become a short educational video. A common customer objection can become a piece of content that answers it before someone ever reaches the product page.

The content does not need to be a cinematic production.

It needs to be useful enough that somebody wants to watch it.

A good operator can coordinate that process, keep publishing consistent, structure captions, connect content back to relevant products and make sure the store is not relying entirely on paid traffic to be discovered.

Again, none of this sounds revolutionary.

It is mostly execution.

And that is precisely why it gets neglected.

Then there is all the work nobody puts on the marketing dashboard

Shopify stores do not run on marketing alone.

Someone still has to deal with inventory, suppliers, fulfilment, order problems, customer questions and the endless little operational issues that appear whenever you sell something to actual people.

That might mean coordinating with a 3PL, checking inventory syncs, communicating with suppliers, helping organise customer support or making sure an order issue does not sit unanswered for three days because everyone assumed someone else was handling it.

This is where a good operator can give a founder something more valuable than another completed task.

They give them back some attention.

The founder can spend less time asking, “Did anyone check that?” and more time thinking about where the business should go next.

Most stores do not need a huge team

There is a strange assumption in ecommerce that growth eventually means hiring a separate person for everything.

An SEO person.

A paid ads person.

A content person.

A developer.

An email marketer.

An operations manager.

A customer support team.

Before long, a store doing modest revenue has somehow created a miniature corporation just to keep its Shopify admin organised.

For many smaller stores, the better answer is not ten specialised employees.

It is a small number of capable people who understand how the pieces connect.

One person who can handle Shopify development basics, product pages, CRO, SEO, paid ads, email and day-to-day store operations is far more useful than someone who can do one task perfectly but has no idea what happens before or after it.

That does not mean one person should do everything forever.

It means early-stage ecommerce businesses benefit enormously from operators who can see the whole machine.

The difference is ownership

This is probably the biggest difference between a store that keeps plateauing and one that keeps improving.

Ownership.

Not ownership in the legal sense.

Ownership in the sense that somebody opens the store each morning and notices what is wrong.

The product page could be clearer.

That collection could rank better.

Those search terms need cleaning.

That product feed has problems.

The mobile experience is slow.

That email flow is broken.

Those products are sitting there without internal links.

The campaign is spending money on something it shouldn't.

None of these problems is necessarily large enough to trigger a crisis.

That is why they survive.

A store rarely becomes messy overnight. It becomes messy through hundreds of small things that nobody quite owns.

A strong Shopify VA changes that by making improvement part of the job.

The question stops being, “What task should I complete today?”

It becomes, “What can I improve today?”

That is a much more valuable question.

Because most Shopify stores do not need another app, another dashboard or another complicated growth hack.

They need someone paying attention.

Someone who understands that the product page affects conversion rate, the collection structure affects SEO and navigation, the feed affects Shopping traffic, the landing page affects advertising efficiency, email affects retention, and operations affect everything in between.

That person does not have to be called an eCommerce manager.

They might be called a Shopify VA.

But if they are doing the job properly, they are not simply assisting the store.

They are helping run it.

How to Run Google Ads Profitably on a $50-a-Day Budget

Katalaga Hakim — Wed, 06 Aug 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A $50-a-day Google Ads budget doesn't give you much room for mistakes.

That's $1,500 a month, assuming you spend it every day. You can't throw money at five different campaign types, target everyone who might possibly be interested in your product, and wait around for Google to figure out what you're doing.

There simply isn't enough money for that.

With a small budget, the question isn't really, "How can I get the most traffic?"

It's, "Where can I put the next dollar that has the best chance of becoming a customer?"

That changes the way I would structure the account.

You're looking for people who already have some intention to buy. You don't have the budget to spend months educating completely cold audiences or funding a collection of experiments just because they look interesting inside the Google Ads interface.

At $50 a day, I'd rather have a small amount of highly relevant traffic than a large amount of people who clicked an ad because they were vaguely curious.

The first $10 goes toward branded search.

Keep it simple. Target your brand name on exact match and don't turn the campaign into a giant collection of variations that don't need to be there.

There is a reason for giving brand search its own little corner of the budget. It captures people who already know you and, more importantly, gives Google clean conversion data from people who have demonstrated a clear relationship with the business.

But there is an important distinction here.

Brand traffic isn't prospecting.

Someone searching for your company already knows who you are. You didn't necessarily create that demand with the ad. They may have seen your product somewhere else, heard about you from someone, visited the site before, or simply remembered the name.

So you don't want to look at those conversions and convince yourself that your prospecting campaign is suddenly brilliant.

The next $30 goes toward finding new customers.

For ecommerce, that means non-branded Shopping focused around your strongest three to five products rather than putting the entire catalogue in front of Google and hoping it finds something interesting.

Start with the products that already have a reason to be there. Products people want, products that convert, products with sensible margins, and products you actually want to sell more of.

For a service business, the structure is different. Use non-branded Search around the core services and keywords that indicate someone is actually looking for what you sell. Exact and phrase match can keep the initial targeting focused rather than opening the account up to every vaguely related search Google can find.

And there is one thing I would do immediately here: exclude your branded terms.

This sounds like a small detail until you look at what happens when you don't do it.

Brand searches are often easier to convert. Google knows that. If you leave the door open, the system has a very obvious incentive to find those easy conversions.

Now you can look at your campaign and see a nice conversion rate and a healthy return while acquiring very few new customers.

The account appears to be working.

It just isn't doing the job you thought you hired it to do.

The final $10 goes toward remarketing through Performance Max.

I'd keep this simple as well. Feed-only, focused on your bestsellers and aimed at people who have already interacted with the business in some meaningful way.

Someone visited the site and left.

Someone looked at a product.

Someone added something to their cart and didn't finish.

Someone engaged with the business and disappeared.

These people are different from someone who has never heard of you.

They've already crossed part of the distance.

That's why the small remarketing budget can make sense. You're not asking cold traffic to suddenly become interested in a product they've never seen. You're giving people who have already shown some interest another opportunity to come back.

So the account ends up looking almost boring:

$10/day → branded Search

$30/day → non-branded prospecting

$10/day → remarketing

And honestly, boring is fine.

At this budget, complexity is often just another word for spreading the money too thin.

You don't need a campaign for every audience imaginable. You don't need to launch every new Google Ads feature. You don't need fifteen different experiments running simultaneously so you can feel like you're doing sophisticated marketing.

You need enough data for Google to learn from, enough control to understand where the money is going, and enough focus that the budget isn't being wasted on traffic that was never particularly likely to buy.

The structure also gives you somewhere to go later.

As the account grows, you can add more products, expand your keyword coverage, introduce additional campaign types, test different approaches and eventually increase the amount you're spending.

But the underlying logic doesn't need to disappear just because the budget gets bigger.

You're still trying to separate people who already know the business from people you're trying to acquire.

You're still trying to protect prospecting campaigns from easy branded conversions.

You're still trying to understand which products, searches and audiences actually produce profitable customers.

The numbers simply get larger.

That's the part people sometimes miss when they talk about scaling.

Scaling isn't necessarily about throwing more campaigns into the account because you have more money.

It's about finding something that works, understanding why it works, and then giving it more room to work without destroying the economics that made it profitable in the first place.

A $50-a-day account forces you to learn that discipline early.

You have to decide what matters.

You have to decide which products deserve the budget.

You have to separate acquisition from existing demand.

You have to watch the numbers closely enough to notice when you're paying for traffic that isn't doing much for the business.

And you have to resist the temptation to make the account look complicated simply because complicated accounts look impressive.

If you can make a $50-a-day account behave sensibly, you have a much better foundation for a $500-a-day account.

And eventually a $5,000-a-day account.

The budget changes.

The basic question doesn't:

Where should the next dollar go?

That is the question worth building the entire account around.

When Google Ads Stop Working, Don't Increase the Budget

Katalaga Hakim — Thu, 06 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There is a familiar moment in Google Ads.

The campaigns aren't performing. Clicks are coming in, the cost per click looks uncomfortable, conversions are thin, and someone eventually says the thing that seems easiest to try:

"Let's increase the budget."

It sounds reasonable. If the campaign isn't generating enough sales, perhaps it simply needs more traffic.

But a bigger budget does not fix a campaign that is sending the wrong people to the wrong message on the wrong page.

It just gives the problem more money to work with.

A better approach is to start much earlier in the process, before touching the bids.

The first problem is often the ad itself

One account we worked through had the usual symptoms. The instinct could easily have been to start adjusting bids, testing automated strategies and looking for some magical keyword combination that would suddenly make everything work.

Instead, the first thing to look at was the ad copy.

The ads needed to do more than mention the service.

They needed to match what the person had actually searched for, address the problem behind that search and make it clear who the offer was for.

