SEOLeverage

Your website is bleeding money right now. Not metaphorically. Actual dollars leaving your business every single day. I just audited an ecommerce site last week. They had 342 product pages without any customer reviews displayed. Here's the math that made the CEO's jaw drop: Products with reviews convert 270% better than those without (that's Spiegel Research Center data - Northwestern University). Their baseline conversion rate on products without reviews: 0.8% With reviews, they'd hit: 2.16% They get 15,000 monthly visitors across those products. Average order value: $89 Current revenue: 15,000 × 0.008 × $89 = $10,680/month Potential revenue: 15,000 × 0.0216 × $89 = $28,836/month Lost revenue: $18,156 per month From not showing reviews that customers already left. Reviews sitting in their system. Unused. Here's the thing about revenue leaks: Most businesses focus on getting more traffic when they're literally throwing away money from the traffic they already have. Let me show you the three gaps that cost you the most: 1. The Performance Gap Your cart abandonment rate is 78%. Industry average for your vertical is 69.8% (Baymard Institute). You have 500 abandoned carts monthly at $115 average value. That gap costs you: $4,715 per month. 2. The Volume Gap Your email list grows by 50 subscribers monthly. Your competitor adds 180. Customer lifetime value: $240. You're missing: $31,200 per year. 3. The Value Gap No personalized product recommendations. Those typically add 10-30% to AOV (McKinsey data). Taking just 10%: 400 monthly orders at $95 average. You're leaving: $3,800 per month. Add these up? That's $8,515 monthly. $102,180 yearly. And here's what kills me: Most of these fixes take less than 30 days to implement. - Add review displays? 5 days. - Fix cart abandonment flows? 10 days. - Set up recommendations? 14 days. But instead, businesses chase the next marketing channel while their current funnel hemorrhages cash. My daughters could probably spot some of these issues. They're that obvious once you know where to look. Stop looking at bounce rates and engagement metrics. Start calculating exactly how much money you lose every hour you don't fix these problems. Your competitor already did the math. And they're banking your money. DM to calculate your revenue leaks and line up a road map!

Are you an ecommerce brand? Your SEO priorities are (probably) wrong. As a consultant, I believe one of my main goals is to make sure my clients work on those things first that have the most impact. For an ecommerce site, like a Shopify portal, there is a clear order of how we believe at SEOLeverage things should be addressed. We even visualized it as a pyramid that makes clear how to lay a solid broad foundation, and then work your way up. At the basis, we have technical SEO. Shopify usually doesn't come with too many technical issues out of the box, but a few need to be addressed. The next step to check is the home page - this is where engines learn about who you are, what you are selling, and who your intended target audience might be. Product detail pages (PDPs) are the holy grail - this is where the magic happens, this is where someone decides to click "Add to basket" and get this product. This is your sales page - treat it like that, provide context, pick users up where they are, and clarify their doubts. Collection pages, together with PDPs, are the most important entry point for buyers that are already looking for something specific. Collection pages mostly are just lists of products with one line in the description - this can also be a landing page (keep the content transactional, though). Complementary content contains buyers' guides, product comparison pages, brand comparisons, specific use cases, review pages, etc. - all those elements will help you establish topical authority and build out your topical clusters, but if your PDPs aren't optimized, I wouldn't spend too much time and resources on blog posts! Where in the pyramid would you locate your shop? DM for help getting your shop prepared for SEO and AI search!

Product pages are where the sale happens. Yet most ecommerce sites I see mess up the basics. After analyzing hundreds of Shopify stores, here are 3 context mistakes that kill conversions: 1. Writing for yourself, not for your customers Your customers don't know your product like you do. They need context about size, materials, and actual use cases. "Premium quality construction" tells them nothing. "Made from recycled aluminum, weighs 2.5 lbs" does. 2. Ignoring comparison shoppers People have 10 tabs open comparing products. If you don't explain why yours is different, they'll bounce. Add a simple comparison table. Show what makes yours worth buying. Context means positioning against alternatives. 3. Forgetting about search intent Someone searching "waterproof hiking boots for winter" needs different info than "comfortable work boots." Your product might be both. But if your page doesn't address the specific context they came for, Google won't rank you. Visitors won't convert. And AI won't recommend that product. Here's what works: Write your product descriptions like you're explaining to a friend who's never seen it. Be specific about measurements, materials, and best use cases. Show it next to common objects for scale. The stores we work with at SEOLeverage see 20-30% conversion lifts and more just from fixing context issues. Not from fancy AI tools or complex strategies. Just from explaining their products properly! What context mistakes do you see most often on product pages?

