Benjamin Golden, Zurab Avalishvili N8, Tbilisi (2026)

26/07/2024

I had a consulting call last week with a friend of mine, who got inspired by my posts and acquired his own exact match domain to launch his Shopify brand…

It was a really nice experience answering all of his questions, as it made me feel very appreciated and valued - someone literally took the advice I shared and implemented it.

I consider that one of the best feelings in the world.

During the consultation, one of the questions that came up was regarding link frequency - how fast should you build links, when you’re just launching a new brand, and how many of them…

I suggested the same thing that I’m doing with my own brands.

After launching all of the collections and product pages, and perfecting the ON-Page SEO of those pages, based on the pre-planned keyword research plan, you need to focus on ads.

My personal preference is Google because I see so many advantages between running Google Ads and the organic SEO performance…

but you also have the option to go with Facebook, Instagram, Reddit, YouTube, or any of the other paid traffic sources.

The main focus should be that you build up a sales channel where you can profitably acquire sales and customers, and can start to scale.

As you start to scale - that’s when you bring on linkbuilding, because it’ll look the most natural.

With your branded search increasing, it makes sense that your site starts acquiring backlinks, as it’s getting featured in other media outlets.

In regards to how many links to build and over what time frame, I’d start with 1 link a week and increase by 1 link every 1-2 weeks until you get to about 5-10 links a week.

Then review your SEO results and how you’re progressing to the top of Google.

When you start getting close to the top of page 1, you can dial the linkbuilding back a bit, to 3-10 links per month, depending on how competitive your niche is…
Remember, just focus on making linkbuilding look and feel legit, and you’ll be all set.

You got this! ;)

25/07/2024

The only linkbuilding strategy that I use in 2024 for my Shopify and SaaS SEO projects…

As you might already know, I’ve been in the SEO game for about 7 years now, and have tried and tested everything under the sun when it comes to linkbuilding.

From useless web 2.0s and “entity stacking” that some people steal swear by to this day (wtf… I literally just had a call with a client of ours, who showed me those were the types of links their previous SEO agency was building)...

to HARO and digital PR links on the other end of the spectrum.

All things considered, at the end of the day, all you’re looking for is the most SEO power, for the best price, and LONGEVITY (how long the link remains live, which is often forgotten about.)

Here’s what I do…

I focus on DR50+ links, placed on the main domain (no subdomains), with at least 10,000 monthly domain traffic, and with the MAJORITY of the traffic coming from our target market.

If we’re trying to rank in the US, I want to see at least 80% of all traffic coming from the US - no ifs or buts about it.

You can get these links through HARO, digital PR campaigns or you can just bribe journalists who work at PR agencies or magazines as in-house writers - which is what we do… :))

On the other hand, I do still see potential in PBNs, and WAIT, give me a minute to explain, before you start raging in the comments.

With PBNs, you get a homepage link…

You can make the site 100% relevant to your niche…

You can make the site look as legit as possible…

And at the end of the day, you have full control over it.

I have SO many active projects that still heavily rely on PBNs, and for some reason haven’t gotten hit by algorithm updates (as long as they have branded search and diversified traffic across multiple channels).

I’m DEFINITELY going to be utilizing PBNs and testing them further with my three Shopify exact-match domain projects, and I’ll keep you posted on the results, so you can apply the lessons to your own projects.

Let’s smash it!

25/07/2024

One of the BEST ways to increase the organic traffic and revenue of your Shopify product pages that no one talks about… EVER.

Chances are you’ve already heard of these metrics, but I just want to point them out again…

The first one is your bounce rate, and the second is the average session duration.

Let’s start first by asking ourselves, what is the main goal of Google?

Their main goal is to provide the most relevant results to the users.

And how do they measure if a result is relevant or not?

By measuring the bounce rates and session durations.

The longer the session duration, the more “engaging” the page is, in the eyes of Google, and the better you end up ranking.

This means, that one of the key factors for improving your rankings is increasing your average session duration and lowering your bounce rates.

The easiest way to do that on product pages?

Add shoppable videos/short-form content to the product pages.

These can be videos or creatives you’re using with your paid ads, so feel free to repurpose them.