That last part matters more than people think.

A generic ad can attract a lot of clicks because it doesn't really tell anyone anything. It leaves the door open to almost everyone.

A specific ad does the opposite.

It tells the right person, "Yes, this is what you're looking for."

And it gives the wrong person a reason to keep scrolling.

That is useful.

The goal of an ad isn't simply to get the highest possible number of clicks. It is to get the right clicks.

Then we looked at everything around the ad

Ad extensions are often treated as something you fill in after the campaign is already running.

They shouldn't be.

Structured snippets can reinforce the services being offered. Callouts can answer common objections. Sitelinks can take people directly to pages that matter instead of forcing everyone through the same homepage.

None of this is particularly complicated.

But collectively, these elements give the searcher more information before they click.

They also make the ad more useful.

If someone is searching for a specific service, showing related services through structured snippets or sending them directly to a relevant page through a sitelink is considerably better than giving them a generic "Learn More" button and hoping they figure it out.

Before we touched the bidding, the account already had a better chance of attracting the right visitor.

That was the point.

Then came the search terms

This is where many campaigns quietly lose money.

The keyword might look perfectly relevant when you add it to the campaign.

Then actual searches start coming in.

Some are useful.

Some are loosely related.

Some are completely wrong.

And some are the sort of searches that make you wonder how Google decided they were relevant in the first place.

So we cleaned them up.

Broad, irrelevant queries were removed. Match types were tightened where necessary. Negative keywords were added. Keywords were grouped according to search intent rather than simply being thrown together because they happened to contain similar words.

That distinction is important.

Two keywords can look almost identical while representing completely different intentions.

One person may be ready to hire someone.

Another may simply be looking for information.

Another may be researching prices.

Another may be looking for a job.

Another may be looking for something completely unrelated that happens to contain the same words.

Google sees the query.

The advertiser has to understand the intent behind it.

That is why the search-term report is one of the most useful places to spend time inside an account.

Only then did we touch bidding

This is probably the part people tend to get backwards.

Bidding is visible. It feels like an obvious lever to pull.

If performance is bad, change the bid.

If impressions are low, increase the bid.

If clicks are expensive, change the strategy.

But bidding cannot compensate for poor inputs.

So rather than immediately trying to scale, the campaign was moved to a simpler bidding approach for a short period. The purpose wasn't to suddenly explode the account.

It was to collect cleaner information.

We wanted to see what kind of traffic the revised campaign was actually attracting and how people were engaging with it.

This is an important distinction.

A bidding strategy is only as useful as the information feeding it.

If your targeting is messy, your search terms are polluted, your conversion tracking is unreliable and your ads are attracting the wrong people, automation doesn't magically turn that into good data.

It simply automates decisions based on bad data.

Then we followed the click

There is another place where Google Ads campaigns quietly fall apart.

The landing page.

You can write a highly relevant ad, target a good search and get the click at a reasonable cost.

Then the visitor lands on a page that has almost nothing to do with what they searched for.

That creates a strange disconnect.

Someone searches because they have a particular problem.

The ad speaks to that problem.

Then the landing page talks about something else entirely.

The customer has to start the journey again.

Instead, the page should continue the conversation started by the search.

If the search suggests urgency, the page should make the urgent solution obvious.

If the search is comparison-driven, the page should provide the information and proof needed to compare.

If the search indicates that someone is still trying to understand their problem, the page may need to educate before asking for the sale.

The landing page doesn't need to look spectacular.

It needs to make sense.

Tracking can make the whole thing even worse

There is one more problem that can make an account look broken even when parts of the campaign are working.

Bad conversion tracking.

If the account isn't recording conversions properly, you don't really know what is working.

You might cut a campaign that is producing valuable customers.

You might increase spending on traffic that looks good in the interface but produces nothing useful.

You might tell Google to optimize toward an event that isn't actually measuring the business outcome you care about.

At that point, the numbers become increasingly difficult to trust.

Before making major decisions, make sure the tracking reflects what you actually want the campaign to achieve.

Otherwise you're optimizing a dashboard rather than a business.

The interesting part was what happened after the cleanup

The budget didn't need to change.

The product didn't suddenly become better.

There wasn't some secret keyword that had been hiding in the account.

The structure simply became more coherent.

The ads were more closely aligned with the searches.

The search terms were cleaner.

The extensions supported the offer.

The landing page matched the intent.

The conversion tracking gave the campaign usable information.

And the account started behaving differently.

CTR improved.

CPC became more manageable.

Quality Score improved.

Conversions began tracking properly.

Most importantly, the spend started doing useful work instead of simply accelerating waste.

That is the part worth remembering.

The same budget can produce very different results depending on the structure underneath it.

For Clothing Brands, Email Is More Than a Sales Channel

Katalaga Hakim — Tue, 11 Nov 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A clothing store can have plenty of traffic and still have a retention problem.

Someone sees an Instagram post, clicks an ad, finds a hoodie they like, buys it, and disappears.

Then the store goes looking for another customer.

And another.

The cycle gets expensive quickly.

This is one reason email is particularly valuable for fashion and apparel brands. Clothing is not a category where people necessarily make one purchase and disappear forever. People change their wardrobes. Seasons change. Trends change. Sizes change. New collections arrive. A customer who bought a blazer six months ago may now be the perfect customer for a new pair of trousers.

Fashion also has something that many other ecommerce categories do not have to the same degree.

It is emotional.

People buy clothes because they need them, but they also buy them because of how they want to look, how they want to feel, and how they want other people to see them.

That gives an apparel brand many more reasons to stay in contact with a customer than simply sending another 10% discount.

The problem is that many stores barely use any of them.

The foundation comes before the campaigns

Before worrying about clever subject lines or elaborate seasonal campaigns, the basic email infrastructure needs to work.

A clothing store should have the obvious flows in place: welcome, abandoned cart, abandoned checkout, post-purchase and win-back.

These are not exciting campaigns.

They are the plumbing.

If someone joins the email list and receives nothing useful, the brand has wasted the moment when interest is highest. If someone adds a product to their cart and disappears, there should be a sensible follow-up. If someone buys a jacket today, the relationship should not end at the order confirmation.

And if a customer has not purchased in a long time, there should be a reason to remind them that the brand still exists.

This matters even more when the business is spending heavily on acquisition.

You have already paid to get the customer.

Email is where you get another chance to earn from the relationship.

A fashion welcome series should introduce a world

A clothing brand has an advantage here because it can sell much more than the individual products sitting in Shopify.

Imagine a streetwear brand.

The first email does not necessarily need to say, “Here are our products. Buy them.”

It can introduce the brand, its aesthetic and the reason it exists.

The next email might show how customers style one of the best-selling cargo pants. Another could feature customer-generated content. Another could introduce a first-order incentive.

The sequence starts to feel less like a discount funnel and more like an introduction.

That matters because people who buy fashion are often buying into an aesthetic.

They are not only deciding whether they like the trousers.

They are deciding whether they like the world surrounding the trousers.

A good welcome flow gives them a chance to see it.

Restocks are different from ordinary promotions

There is something interesting about a restock email.

A normal promotional email has to create the desire to buy.

A restock email often doesn't.

The customer has already done that part.

They wanted the product. They may have visited the page. They may have chosen a size or colour. Then it disappeared because their preferred option was sold out.

When that size comes back, the email can be incredibly simple.

Your size is back.

That is enough.

The intent already exists. The scarcity was real. The customer has already formed an attachment to the product.

This is why back-in-stock flows can be so valuable for fashion brands. They respond to an existing demand instead of trying to manufacture one.

And they should be automated.

If someone has specifically asked to be notified when a particular size returns, there is little reason to make a staff member remember to send the email three weeks later.

Sometimes you should sell the outfit instead of the product

Another opportunity sits in the way people actually shop for clothes.

Customers do not always think in individual SKUs.

They think in outfits.

A person buying a blazer may also need trousers. Someone buying a hoodie might want matching joggers. A customer looking at a dress may also be interested in the shoes or accessories that complete the look.

That gives the brand an opportunity to build emails around the entire outfit.

“Complete the look” is often more useful than simply sending another product recommendation.

It also has an obvious commercial benefit.

If the customer was already going to spend $70, helping them see the rest of the outfit may turn the order into $120 without requiring another customer acquisition.

That is one of the quiet advantages of good email marketing.

You can increase the value of existing demand.

Fashion gives you a calendar full of reasons to talk to customers

Clothing is seasonal by nature.

New collections arrive. Weather changes. Holidays arrive. Certain colours become popular. Certain products become relevant again.

A brand does not have to invent an excuse to email its customers every week.

The calendar is already giving it material.

