Gagan Ghotra

From my recent podcast with Edward Strum!

Key Points

• E-commerce as a Prime SEO Opportunity: Gagan Ghotra identifies e-commerce as the biggest current opportunity in SEO. Success requires a holistic approach, including proper optimisation of the Google Merchant Center, on-page content, and branding.
• Critical E-commerce Mistakes: A common and significant mistake businesses make is having improperly set up product feeds in Google Merchant Center. This prevents Google from correctly identifying product variations.
• The Power of Correct Imagery: Use unique product images and make sure that these are highly relevant to other content on the page.
• Actionable Advice on Visuals: Instead of generic stock photos, businesses should use images that help customers visualise the product or service. For a software-as-a-service (SaaS) company, this means using screenshots of the app. For a service-based business, it means showing the service being performed and of course for E-Commerce sites its to make sure that product images are clear & right there at the top of page. The goal is to give the user exactly what they are looking for as clearly and quickly as possible.

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We discussed this from 41:40 – 50:37 in the video below!

Here is the full transcript of what we discussed from 41:40 – 50:37!

Edward Sturm: What opportunities do you see in search engine optimization right now?

Gagan Ghotra: E-commerce. E-commerce is the biggest opportunity right now and if you can do proper optimization, uh Google Merchant Center and of course your content, internal links, right images, right branding, you can literally generate like insane amount of revenue.

Edward Sturm: What are the mistakes that people make with Google Merchant Center?

Gagan Ghotra: Google Merchant Center, their feeds are not set up properly. That is the number one thing. Either their feeds are invalid or their feeds and the product structure is set up such that Google is not able to identify the different variations. That’s the number one mistake that people are doing right now.

Edward Sturm: What is it, aside from that, what is something that everyone has to do with it?

Gagan Ghotra: I think uh, even it’s not about merchant center, but what what I have noticed is that most people don’t have the right images on their product pages. And that is that is the biggest flop. Like, even if you you manage to bring in users to your product pages, still people have to actually see the product and they have to make a judgment around like how this going to look on me if it’s a shirt or something like that.

Edward Sturm: Dude, it’s not it’s not just physical products too. This I made an episode about how images can actually hurt SEO and and that episode did pretty well because I see this all the time. It could be a SaaS company, it could be a services business, and people will put these like very general images on their product pages, on their bottom-of-funnel SEO pages, and it will be like, so let’s say you have like a meditation app and you’re targeting keywords around meditation. People might put for this meditation app, instead of putting a screenshot of the app, which is what you should put, they might put someone meditating on a beach or something or someone meditating with rocks, but you should actually put an image of the app. If you’re a services business, you actually put an image of like one of your workers doing the service that you are describing. It’s the same thing, give people what they want as soon as possible.