The goal is to have a very engaging product page, that keeps the visitor engaged for longer, than the product pages fo your competitors.

Achieve that, and your rankings will get a solid boost. 😉

24/07/2024

The 3 biggest contributors that helped me generate over $29.6M in organic Shopify revenue over the past 24 months…

1. Implementing technical/on-page SEO Quick-Wins

There’s a reason why I spent 6 months creating a Shopify SEO Checklist, that allows you to easily identify and implement all the quick-wins.

Performing a full audit with the checklist, and implementing all of the quick-win opportunities is the highest ROI activity any Shopify store owner can work on, when it comes to SEO.

Not just because it positively impacts your organic revenue and ranking positions, but because it lifts up all the other channels alongside it.

When you have a Shopify store that’s fully optimized and dialed in, your UX improves, your conversion rate goes up, and with that, so does the performance of all your other channels such as paid ads and email.

2. Build EVERY project based on demand/keyword data

After we have all the quick-wins implemented, we’ll compile a massive list of keywords from Ahrefs with EVERY single keyword that’s in any way relevant to the products we offer on our Shopify store.

This process takes time, up to 4 weeks to be exact, but you literally end up with EVERY single collection, product page and blog article you need to create to maximize your organic rankings and revenue.

Another benefit of doing this is the fact that NO OTHER competitor of yours will ever think of doing this, as it’s quite an intense process to go through…

But once you’re on the other side, by having all these pages published and organized based on the exact keywords people type into Google, you’ll not only see a big jump in organic traffic, but also a LOT more opportunities with your paid advertising.

(Because you’ll have a lot more perfectly optimized landing pages, you can test and send traffic to - works especially well with Google Ads.)

3. Realizing that SEO is a piece of the puzzle, and not the puzzle itself
This one may sound a bit strange, but it’s one of the most important points on the list.

You HAVE TO understand that in today’s day and age of Google, SEO can no longer be considered as the main traffic/sales acquisition channel for any business.

Google simply just won’t let it happen, unless you’ve got enough brand signals… and brand signals obviously come from paid media and people searching for your brand.

That’s why you need to shift your thinking from seeing SEO as a standalone channel, to seeing SEO as an amplifier.

By ensuring all of your channels such as paid ads, email marketing, influencers, etc. are dialed in, you can then bring SEO in on top of that, and LIFT UP the performance of all those other channels.

How?

There are tons of examples, but a simple one would be just recapturing all of the abandoned carts/sales, by answering all the questions people have about your store/products, that they search for in Google.

And this is just one example…

If you’re a brand doing 6-figs a month in sales, DO NOT sleep on SEO - it’s what allows you to create a MOAT around your business, and makes it incredibly difficult for competitors to actually have a chance at taking you down.

23/07/2024

For the past few months, I’ve had a dilemma about my content and the direction I want to take with my personal brand…

As many of you might know, I post a LOT of content…

Most of which is posted in written form on Facebook and LinkedIn, as these two are the platforms I use the most…

Now the dilemma…

I also have an Instagram, which has up until now been mainly used to post pics and stories of my trips, cool things I’m doing, etc…

I have just been using it as my social/networking card, but I haven’t really been posting any business content on here…

The same thing with Facebook and LinkedIn, I’ve only been posting business content, even though I have a lot to say and share about a variety of different things…

Last week I did a test and randomly re-posted a few stories/reels from my Instagram - I answered a few personal questions in those, that my followers asked…

And the response I received here on Facebook was absolutely incredible.

SO many people were super excited about me sharing my story of how I moved to Cyprus, and they all resonated with the story in a different way, which made it very nice to connect on something other than just business.

With that said, moving forward, I’ll really try to add some more lifestyle content, as well as start answering more personal questions in the form of reels/videos.

It’s something I genuinely really enjoy (and miss - I made over 1,000 videos on YouTube by the age of 17, remember?) - so it’s definitely something I want to bring back.

With that said - please ASK away.

ASK me absolutely anything you’d like to know about me, my businesses, my strategies, my personal life, etc.

I want you to know me, and I want to connect with you through answering these questions in order to form even more friendships and great business relationships.