A winter campaign can be built around coats, layering and cold-weather accessories. A summer campaign can introduce lighter fabrics and warm-weather pieces. A holiday edit can group products around occasions rather than product categories.

The smarter part is deciding who should receive what.

Someone who bought winter coats last year may be a much better audience for early access to the new winter collection than someone who has only ever bought summer clothing.

That is where segmentation starts becoming useful.

The more the email reflects what the customer has actually shown an interest in, the less it feels like advertising being sent to a database.

It feels like a recommendation.

And recommendations tend to be easier to act on than generic promotions.

Abandoned carts have their own objections

The abandoned cart email is another place where clothing brands can do better than “You forgot something.”

The customer may not have forgotten anything.

They may be unsure about the size.

They may be wondering how the fabric feels.

They may not know whether the item fits the way they expect.

They may be worried about returning it if it doesn't work.

Those are different problems from simply forgetting to complete checkout.

So the email can address them.

A fit guide can answer the sizing question. A clear returns policy can reduce risk. Customer reviews can show how the item looks on actual people. Useful product imagery can answer questions the original product page failed to answer.

The email is not just a reminder.

It is another opportunity to remove friction.

The purchase should be the beginning of the relationship

This is probably one of the most underused parts of apparel email marketing.

A customer has just bought something.

Most stores send an order confirmation, shipping updates and then eventually another promotion.

There is a much better opportunity in between.

If someone bought a denim jacket, why not show them how to style it?

Why not introduce customer photos featuring the same product?

Why not explain how to care for the fabric?

And after enough time has passed, why not recommend products that actually complement what they already purchased?

The customer has given the brand information about what they like.

Use it.

The post-purchase period is when the customer is already thinking about the product. It is a natural time to help them get more value from it and introduce them to the rest of the brand.

That can turn a single transaction into the beginning of a buying cycle.

Drops are where fashion can use exclusivity properly

Fashion brands also have something that many ecommerce businesses spend a lot of time trying to manufacture.

Exclusivity.

A new collection can be announced to existing customers before the public gets access.

Repeat buyers can receive early access. High-value customers can get a private preview. Recent purchasers can be given an opportunity to see the new collection first.

The message does not have to scream about a discount.

Sometimes the value is simply being early.

“VIP early access” works because it gives the customer a reason to care about the relationship itself.

They are not just another email address receiving a promotion.

They get something first.

Browse abandonment is particularly natural for fashion

Clothing is highly visual, which makes browsing behaviour unusually informative.

Someone might visit the same dress three times without buying it.

That tells you something.

Instead of sending a generic reminder, the brand can bring the product back into view alongside useful information: reviews, styling ideas, related pieces or, where it is genuinely true, low-stock information.

The goal is not to manufacture pressure.

It is to continue the conversation the customer already started.

That distinction becomes important because fake scarcity can damage trust very quickly.

If something is low in stock, say so.

If it isn't, don't pretend it is.

Fashion brands have enough genuine urgency without inventing it.

Win-back needs to show what changed

The weakest win-back email is often the most obvious one.

“We miss you.”

Fine.

But the customer probably needs a reason to come back.

What has changed since they last purchased?

New arrivals. New colours. New collections. Different styles. Products related to what they previously bought.

The message should answer a simple question:

Why should I care now when I didn't buy recently?

If the brand has genuinely changed or added something interesting, the email has something to say.

If nothing has changed, sending “we miss you” five times will not magically create demand.

The design matters because the product is visual

There is another reason apparel email deserves more attention than a plain text-heavy approach.

Fashion is visual.

The customer needs to see the clothes.

Good photography, clean layouts, sensible product hierarchy and mobile-first design all matter because a large portion of the shopping experience happens on a phone.

The email should not look like a spreadsheet with product names attached.

But it also should not become an elaborate design exercise where the customer has to hunt for the actual products.

The best fashion emails usually make the product obvious.

Strong image.

Clear context.

Useful reason to click.

Then get out of the way.

The numbers should tell you what is actually working

Email reporting can become unnecessarily complicated.

For a clothing brand, I would rather know whether revenue per recipient is improving, whether customers are buying again, whether bundles are increasing average order value and how long customers typically take to purchase again.

Those numbers tell you more about the health of the retention system than simply celebrating a high open rate.

A campaign can have an impressive open rate and generate very little money.

Another campaign can look less exciting in the dashboard and quietly produce significant revenue.

The point of the email is not to win an engagement trophy.

It is to move the customer relationship forward.

This is where someone needs to own the system

None of this works particularly well if email is treated as something that gets checked once every few weeks.

Someone has to notice that a popular product has been restocked and make sure the trigger works.

Someone has to build the new bundle.

Someone has to replace an outdated seasonal block.

Someone has to refresh the product imagery.

Someone has to review campaign performance and ask why one segment is responding while another isn't.

Someone has to keep testing.

That is another area where a capable Shopify or eCommerce VA can become much more valuable than the title suggests.

They are not simply “sending newsletters.”

They can build and maintain the flows, segment customers based on buying behaviour, create product and bundle logic, coordinate campaigns with the Shopify catalog, keep the visual presentation consistent with the brand and review performance regularly.

The work is operational, but the result is commercial.

Traffic gets expensive when retention is ignored

Imagine a clothing brand already doing $80,000 a month.

The traffic is there.

People are buying.

But there is no restock flow. The post-purchase sequence is weak. Products are never bundled intelligently. VIP customers receive the same treatment as everyone else. Seasonal campaigns are sent to the entire list without much thought.

The store may still grow.

It is just making growth harder than it needs to be.

Every customer has to be acquired again.

Every sale has to start from zero.

Email changes that equation.

A customer who already knows the brand is easier to reach than a stranger who has never heard of it. A person who bought a hoodie can be shown the matching joggers. Someone who wanted a sold-out dress can be told when it returns. A repeat buyer can get early access to the next collection.

You are not constantly trying to find another person.

You are giving existing customers more reasons to come back.

That is why email is particularly powerful for clothing brands.

Fashion already runs on cycles of desire, discovery, identity, seasonality and novelty.

Good email simply gives those cycles somewhere to go.

The best fashion brands do not use email only to shout, “10% off.”

They use it to introduce the brand, show customers how to wear the products, announce what is new, bring back what sold out, recommend what fits with what they already own and give loyal customers a reason to return.

Paid traffic may bring someone through the door.

Email gives you a reason to keep the relationship alive after they arrive.

And for a clothing brand, that relationship can be worth far more than the first order.

Your Google Ads Performance Has a Trust Problem

Katalaga Hakim — Tue, 02 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

There is a point in every ecommerce journey where the advertising stops.

It happens immediately after the click.

Someone searches for a product. They see your ad. The targeting is good, the keyword is relevant and the product looks like exactly what they wanted.

They click.

Now they are on your product page.

This is where a different kind of marketing begins.

They look at the product photos. They check the price. They look for shipping information. Then, almost without thinking about it, they look at the reviews.

How many people have bought this?

What did they say?

Are the reviews recent?

Do the customers look like real people?

Does anyone actually seem happy with this product?

You can have an excellent Google Ads account and still lose the sale at this point.

The ad got the customer to your store.

The product page has to give them a reason to trust it.

The Ad Is Not the Whole Customer Journey

It is easy to look at Google Ads as though performance begins and ends inside the advertising account.

You can have strong targeting.

Clean keyword structures.

Logical campaign segmentation.

Good bidding.

Well-written ads.

And still have mediocre results.

Why?

Because Google does not complete the transaction for you.

The customer does.

And customers do not behave like spreadsheets.

They have doubts.

They compare.

They hesitate.

They look for reassurance before spending money with a company they may have never heard of before.

Reviews are one of the easiest ways for them to find that reassurance.

A product page with three reviews tells a very different story from one with hundreds of genuine customer reviews.

A review from last week feels different from one posted eight months ago.

A written review is useful.

A customer photograph can be even more convincing.

A brand that responds thoughtfully to questions and feedback sends another signal that there are actual people behind the store.

None of these things guarantee a sale.

But their absence can make a customer hesitate.

The Quiet Conversion Problem

Imagine two stores selling similar products.

The first has a good advertisement and a clean product page.

There are three reviews.

The newest one is months old.

There are no customer photos.

There is little information about returns.

The second store has hundreds of reviews, recent customer feedback, photographs from buyers and clear information about shipping and returns.

The customer may never consciously sit down and compare these things.

They simply feel different.

One store feels established.

The other feels uncertain.

That difference matters because the click has already cost money.

If a customer arrives through Google Ads and leaves because they do not trust the store, the advertising campaign still paid for that visit.

The problem was not necessarily the targeting.

The problem happened after the targeting did its job.

Trust Changes the Economics of the Click

This is where reviews become more than a nice feature on a product page.