If you can only work on one thing on your ecommerce site for SEO, do this: Work on your product pages. Not all of them. Just pick the best 20 products that are not ranking in the first 3 spots on Google, and optimize them: - research use cases - research customer questions about them - check how people report on their experience using it - confirm if there are specific issues based on reviews Rework your product page taking the abovementioned things into account. Watch your traffic, rankings and AI visibility go up! DM if you want me to do this for you!

If I were Google these days, I would give extra points to e-commerce sites that actually help customers make decisions. Product pages with real details, not just marketing fluff.

Are you a content hamster? 🐹 Most sites I audit have dozens of articles ranking on page 2 or 3. Articles that could easily hit page 1 with some love and attention. But instead of fixing what's already there, everyone's obsessed with publishing more. If you already have 50-100 articles on your site, it's time to get off the content hamster wheel and focus on what you already have! Think about it: Google has already indexed your content It already has some authority You already did the keyword research The foundation is there Refreshing beats starting from scratch every time. Update your data. Add new sections. Improve your examples. Fix your internal linking. I've seen 200% traffic increases just from refreshing old posts within weeks. Try getting that ROI from a brand-new article. The content marketing industry wants you to believe more is better. But better is better. Your 51st article won't save you if your first 50 are mediocre. In fact, the more bad content you have, the more costly it is for search and AI engines to crawl and process your website. Stop running on the content hamster wheel. Start maximizing what you already have.

When I started out with SEO many years ago, I thought everything would change every few months. New algorithm updates. New tactics. New "secrets" to crack the code. I was wrong (at least, partly). Twenty years later, quite a few of the things we did in those early days still make sense. We knew it made sense to interview clients and sales departments about the exact phrasing of questions and concerns back then, and we still do this today. We also still focus on search intent - we match what people are looking for (in content and format / layout). The site I built in 2010 for a refurbishment company? It still ranks today. In fact, many of the articles I personally wrote back then still drive leads today! Not because I used some magic trick, but because I focused on the basics: - Quality content that actually helps people. - Getting other relevant sites to link to us. - Clean, simple technical structure. Sure, the tools got better. Search Console replaced guesswork with real data. Core Web Vitals gave us clear targets. AI tools help me scale content creation now. But here's what I tell clients who get excited about AI optimization: it's just another layer. The "icing" on the SEO fundamentals cake, so to speak. ChatGPT needs the same clear structure and quality content that Google does. If your content does not bring value to the table, or your basic SEO is broken, AI optimization won't save you. I learned this the hard way with a client last year. They wanted to optimize for AI visibility while their site took 8 seconds to load. We fixed the foundations first. Then added the AI layer. After two decades of this game, I can tell you: The brands that master the basics and add the latest hypes on top of outstanding fundamentals? They're the ones still standing. The fundamentals aren't flashy. But they're what keeps you in business.

The icing on the holistic SEO cake.

Most people are asking the wrong question about AI and SEO. They want to know: "How do I create more content faster?" But that's not the real shift happening. The question should be: "How does AI actually read my content?" Think about it. When someone asks ChatGPT for a recommendation, it can't answer because it crawled your site like Google does. It's pulling from training data and making connections you might not expect. Your perfectly optimized blog post might be invisible to AI if it can't understand the context around your expertise. Meanwhile, that one comment you made on a podcast transcript could be exactly what gets you mentioned. The winners aren't just pumping out more AI content. They're optimizing the content that goes into the AI. Input = Output. The way to show up in AI tools is to impact how AI tools understand your brand, your product, your audience, and your use cases. Understanding how these systems connect ideas. How they weigh authority. How they decide what's relevant. Everyone's focused on feeding tons and tons of content to the machine. Smart marketers are learning how the machine digests information. Big difference.

"I'm losing customers but I don't know why." That's what Luis said when he called me. His family business in Madrid was doing fine with Google ads. But something was wrong. Sales had stopped growing. And he kept hearing about competitors getting deals he thought he should have won. Then Luis was shopping for software for his own business. He started on Google. But ended up finding his answer on Reddit. Then watched a YouTube video. Never went back to Google. "Wait," he thought. "If I do this, my customers probably do too." So we looked into where his customers actually research solutions. Turns out 73% of them were using 5 platforms where Luis didn't exist. Instagram. Reddit. YouTube. Industry forums. LinkedIn groups. Luis was fighting for Google rankings while his competitors were talking to customers everywhere else. Eight months later? Luis makes over $60K monthly from those platforms. And here's what bothers me. Every month Luis waited, his competitors got stronger on those platforms. The gap kept getting bigger. Your customers are researching solutions right now. On platforms where you don't show up. Your competitors already know this. So what are you going to do about it?