I appreciate you all from the bottom of my heart!

Thank you for your never-ending support.

22/07/2024

When should I switch my exact match domain Shopify projects from dropshipping model to private labelling our own products?

It’s difficult to give you guys a general answer that fits all projects, but here’s my thought process behind it.

I’d ONLY consider private labelling our own products, if there were enough pros/advantaeges of doing so, here are some that I’d consider.

1. Can we dramatically increase the profit margins by switching to private label?
2. Can we dramatically improve the customer experience/quality of products, while keeping the same costs?

3. How much more hassle will it be managing stock/cashflow with private labelling, and is that worth it?

4. How much of an impact would switching to private labelling have on the store’s valuation and “sellability”?

I think if you go through all these questions, and answer them while having a clear vision in your mind for your Shopify store/brand, you’ll naturally make the right decision.

It just comes down to what you want…

Do you want a high cashflowing lifestyle business that prints money and doesn’t require you to invest tons of hours?

OR…

Do you want to build a massive brand, and go for a big exit one day?

I really respect both options, mainly because I have both lifestyle Shopify projects that are just there for cashflow, as well as projects that I plan on exiting on one day and collecting a big check.

Let me know which strategy you prefer! ;)

19/07/2024

Why am I building all of my Shopify stores on exact match domains? And why do I spend tens of thousands of dollars on those domains?

A few reasons…

First, as you might know, Google’s been really cracking down on sites without branded search, that’s why so many affiliate sites are getting totally nuked.

With an exact match domain, matching a generic term, Google will never really know if people are looking for your brand, or for a generic term - therefore you’re automatically on the safer side.

Pair that with an omni-channel marketing approach, and you’re SUPER SAFE from getting hit by any kind of Google algo update.

Second, by having an exact match domain, you can trick Google into thinking people searching for the “generic keyword” are actually looking for your brand.

Therefore it becomes EXTREMELY easy to rank in the #1 spot, even if it’s a massive keyword with a ton of competitors.

There’s nothing as powerful as an exact match domain, and using the homepage to try and rank for that keyword (the homepage always holds the most link value).

Third, you don’t have to worry about over-optimizing your anchor texts for the exact match keyword ever again…

At the end of the day, your brand is the keyword, therefore you can use it as many times as you want, and you can never get in trouble for over-optimizing your anchor texts.

Fourth, and my favorite…

Due to all of the reasons listed above, you end up saving a TON of budget on linkbuilding, because you have an exact match keyword and branded links, which also act as exact match anchor links - super strong signals for Google.

One last point I want to make…

The EMD SEO strategy really shines when the main root keyword that you target with the domain, has a bunch of subcategories, that you can try and rank for with your collections and product pages.

In fact, I’d say that having those is an absolute must…

The more of those that you can find, the higher the ROI you’ll able to generate.

18/07/2024

One of the most frequently asked questions about my 3 exact match domain Shopify projects I’m building has been “How much have I invested so far in all 3 projects?”

So here are the exact breakdowns, project by project…

🧸 Project A - Toys niche, US market, $7,654.07 in revenue.
- $15,000 - Domain
- $2,100 - Development
- $600 - Conversion Rate Optimization
- $3,300 - Stock/Dropshipping costs for last 30 days
- $4,500 - Google Ads Management
- $5,000 - Google Ads Costs

⌚ Project B - Accessories niche, AU market, $641.30 in revenue.
- $13,500 - Domain
- $400 - Theme & Development,
- $1,500 - Google Ads Management
- $550 - Google Ads Spend

👟 Project C - Sports niche, AU market, $275.57 in revenue.
- $4,710 - Domain
- $400 - Shopify Theme
- $x - Development
- $x - VA
- $x - Conversion Rate Optimization
- $x - Google Ads Management
- $x - Google Ads Spend

17/07/2024

I made a post about a week ago, about the software we use that allows us to get insane indexing rates of freshly launched collections and product pages, and since then I got even more questions about indexing rates…

It seems that many of you are struggling with getting pages indexed, especially product pages… so I just want to share a few reasons as to why that might be…

1. Duplicated product descriptions

This is especially going to be a problem if you’re dropshipping, and it’s one of the most common mistakes I see…

When you’re loading up products to your store, please, for the sake of your organic traffic, don’t just copy-paste the product descriptions from your supplier…

Because chances are that’s what all of your competitors are doing also.