Suppose you pay to bring a customer to your store.

If ten visitors produce one sale, the economics look very different from a situation where ten visitors produce two.

The advertising did not necessarily become cheaper.

The page became better at converting the traffic.

That means the same click can become more valuable.

Your acquisition cost can improve.

Revenue per visitor can increase.

And the conversion data being sent back to Google becomes stronger.

This matters when you are using automated bidding.

Smart Bidding learns from conversion signals. If the site consistently turns qualified visitors into customers, Google has better evidence about which auctions and users are valuable.

If the site receives good traffic but repeatedly fails to convert it, the account has a different problem to solve.

The important distinction is that Google Ads cannot manufacture trust that the website has not earned.

Look at the Product Page Through a Customer's Eyes

When auditing an ecommerce store, I would not stop at the ad.

Follow the entire journey.

Search.

Ad.

Product page.

Checkout.

Then ask what the customer is likely thinking at each stage.

On the product page, reviews are only one part of the picture.

Is the star rating visible?

Is the number of reviews believable?

Are they recent?

Are there customer photographs?

Can shoppers see questions and answers?

Is the return policy easy to find?

Is shipping clearly explained?

Does the product page explain what makes the product worth buying?

Are the claims supported by actual information?

Does the page look like a real business selling a real product?

These details work together.

Trust is rarely created by one badge or one five-star review.

It is created by the accumulation of small signals.

Review Volume Matters, But Recency Matters Too

There is a difference between having reviews and looking like a store that customers are still buying from.

A product with hundreds of reviews collected over many years may have strong social proof.

But if the latest review is ancient, a customer can still wonder whether the product is actively sold or whether those reviews are relevant to the current version.

Recent feedback helps create a sense that people are still buying the product.

That does not mean asking customers for reviews every five minutes.

It means having a system for generating genuine feedback after purchases and making sure useful reviews actually appear where shoppers can see them.

The important word is genuine.

The goal is not to manufacture five-star ratings.

It is to make the real customer experience visible.

Reviews Are Only One Layer of Trust

The same principle applies beyond product reviews.

Store-level ratings can help.

So can reputable third-party reviews.

Clear guarantees can help remove uncertainty.

Straightforward shipping information can prevent surprises.

A properly explained return policy can make the purchase feel less risky.

Customer-generated photographs can show what the product looks like outside the carefully controlled studio environment.

Even something as simple as a brand responding to customer questions can make a store feel more legitimate.

None of these elements needs to scream for attention.

In fact, the best trust signals often do the opposite.

They quietly answer the questions a cautious customer would otherwise have to ask.

What happens if this doesn't fit?

How long will it take to arrive?

What do other customers think?

Can I return it?

Is this business still active?

Will someone help me if there is a problem?

Every unanswered question creates a little friction.

Enough unanswered questions and the customer leaves.

The Competitor With More Trust Has an Advantage

This becomes particularly obvious when you compare two stores competing for the same search.

Both may have similar products.

Both may be running Google Ads.

Both may have reasonable prices.

Both may be targeting the same commercial keywords.

But one product page has strong, recent social proof and the other barely has any.

Now the competition is not simply happening inside Google Ads.

It is happening on the product page.

The customer clicked both stores.

Now they are deciding which one feels safer.

That is why I would be careful about blaming every weak ROAS number on the advertising account.

Sometimes the campaign is bringing the right people.

The website is simply giving them too many reasons to hesitate.

This Is Where Ads and Ecommerce Operations Meet

Reviews also reveal something broader about ecommerce management.

Someone has to make sure the review system works.

Someone has to make sure post-purchase emails are encouraging customers to leave genuine feedback.

Someone has to surface useful customer-generated content.

Someone has to notice when an important product has almost no reviews.

Someone has to identify product pages where trust is clearly weaker than it is on competing products.

That work can easily become part of a strong Shopify or ecommerce VA's responsibilities.

Not simply uploading products.

Not simply checking orders.

But watching the relationship between the store, the customer and the advertising.

If one product has excellent traffic but consistently poor conversion, investigate it.

Maybe the price is wrong.

Maybe the offer is weak.

Maybe the page is confusing.

Or perhaps the product has three reviews while the competitor has 700.

That is useful information.

Don't Buy More Traffic Before Fixing the Leak

This is one of the easiest ecommerce mistakes to make.

ROAS looks disappointing.

The immediate reaction is to increase traffic.

Increase the budget.

Launch another campaign.

Add more keywords.

Try another audience.

But if the existing visitors are already arriving at the right pages and failing to trust what they see, more traffic simply creates more opportunities to lose people.

Before spending more, look at the product pages.

Look at the reviews.

Look at the customer photos.

Look at shipping and returns.

Look at the offer.

Look at how clearly the page explains the product.

Look at the difference between your page and the pages competing for the same customer.

Sometimes the advertising account needs fixing.

Sometimes the bottleneck is sitting three inches below the product image.

Trust Is Part of Conversion Rate Optimization

This is why reviews belong in the same conversation as CRO.

You are not adding reviews because they look nice.

You are reducing uncertainty.

A customer who understands the product, sees credible evidence from other buyers, knows what delivery looks like and understands what happens if they need to return it has fewer unanswered questions.

Fewer unanswered questions can mean less hesitation.

Less hesitation can mean more purchases.

And more purchases from the same amount of qualified traffic changes the economics of your entire acquisition system.

That is the part people miss.

Google Ads does not operate in isolation.

The ad creates the opportunity.

The product page handles the opportunity.

The checkout completes it.

The review system helps make the next customer more confident.

Each part affects the next.

Audit the Page Before Blaming the Campaign

If your Google Ads performance feels stuck, I would not immediately start changing everything inside the account.

Look at the customer journey.

Are the reviews strong enough?

Are they recent?

Are customer photographs visible?

Is the review count credible?

Is review markup implemented correctly where appropriate?

Are shipping and returns obvious?

Does the landing page match the search and the ad?

Does the product page answer the customer's obvious objections?

And, perhaps most importantly, how does your page compare with the competitors receiving the same traffic?

The answer may have very little to do with your bids.

You can optimize the campaign endlessly, but eventually the customer has to make a decision.

They are not thinking about your Quality Score.

They are not thinking about your campaign structure.

They are wondering whether they should trust you with their money.

That is a different problem.

Ads bring the customer to the door.

The product page is where you convince them to walk inside.

And reviews are one of the clearest signs that other people have already done it.

Your Shopify Product Page Is Where the Sale Is Won or Lost

Katalaga Hakim — Tue, 30 Dec 2025 00:00:00 GMT

A Shopify store can have a beautiful homepage, a good-looking logo, a fast theme and perfectly organized collections, and still struggle to make sales.

Sometimes the problem is sitting one click away.

The product page.

This is one of the strange things about ecommerce. A business can spend days getting the homepage to look right because that is the page everyone sees when the store is being built. Then the product pages get filled in almost as an afterthought.

A product title is copied from the supplier. The description is pasted underneath it. Four product images are uploaded. The price is added. Maybe a review app is installed. Then someone wonders why the traffic coming from Google Ads or Meta isn't turning into enough orders.

The customer, meanwhile, has arrived on the page asking a very simple question:

"Why should I buy this?"

Your product page has to answer that question without making the customer work for it.

Start with the product, not the template

A common mistake when building Shopify stores is designing the product page before understanding what is actually being sold.

The page should change depending on the product.

A $20 phone accessory does not need the same presentation as a $300 piece of professional kitchen equipment. A skincare product has different questions around ingredients and usage. Apparel needs sizing information. A technical product may need specifications, diagrams and demonstrations.

The template is the container. The product is the thing that determines what belongs inside it.

That sounds obvious, but a surprising number of stores do the opposite. They take the default Shopify product template and try to squeeze every product into it.

The result is a page that technically works but does very little selling.

Before touching the design, figure out who the buyer is, what they care about, what objections they are likely to have and what information they need before they are comfortable purchasing.

That becomes the foundation of the page.

The title should tell people what they are looking at

Product titles are often treated as an SEO exercise, and that is where things go wrong.

A product title should identify the product clearly. It should not look like something copied from a supplier catalog.

There is a big difference between:

"2024 NEW HOT TRENDY WOMEN PUFFER JACKET WINTER BEST SELLER"

and:

"Marshmallow Crop Puffer Jacket"

The second one tells the customer what the product is. The rest of the information can be handled elsewhere.

The title also needs to make sense when someone encounters the product outside your store. It might appear in Google Shopping, a collection page, an email, a search result or a social post.

Clarity matters more than stuffing every possible keyword into the title.

The first screen has a job to do

When someone lands on a product page, you should not make them scroll through half the page before they understand what they are buying.

The important information needs to be visible immediately.

Product name.

Product rating, if genuine reviews exist.

Price.

A clear indication of the offer, if there is one.

A concise explanation of the product's main benefit.

The purchase option.

Basic shipping or returns information.

And, of course, strong product imagery.

This is not about cramming everything above the fold. It is about removing unnecessary detective work.

If someone has to scroll around looking for the price, figure out whether shipping is available to them, or work out what the product actually does, the page is making the sale harder than it needs to be.

The primary action should also be obvious. Add to Cart should not disappear underneath a paragraph of text or get lost among five competing buttons.

On mobile, this becomes even more important. A large percentage of ecommerce traffic arrives on a phone, where there is considerably less space to work with.

Product photography does more work than most descriptions

There is a point where writing more copy stops helping.

Better images can solve the problem instead.

The customer cannot pick up the product. They cannot turn it around, feel the material, check the size with their hands or see how it looks in their own environment.

Photography has to compensate for some of that.

A useful product image set normally includes a clear primary image, additional angles, close-up details and lifestyle imagery where it makes sense.

For apparel, that might mean seeing the product being worn. For furniture, it might mean seeing it in a real room. For professional equipment, it might mean showing the product being used.

A product photograph should answer questions before the customer has to ask them.

What does it actually look like?

How big is it?

What does the material look like?

How does it work?

What does it look like in use?

If the product has something customers regularly misunderstand, show it.

A size chart can be more useful than another decorative photograph. A short demonstration video can be more useful than another paragraph describing the same feature.

The goal is not to hit an arbitrary number of images. The goal is to give the buyer enough visual information to make a confident decision.

The description should sell the product without sounding like an advertisement

This is where many Shopify stores become strangely difficult to read.

The product description says something like:

"Experience ultimate quality and premium performance with our revolutionary, high-quality product designed to transform your lifestyle."

It sounds impressive until you realize it hasn't actually told the customer anything.

Good product copy is usually much more concrete.

Start with the reason the product exists.

What problem does it solve?

What does it make easier?

Who is it useful for?

Then explain the important benefits and features.

After that, give the technical information someone may need before purchasing.

The distinction matters.

A feature tells me what the product has.

A benefit tells me why I should care.

For example, "AISI 304 food-grade stainless steel" is a feature.

"Built for repeated use in professional kitchens and easy to clean after service" explains why that feature matters.

The technical specification still belongs on the page. But it should not be the entire sales argument.

Give people the information they need to remove their objections

Most customers don't arrive on a product page with only one question.

They may be wondering whether the product is the right size, whether it will arrive in their country, whether they can return it, whether it is durable, whether it works with something they already own, or whether the product is actually as good as the photographs suggest.

The best product pages anticipate these questions.

That is why a useful product page often needs sections for specifications, dimensions, materials, usage instructions, compatibility, shipping, returns and frequently asked questions.

Think of the page as a conversation.

The customer asks a question.

The page answers it.

The customer thinks of another objection.

The page answers that too.

Eventually there are fewer reasons left not to buy.

That is a much better way to think about product-page content than simply trying to make the description "long enough."

Trust has to appear where the decision is being made

Trust cannot live exclusively on the About page.

A customer deciding whether to buy a product needs reassurance on the product page itself.

That might come from genuine customer reviews, verified ratings, customer photographs, testimonials, clear shipping information, a straightforward return policy or a visible guarantee.

The important word is genuine.

Adding fake reviews or invented testimonials may make a page look more complete, but it creates a much bigger problem when customers realize the proof isn't real.

The strongest stores don't need to hide behind vague claims.

They show who bought the product, what those customers thought, how the product is used and what happens if something goes wrong.

Even simple things matter.

A real business email.

Clear shipping times.

A visible returns policy.

A physical business location where appropriate.

A company story that actually explains who is behind the brand.

These details don't look exciting during development. They become important when someone is deciding whether to hand over their money.

Then you can start thinking about conversion

Once the page answers the basic questions and establishes trust, conversion elements can help.

A free-shipping threshold can encourage a larger basket.

Bundles can make the offer more attractive.

Frequently bought together products can help customers complete their purchase.

Quantity discounts can make sense for products people buy in multiples.

A sticky add-to-cart button can reduce friction on mobile.

Email capture can give the business another opportunity to reach visitors who aren't ready to buy immediately.

These things can be useful, but they are not substitutes for a good product page.

A countdown timer will not rescue a product nobody understands.

A popup will not fix bad photography.

A "10% OFF" banner will not create trust where there is none.

Conversion elements work best when they sit on top of a solid buying experience.

Be careful with urgency

There is also a temptation to put urgency everywhere.

"ONLY 2 LEFT!"

"SALE ENDS IN 03:42!"

"BUY NOW!"

Sometimes genuine scarcity is useful. If inventory really is low, telling the customer makes sense.

But manufactured urgency can make a store feel like a dropshipping template rather than a serious business.

The same applies to discounts.

If every product is permanently "50% OFF," customers eventually stop believing the original price means anything.

The page should make the purchase easier, not noisier.

A good product page is part of the whole store

The product page does not operate in isolation.

A visitor might arrive from a Google Shopping ad without ever seeing the homepage.

Another customer might discover the brand on Instagram, click directly into a product and never read the About page.

Someone else might land on a collection page first, compare three products and then make the decision on the product page.

That means the product page has to carry enough of the brand's trust and product information to stand on its own.

The customer journey is not always:

Homepage → Collection → Product → Cart.

It can be:

Google → Product → Cart.

Or:

Instagram → Product → Exit.

Or:

Google Shopping → Product → Back to Google → Competitor.

The product page is often the moment where all the work done in advertising, SEO, social media and merchandising either turns into a sale or disappears.

That is why I treat product-page QA as one of the most important parts of a Shopify build.

The final test is surprisingly simple

Before launching a product page, forget for a moment that you built it.

Open it as a stranger.

Can you tell what the product is immediately?

Can you understand who it is for?

Can you see what it costs?

Can you understand the main reason to buy it?

Can you see the product properly?

Can you find the important specifications?

Can you understand shipping and returns?

Is there enough real proof to make the business believable?

Can you add the product to your cart without thinking about how the website works?

And perhaps the most useful question:

If I arrived here from an ad with no previous knowledge of this brand, would I have enough information to feel comfortable buying?

If the answer is no, don't start adding more apps.

Fix the page.

Because a Shopify store doesn't become conversion-ready when every section has been filled in. It becomes conversion-ready when the customer can move from "What is this?" to "I understand it" to "I trust it" to "I'll buy it" without having to fight the website along the way.

Are Liquid Themes Still Relevant? Or Is Headless Shopify the Move?

Katalaga Hakim — Sun, 18 Jan 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A few years ago, telling someone you were building a Shopify store headlessly had a certain effect.

It sounded serious.

The frontend was custom. The architecture was more complicated. There was usually a modern JavaScript framework somewhere in the stack, a separate hosting setup, APIs connecting different systems and enough technical vocabulary to make a normal Shopify theme sound like something from another era.

For some brands, especially larger Shopify Plus businesses, going headless made genuine sense. There were situations where the flexibility of a custom frontend justified the additional engineering work.

But something has changed.

As ecommerce teams have matured, the conversation has become less about what architecture looks impressive and more about what architecture allows the business to do efficiently.

That changes the question.

The question is no longer whether headless Shopify is more technically powerful than a Liquid theme. It usually is. The more useful question is whether that additional power solves a problem the business actually has.

For many Shopify stores, the answer is no.

Headless Became a Symbol of Progress

There was a period when headless felt like the obvious next step for ambitious ecommerce brands.

A custom frontend meant almost complete control over the customer experience. Developers could build highly interactive interfaces, unusual animations and experiences that were difficult to reproduce inside a traditional theme architecture.

It also carried a certain perception.

Headless sounded like enterprise ecommerce. It suggested that the brand had moved beyond the limitations of a normal storefront and was now operating on a more sophisticated technical foundation.

There is nothing inherently wrong with that.

The problem is when the architecture becomes the achievement instead of the business outcome.

A more complicated system is not automatically a better system. It is simply a system with more moving parts.

And once a store is operating at scale, those moving parts have a cost.

The Real Cost of Going Headless

A headless Shopify store is not simply a Shopify theme with a different frontend.

You are introducing another application into the business.

Instead of Shopify providing the storefront presentation through Liquid, you have a separate frontend application, potentially built with technologies such as Next.js or Remix. That frontend needs hosting, deployment processes, monitoring, maintenance and coordination with Shopify's APIs and the rest of the technology stack.

The complexity does not stop once the initial build is finished.

A developer has to maintain the frontend. API integrations need to remain functional. Deployments need to be managed. Changes need to be tested. Frontend and backend systems need to remain compatible. The team needs to understand what happens when something changes on one side of the architecture.