Take the 2 minutes it takes to copy/paste the text into ChatGPT and get it rewritten in your brand tone.

2. No adjustments to image file names

Take a few extra seconds per image to rename it from the default file name (and differentiate yourself from your competitors, who all use the default file name).

I highly suggest using a target keyword or one of the keyword variations as the file names of product images.

3. Importing reviews from Aliexpress/Alibaba

Once again, I know this saves a lot of time, but at the end of the day, even though it might slightly improve conversions, Google will still see the content as duplicate content, and that won’t help you with indexing.

I know it’s not the most ethical, but I’d either get a VA to rewrite some of the initial reviews or just offer free products in exchange for unique reviews, as it really goes a long way.

4. Don’t forget to add products to all relevant collections

Remember, the only way for Google to index your product, is by being able to find them first.

This means that if your products aren’t included in any collection pages or the header menu, then there’s no chance for Google to crawl them, let alone index them.

Make sure to add all the products to relevant collections, and to include all the collections in the header menu.

5. Not including the index,follow tag.

I spoke about this previously, from my experience not including the index,follow tags in your meta robots tag, makes it much less likely for Google to index those pages.

This seems to be especially important for Shopify stores.

You can check if you have this done properly using the inspect tool, and doing a search within your code for “index,follow”.

Or just reach out, and I’ll check it for you!

16/07/2024

A very simple & easy growth hack to get more organic clicks to your product pages, that actually convert into sales…

I’m just implementing this strategy across my portfolio of EMD Shopify projects, and based on my projections, we should be able to increase the amount of organic traffic we get in considerably…

The credits for this growth hack actually go to my business partner Chris, who pointed it out when looking at the keyword research list.

Essentially, there were many target keywords on our list that included the word (“set”/”sets”), where people were looking for multiple product packages up in a set.

We didn’t initially plan on targeting these keywords, because we only sold products individually, but Chris suggested that we just bundle up multiple products together, and create a “set” that way.

And that’s exactly what we’re doing across all of the keywords where we can leverage bundles.

Again, it’s super simple - but I just didn’t think of it…

Makes me even more grateful for the incredible team and business partners in my corner!

15/07/2024

The exact SOP I use to launch perfectly ON-Page SEO optimized collections and product pages for my exact match domain Shopify stores…

As you might know by this point, we prepared a specific keyword research plan for each one of the stores, clustered the keywords, and sorted them into commercial and informational terms.

When it comes to the commercial keywords, we assign the page type for each one of the keywords that we plan to target, there are 2 page types.

a) Collection page (if we have 2 or more products that we want to rank for a specific keyword),

b) Product page (if we have a single product we want to rank for a specific keyword).

Once we have that dialed in, we can start creating all of the collections and product pages, the ON-Page SEO process is highly similar for both of these, except for the collections/product descriptions creation.

1. Take the primary target keyword and include it at the start of the meta title, the H1 tag and also make the URL slug of the collection/product page match the target keyword.

2. Load up all of the relevant products in the collection, and all the relevant product images and product data to the product page.

(When it comes to product images, use the keyword variations planned out in the keyword research part of the project, as file names and alt tags for extra visibility.)

3. Use ChatGPT to write a brand-optimized collection/product description.

3.1 Provide info to ChatGPT about what you need, for example - a collection description, 500 words long, written in American English, etc.

3.2 Provide ChatGPT with the “About us” section from your Shopify store, so AI can understand your brand voice/tone, and write the description accordingly.

3.3 Enter the target keyword, along with all of the keyword variations and ask it to include as many in the description as possible, while ensuring that it still sounds natural.

For collection descriptions I recommend a minimum of 500 words, for product descriptions I recommend a maximum of 150-200 words.

I suggest monitoring & tracking everything in the same spreadsheet where you have your keyword research plan, that way you can easily outsource this to a VA, and focus on other high ROI activities.

Benjamin Golden

26/07/2024

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