You have moved from maintaining a Shopify storefront to maintaining a software product built around Shopify.

For the right business, that can be completely justified.

For many businesses, it is simply more infrastructure than they need.

Most Stores Are Not Limited by Liquid

Think about what the majority of ecommerce stores are actually trying to accomplish.

They need product pages that explain the product properly. They need collection pages that make the catalogue easy to navigate. They need fast load times, effective conversion elements, clean integrations, useful landing pages and a checkout experience that does not get in the customer's way.

None of those requirements automatically demands a headless frontend.

Modern Shopify themes are considerably more capable than the old image of a basic Liquid template suggests. With Liquid, sections, metafields and metaobjects, developers can build highly customised storefronts while keeping the underlying Shopify theme architecture.

You can create different templates for different products. You can build dynamic landing pages. You can structure content around specific product attributes. You can create reusable sections and components that allow merchants to change parts of the storefront without asking a developer to rebuild the page.

There is a lot that can be done before a business reaches the point where rebuilding the frontend becomes necessary.

The mistake is assuming that the existence of a technical limitation somewhere means the entire storefront architecture needs to be replaced.

The Underrated Advantage Is Merchant Control

There is another benefit of staying with a well-built Liquid theme that does not receive nearly as much attention as technical flexibility.

The merchant can actually use it.

A Shopify store is constantly changing. Campaigns are launched. Offers change. Products come and go. Collection structures evolve. Landing pages need to be created. Seasonal promotions appear. A merchandising team might want to rearrange a page because customers are responding differently than expected.

With a properly structured Liquid theme, much of that work can happen inside Shopify's existing content and theme management tools.

A marketer can adjust a section. A merchant can update content. A new template can be created for a campaign. A different product layout can be applied without rebuilding the entire frontend.

That matters because ecommerce is iterative.

The business does not finish the website and move on. The website is part of the business's daily operation.

If every relatively small change requires a developer, a deployment and a QA process, the technical flexibility of the architecture can start creating operational friction.

And friction is expensive.

Headless Does Not Automatically Mean Faster

Performance is often one of the strongest arguments for headless.

And there is truth behind it. A well-engineered headless storefront can be extremely fast and gives developers a great deal of control over how the frontend is rendered, cached and delivered.

But the comparison is not really between "headless" and "Liquid."

It is between a well-built implementation and a poorly built one.

A Liquid theme loaded with unnecessary apps, oversized images, inefficient code and third-party scripts can be slow. A headless storefront can also be poorly maintained, overloaded with scripts or built in a way that introduces its own performance problems.

In many stores, the biggest performance problems are not caused by Liquid itself. They come from what has been added around the theme.

Too many apps. Unoptimised media. Heavy tracking scripts. Poorly written custom code. Unnecessary third-party resources.

A clean, carefully developed Liquid theme can perform extremely well.

The fact that another architecture gives developers more theoretical control does not mean changing architectures will automatically solve the actual performance problem.

Sometimes the problem is simply the implementation.

So When Does Headless Actually Make Sense?

There are businesses where headless is absolutely the right choice.

If the storefront needs to behave more like an application than a conventional ecommerce website, the additional control can be valuable. A business might have a highly interactive customer experience, complex data coming from multiple systems, sophisticated personalisation requirements or frontend logic that is difficult to implement efficiently within a standard Shopify theme.

There can also be organisational reasons for choosing it. A large engineering team may already have the infrastructure and expertise required to maintain a custom frontend, making the operational cost much lower than it would be for a smaller team.

In those situations, headless is not a vanity project. It is solving a real architectural problem.

The issue is when a store goes headless because the team wants a more impressive technology stack.

Nicer animations are not an architectural requirement.

Neither is wanting the store to look more "enterprise."

The architecture should exist because the business needs what it provides.

The Team Matters More Than the Architecture Diagram

This is probably one of the most overlooked parts of the decision.

Headless development requires a different level of technical ownership.

You need people who understand frontend engineering. You may need backend and API expertise. Depending on the setup, you may also need someone comfortable with hosting, deployments, monitoring and the rest of the infrastructure surrounding the application.

That does not mean every headless store needs a dedicated DevOps department.

It does mean somebody needs to own those responsibilities.

If the business does not have that capability internally or through reliable partners, the architecture can become technical debt very quickly.

A Liquid theme keeps more of that responsibility inside the Shopify ecosystem.

For a smaller ecommerce team, that can be a significant advantage.

The simpler system is often easier to understand, easier to maintain and easier to hand over when somebody on the team changes.

Ecommerce Teams Need Speed More Than They Need Prestige

This is where the conversation eventually comes back to business.

An ecommerce team is constantly testing things. They change offers. They adjust product pages. They create campaigns. They test layouts. They add merchandising content. They respond to seasonal demand and customer behaviour.

The architecture needs to support that pace.

If a marketer sees an opportunity on Monday and needs a developer, a deployment and several rounds of QA before the change can go live, the business has introduced friction into its own growth process.

Sometimes that friction is worth accepting because the custom experience produces enough additional value.

Often it is not.

For many Shopify stores, the ability to make changes quickly inside the platform is more valuable than having complete frontend control that rarely gets used.

That is one reason Liquid remains relevant.

It is not because Shopify themes are somehow more sophisticated than a custom application. They are not.

It is because most businesses do not need a custom application to run a good ecommerce store.

Start With the Business Problem

Before choosing headless, I would ask a much simpler question:

What exactly are we unable to do with the current Shopify architecture?

If the answer is that the store needs a highly specialised experience that genuinely cannot be implemented effectively in a theme, that is worth investigating.

If the answer is that the team wants more flexibility, I would first find out what kind of flexibility is actually missing.

If the answer is better performance, I would audit the current implementation before assuming the architecture is responsible.

If the answer is more impressive animations, I would probably save the engineering budget.

There is a tendency in technology to treat architectural decisions as permanent markers of sophistication. In ecommerce, they are much more practical than that.

The best architecture is the one that allows the business to operate effectively without introducing unnecessary complexity.

For most stores, that means getting the existing Shopify foundation right before replacing it.

Liquid Is Still Relevant

The idea that Liquid is an outdated technology that ambitious Shopify brands eventually need to escape does not hold up very well.

A well-built Liquid theme can support sophisticated product pages, dynamic content, structured merchandising, custom landing pages, strong performance and a highly tailored customer experience.

More importantly, it keeps the storefront closely connected to the tools the ecommerce team is already using.

That matters.

The goal of an ecommerce website is not to demonstrate how advanced the development team is. It is to help the business sell products efficiently while giving the people running the store enough control to keep improving it.

Headless is a powerful option when a business genuinely needs it. But it should be treated as an architectural solution to a specific problem, not as the default definition of a serious Shopify store.

For most brands, the better investment may be much less glamorous: clean theme architecture, fast pages, better product templates, stronger collection structures, better merchandising, useful content and a storefront the marketing team can actually control.

Architecture should support the business.

It should not become the business.

Collection Pages are the most important part of an eccomerce site

Katalaga Hakim — Sat, 07 Mar 2026 00:00:00 GMT

I have seen plenty of Shopify stores with dozens, sometimes hundreds, of products and almost nothing useful for Google to understand.

The homepage looks fine.

The product pages exist.

There is a blog with a handful of articles.

And then you open the collection pages.

A heading.

A product grid.

Maybe a sentence or two.

Then the footer.

That is a strange way to build an ecommerce site, because collection pages are often some of the most commercially valuable pages on the entire store.

They sit between broad category searches and individual products. They can target people who already know roughly what they want, while still giving them enough information to decide which product to buy.

Yet many Shopify stores treat collections as little more than folders for products.

That is where the problem starts.

A collection should answer a question

Suppose you sell supplements.

You create a collection called “Magnesium Supplements.”

You could put 20 products on the page and leave it at that.

But what does Google learn from the page?

And more importantly, what does the customer learn?

A better collection page explains what the category actually is.

What is magnesium used for?

What is the difference between magnesium glycinate and magnesium citrate?

Who might prefer one form over another?

What are the common reasons people buy these products?

When might someone take them?

The point is not to write 400 words because some SEO checklist told you that 400 is the magic number.

There is no magic word count.

The point is to give the page enough useful context to satisfy the searcher.

If 300–400 words helps you explain the category properly, great.

If the topic needs less, use less.

If it needs more, use more.

The copy should exist because the page has something worth explaining, not because someone wanted to hit a word target.

The same applies outside supplements.

A “Modern Wall Art” collection can explain what makes a piece modern, which rooms it tends to work in, how to think about sizing, and the difference between framed prints and canvas.

Now the collection is doing more than displaying products.

It is helping someone make a purchase.

That is what useful SEO content should do.

The product grid is not the whole page

One of the easiest ways to spot an underdeveloped ecommerce collection is to look at the page above the fold.

You see the collection title.

Then products.

Then more products.

It feels like a warehouse catalogue.

A strong collection can be structured more deliberately.

There might be a short introduction explaining what the category contains, followed by the product grid.

Below that, useful supporting information can answer common questions, link to related collections, provide sizing or comparison information, and deal with objections that might otherwise send the customer back to Google.

The exact layout will depend on the store.

But the principle is simple.

The collection should feel curated rather than dumped.

A customer should understand what they are looking at and why these products belong together.

Sometimes the collection you need does not exist yet

This is where search intent becomes interesting.

Imagine a store with one large collection called “Running Shoes.”

It might contain road shoes, trail shoes, marathon shoes and wide-fit options.

From the store's perspective, that seems perfectly logical.

From a search perspective, it is much less useful.

Someone searching for trail running shoes has a different problem from someone looking for running shoes for wide feet.

Someone training for a marathon has different requirements again.

Those are different buying intentions.

So instead of forcing everything into one broad collection, you can create useful category pages such as:

Running Shoes for Wide Feet.

Trail Running Shoes.

Marathon Running Shoes.

Running Shoes for Flat Feet.

Now each collection has a clearer purpose.

You have created another doorway into the store.

This does not mean creating hundreds of nearly identical collections just to capture keywords. That usually produces a mess.

The collection needs to represent a real distinction in the products and the customer's intent.

If people genuinely search for it and your store genuinely serves that need, it probably deserves a page.

Then connect the pages

Creating useful collections is only half the job.

They also need to make sense together.

Take a Trail Running Shoes collection.

Somewhere on that page, it might make sense to mention that customers looking for road running shoes can browse the Road Running Shoes collection.

A Protein Powder collection might naturally connect to Shakers, Pre-Workout or Mass Gainers.

These links are useful to customers because they help them move around the store.

They are also useful to search engines because they establish relationships between related pages.

Over time, you start building a topical structure rather than a collection of isolated URLs.

This is where internal linking becomes much more interesting than simply sprinkling links into random blog posts.

Your collections should understand each other.

Keep important pages close to the surface

I like a simple rule for ecommerce architecture: important pages should not be buried.

If a valuable collection requires five clicks and several awkward navigation steps before someone can reach it, the site is telling you something.

It is not very important.

You do not need to put every collection into the main navigation, either.

That creates its own problem.

A header containing 40 categories is not a sophisticated information architecture. It is a list that nobody wants to use.

Use the homepage to feature important collections.

Use breadcrumbs.

Use contextual links.

Use the footer for useful category navigation.

Use related collections where they make sense.

The goal is not to make every page one click away.

The goal is to make important pages easy to discover.

For many stores, keeping key collections within roughly two or three clicks of the homepage is a sensible target.

FAQs can reveal what the collection is missing

A good FAQ section is not there because someone told you every page needs one.

It is useful when customers genuinely have questions.

Consider a collection for waterproof hiking boots.

A shopper might want to know:

Are they suitable for snow?

How waterproof are they?

Are they true to size?

Can they handle rocky terrain?

How long do they typically last?

Those questions tell you something about the searcher's concerns.

They also give the page an opportunity to answer long-tail queries naturally.

And sometimes the questions reveal that the collection itself needs better information.

If five customers keep asking about sizing, perhaps the page needs a sizing guide.

If people keep asking whether the boots work in snow, perhaps that information belongs much higher on the page.

SEO and CRO often end up pointing at the same problem.

The customer is telling you what the page is missing.

Add information that helps someone choose

There are plenty of small elements that can make a collection more useful without turning it into an enormous piece of content.

A comparison table can help someone understand the differences between products.

A quick sizing guide can remove uncertainty.

Shipping information can answer a common objection.

Trust signals can reassure a first-time buyer.

A short buying guide can explain which type of product is suitable for which situation.

None of these exists purely for Google.

They exist because people are trying to make decisions.

The fact that they can also make a page more useful to search engines is a nice side effect.

The technical work still matters

All the useful content in the world will not compensate for a technically poor page.

Your collection should have a clear H1.

The title should describe the category properly.

The URL should be clean and understandable.

Images should be appropriately compressed.

The page should work properly on mobile.

The layout should not become painfully slow because someone uploaded enormous images for every product.

These are not exciting tasks.

They are also not optional.

A collection page that is difficult to crawl, slow to load or confusing to navigate is not going to become a great SEO asset simply because you added another 400 words underneath the products.

Authority has to reach the collections too

Another common ecommerce SEO mistake is building links almost exclusively to the homepage or random blog posts.

The homepage matters.

But if your goal is to make important collection pages rank, those pages need authority as well.

Relevant supplier mentions can help.

Industry publications can help.

Niche roundups and comparison articles can help.

Useful community participation can sometimes create legitimate references.

Relevant directories can make sense in the right industry.

The important word is relevant.

I would rather have a small number of genuinely useful links pointing toward important commercial pages than a pile of meaningless links created simply to make a monthly SEO report look busy.

Authority is not valuable because a spreadsheet says you built ten links this month.

It is valuable when it helps the pages that matter become more competitive.

Your blog should support your collections

This is where ecommerce content marketing becomes much more useful.

Suppose you sell hiking boots.

You publish an article called “How to Choose the Right Hiking Boot.”

The article can explain the different types of boots, terrain considerations, waterproofing, weight and fit.

Then it can naturally point readers toward your Waterproof Hiking Boots collection, Lightweight Hiking Boots collection and Winter Hiking Boots collection.

Now the blog is doing something useful for the commercial pages.

The same principle works across almost any category.

The blog answers broader questions.

The collection captures the buying intent.

The product page closes the transaction.

That is a much better relationship between content and commerce than publishing 50 articles that never link to anything you actually sell.

Collections should not be finished forever

One of the biggest misunderstandings about SEO is that you optimize a page once and move on.

Search data gives you new information all the time.

Google Search Console might show that a collection is appearing for queries you never deliberately targeted.

Customers might repeatedly ask questions you have not answered.

A new product might create an obvious internal-linking opportunity.

A collection might be ranking but attracting the wrong kind of visitor.

The title might need refining.

The copy might be outdated.

The products might have changed.

That gives you reasons to revisit the page.

Every 30–60 days is a reasonable review cycle for important collections, although the right frequency depends on the store and how quickly things change.

Look at the queries.

Look at the clicks.

Look at the rankings.

Look at the products.

Look at the internal links.

Then make improvements based on what you actually see.

SEO is much more useful when treated as an ongoing process than as a launch-day checklist.

The collection page is where several parts of ecommerce meet

This is why I think Shopify stores often have less of a traffic problem than they think.

They have an architecture problem.

The store has products, but the categories are weak.

It has content, but the content does not support the commercial pages.

It has backlinks, but they are not reaching the pages that need authority.

It has traffic, but the collection pages do little to help visitors decide what to buy.

Fixing that does not necessarily require more traffic.

Sometimes it requires making better use of the traffic you already have.

A well-built collection can rank for valuable searches, introduce a customer to the right group of products, link them deeper into the store, answer their questions and move them toward a purchase.

That is a lot of work for a page that many Shopify stores treat as nothing more than a product grid.

The best ecommerce SEO is not about creating more pages for the sake of having more pages.

It is about giving every important page a job.

Your product pages should sell the product.

Your collection pages should organize and capture buying intent.

Your content should answer questions and support those commercial pages.

Your internal links should connect the whole thing.

And your authority should reach the pages that actually matter.

Traffic is useful.

But traffic arriving at a poorly structured store is like pouring water into a bucket with a hole in it.

Before you spend another month trying to get more visitors, look at the pages those visitors are supposed to land on.

You may find that the opportunity was already there.

Your Developer Should Never Control Your Website

Katalaga Hakim — Thu, 30 Apr 2026 00:00:00 GMT

A few days ago, an auto shop contacted me because they wanted their WordPress website redesigned.

That part isn't unusual. Businesses redesign websites all the time. The interesting part came when I asked them for access.

They didn't have it.

Not the WordPress login. Not the hosting account. Not the domain account.

Nothing.

Their previous developer had been managing everything for them, including the Namecheap hosting and domain, and when the business asked for access, the developer simply refused to hand it over.

So now they had a website they had paid for, a domain they had paid for, hosting they had paid for, and a developer sitting between them and all of it.

They weren't happy.

And honestly, I understand why.

The reason they originally came to me was already frustrating enough. Their website had become unreliable. Sometimes it worked. Sometimes it didn't. They would send messages about problems and wait days for a response. When the developer eventually replied, the reported issue might still be there, or the "fix" would somehow create a different problem.

Then the developer would disappear again.

Eventually, they got tired of the whole arrangement and wanted someone else to take over. They wanted the site redesigned, properly maintained, and some of the features they'd been asking for added.

That should have been a fairly straightforward project.

Instead, before we could even start, we had to deal with the fact that they couldn't access their own website.

And this is something I think more business owners need to understand before they hire anyone to build or manage their website.

Your developer should have access to your website. They should not own the keys to it.

There is an important difference.

If I'm building a WordPress website for a client, I need access to WordPress. I may need access to the hosting account. I may need access to DNS, the domain, email settings, Cloudflare or whatever else the project requires.

But none of that means those accounts need to belong to me.

In fact, I prefer the opposite.

I tell clients to create the hosting account themselves.

If they need a domain, they buy the domain themselves.

If they need hosting, they open the hosting account themselves.

If they need a particular service, they register it in their own name and with their own payment details.

Then they invite me.

That might mean adding me as another user, giving me administrator access to WordPress, or providing the appropriate developer-level access to the hosting platform.

I can get in, do the work, configure everything, fix the problems, build the site and maintain it.

But the client still owns the house.

I'm just the person they've given a key to.

This sounds like a small distinction when you're sitting down to hire a developer and all you want is a website.

It isn't.

Imagine paying a contractor to renovate your physical shop and then discovering that the contractor kept the title to the building, the keys to the front door and the only copy of the alarm code.

You'd probably have a few questions.

Websites are easier to treat this way because they don't feel physical. A domain is just a name on a screen. Hosting is just another monthly bill. WordPress is something you log into through a browser.

But these things are still business assets.

Your domain is an asset.

Your hosting account is an asset.

Your website is an asset.

Your email accounts can be business-critical assets.

And the account that controls them should ultimately remain under your control.

A developer can leave.

A developer can become unresponsive.

A developer can close their business.

You can decide that you don't want to work with them anymore.

You can find another developer.

You can have a disagreement.

None of those things should leave you standing outside your own website waiting for somebody else to let you in.

That is the part I find most concerning about arrangements like this.

The client often doesn't realise there is a problem until they need access.

Everything works fine while the relationship is good.

The developer handles the hosting. They renew the domain. They manage WordPress. They make changes when asked.

The client doesn't think much about it because, well, why would they?

Then something goes wrong.

The developer stops replying.

The website goes down.

The business wants to move to somebody else.

And suddenly the person they need to contact is also the person standing between them and their own accounts.

Now the redesign isn't the first problem anymore.

Getting control back is.

And sometimes that can become a much bigger mess than it ever needed to be.

This is why I think businesses should get into the habit of separating ownership from access.

You own the account.

Your developer gets access to the account.

Those are two completely different things.

If you're hiring someone to build a WordPress website, create the hosting account yourself. Buy the domain yourself. Keep the recovery email under your control. Keep the billing information under your control. Turn on the security measures yourself.

Then give your developer what they actually need to do the job.

When the project ends, you can remove their access.

If you decide to hire someone else, you can invite the new developer.

Nothing has to be transferred from one developer's personal account to another developer's personal account because the business never lost control in the first place.

And there is another advantage to doing it this way: it makes the relationship healthier.

The developer doesn't have to hold your website hostage to prove that you still need them.

You don't have to worry about what happens if they disappear.

They get paid to do the work.

You keep ownership of the thing you're paying them to build.

That's how it should be.

There are plenty of good developers who will have no problem with this. In fact, a professional developer should generally be comfortable working within a client's accounts and being given the access necessary to do the job.

You shouldn't have to surrender ownership simply because someone knows more about WordPress than you do.

You wouldn't give your accountant ownership of your bank account because they know more about accounting.

You wouldn't give your mechanic ownership of your car because they know more about engines.

Your website deserves the same common sense.

So if you're a business owner about to hire a developer, ask one very simple question before anything gets built:

"Who owns the accounts?"

If the answer is you, good.

If the answer is "I'll set everything up for you," ask a second question:

"Can you set it up under my account and then give yourself the access you need?"

That small decision can save you an enormous headache later.

Because the best developer-client relationship isn't one where the developer controls everything.

It's one where the developer knows exactly what they're responsible for, the client knows exactly what they own, and neither person has to depend on the other for access to something that was paid for by the business.

Your developer should have the keys.

They just shouldn't own the building.

An Ecommerce Manager Should Be Looking at the Whole Business

Katalaga Hakim — Sun, 24 May 2026 00:00:00 GMT

There is a strange way some businesses define an Ecommerce Manager.

They give someone access to Shopify, ask them to upload products, change a few banners, update collections, and occasionally check whether the orders are coming in.

Technically, the store is being managed.

But nobody is really managing the ecommerce business.

A growing store is a chain of things that depend on one another. Traffic comes in, people land on the store, tracking tells you what they did, products get pushed into Merchant Center, ads send more traffic, product pages turn some of that traffic into customers, and eventually all of it shows up as revenue.

If something breaks somewhere in that chain, the problem doesn't always announce itself.

You might have plenty of traffic but a terrible conversion rate. Google Ads might report a healthy ROAS while the products being sold have terrible margins. Merchant Center might say the feed is approved while half the product titles are poorly structured. A product page might be getting organic traffic every day and still be doing almost nothing for the business.

This is why an Ecommerce Manager needs to look beyond Shopify.

They should be checking the whole path:

Traffic → Store → Tracking → Feed → Ads → Conversion → Revenue.

And not once when they start the job.

Regularly.

That means looking at Shopify's conversion data and understanding where the money is actually coming from. It means checking GA4 and GTM to make sure the numbers being reported are worth trusting. It means looking through Google Ads rather than simply checking whether the account has a nice-looking ROAS.

It means looking at Merchant Center and the product feed.

It means knowing what is happening inside Shopping and Performance Max, checking search terms, finding wasted spend, and understanding which products are actually getting the budget.

Then you go back to the store.

Because sometimes the problem you are trying to solve in Google Ads isn't a Google Ads problem at all.

Maybe people are clicking the ad and landing on a product page that doesn't explain the product properly.

Maybe the collection structure is confusing.

Maybe the important information is buried.

Maybe the mobile experience is irritating enough that people simply leave.

Maybe the product has a healthy click-through rate and plenty of traffic but almost nobody buys it.

You won't find that by staring at the Google Ads dashboard.

You have to follow the customer.

And this is where ecommerce management becomes much more interesting.

The numbers start talking to each other.

Suppose Google Ads tells you a campaign has a 6x ROAS. That sounds great until you look at Shopify and discover that most of those sales are coming from products with very little margin.

The campaign isn't necessarily "bad."

But the business isn't necessarily making as much money as the dashboard suggests either.

Or perhaps Merchant Center tells you everything is approved. Green checks everywhere. Nothing appears broken.

That doesn't mean the feed is good.

Approval only tells you that the products have cleared Google's requirements. It doesn't mean your titles are well structured, your product information is useful, or that you've given Google the clearest possible understanding of what you're selling.

The same thing happens with SEO.

A product page can rank.

It can receive impressions.

It can get clicks.

And still be a terrible sales page.

There is nothing contradictory about that. Google can send someone to a page because it is relevant to their search. Whether that page persuades them to buy is a different question.

This is why I don't think an Ecommerce Manager should be judged by how many products they uploaded or how quickly they can change something in Shopify.

Those are tasks.

The real job is figuring out what is happening to the business and what needs attention next.

Where are we losing money?

What's working?

What isn't?

Which products deserve more attention?

Where are customers dropping off?

What can we scale?

And perhaps the most important question:

What should we fix first?

Because there is always something.

You can spend the entire day fixing small things on a store and still avoid the problem that is costing the business the most money.

Maybe the tracking is wrong.

Maybe the feed is holding Shopping back.

Maybe you're paying for clicks that have almost no chance of converting.

Maybe your best product isn't getting enough exposure.

Maybe the traffic is fine and the product page is the problem.

Maybe the store converts well but the economics of the business don't work.

These are very different problems, and they require very different solutions.

That's why ecommerce management is much bigger than keeping Shopify tidy.

A good Ecommerce Manager needs to understand how the different parts of the business connect, follow the numbers from the first click all the way to the actual sale, and keep looking for the point where things are leaking.

Sometimes that means fixing the store.

Sometimes it means fixing the tracking.

Sometimes it means cleaning up the feed.

Sometimes it means cutting wasted ad spend.

Sometimes it means pushing a product that everyone else has overlooked.

And sometimes it means admitting that the campaign everyone thought was doing brilliantly isn't actually making the business much money.

The job isn't to keep everything busy.

It's to keep the business moving in the right direction.

That's a very different responsibility.