Rhian Beutler shares with Philipp Schoeffmann her most noteworthy SEO tips and more at Affiliate World Europe in Barcelona.

Interview with Rhian Beutler | Co-founder & COO, Ventovv

By Philipp Schoeffmann

Interview Transcript

Phil:Affiliate World Europe 2018 Barcelona, we have another wonderful person here onstage, I’m very excited. Rhian, why don’t you explain briefly what you do and how you add value to this conference.

Rhian:
Oh, for sure. So my name is Rhian Beutler, I’m the COO and co-founder of Venntov. We’re a Shopify app development company, we have two major apps, SEOManager and OrderLookup for Shopify. So we help people get found. We help users or customers, rather, find the product on people’s stores. So a lot of dropshippers use our app. And what do I bring? Well, I’m a woman in tech, so that’s kind of cool.
Phil:
Yes it is.
Rhian:
And I bootstrapped my company, so that’s also cool and I know I a lot about SEO.

How Does The Tool Help With SEO?

Phil:
Alright, well let’s dive into SEO. Let’s just assume I’m the most stupid person on earth when it comes to that topic, which I am. So, how specifically does your tool help me do SEO? And what kind of principles does it apply? Meaning, what is the most important. What do you really want to cover if you market online for example, selling through a Shopify online store.
Rhian:
Okay, so that’s a good question. For a merchant?
Phil:
Yeah.
Rhian:
It really helps walk you through and there’s a lot of support documentation that helps you get to where you need to be. And it’s something that is viewed as fairly difficult to do and so a lot of people are just like, “No, I’m just not going to do it.”
Phil:
Yeah yeah.
Rhian:
And then a year later they’re thinking, “Oh I should’ve done it when I built my store.” So we help empower them to do it right and to do it right the first time and to follow all white hat practices. That’s something we’re really adamant about. It’s all white hat everything and yeah.

Is SEO Unpredictable?

Phil:
So when it comes to SEO, me being a paid guy, I like to control the levers. I have a feeling that maybe that’s not correct, that SEO is very unpredictable, always changing. And I don’t really understand what I have to do. Please shed some light on that. What should I do?
Rhian:
Okay that’s a great question and you’re right, SEO is changing. For instance, Google in October announced you can now have a meta description over 300 characters and then about a month ago they walked that back.
Phil:
Oh, fantastic sounds like fun.
Rhian:
And in my industry, you’re like “oh my god” and then you’re pushing code changes like immediately because we want to make sure our users always have the most up-to-date information. So that’s our job is we make sure we know what’s going on. And we give our users and our merchants the most up-to-date and cutting-edge information so that they don’t have to worry about that.
Phil:
Okay.

SEO Tip: Follow The Best Practices

Rhian:
Like there’s trends that kind of come and go in SEO and a lot of them don’t really follow best practices but they’re quick fixes and it’s something we don’t advocate for. So it’s really important to us that we continually educate our merchants and make sure that they are doing the right thing because if you do the right thing in the long-term it will be beneficial. But if you cut corners and cheat the system and use bots and all that it just doesn’t work in the long-run.

The Future Of SEO

Phil:
Alright, where do you see the future of SEO then? So a friend of mine shared a post last week I think. And it seems like Google was running a test because he was searching for something and he saw like seven ads on top with a different branding, it was very hard to understand as ads. I mean, people like us, we understand ads and majority of people out there won’t even realise it’s an ad when they click on that. I think it was seven of those.
Rhian:
And then you had your organic response, yeah.
Phil:
Yeah, I don’t think this is going to roll out on big scale but you have to expect changes and you have to expect Google monetising their own platform.
Rhian:
Right, absolutely.
Phil:
Do you think SEO will be as important in the future and what should we do to prepare ourselves?
Rhian:
I think it’s actually going to be more important in the future. And the reason why is because different countries are regulating the way that Google serves ads. So this is an interesting solve for us as app developers right because every country, I believe is going to have different requirements of how they serve their search and result pages. So you might see those seven ads in one country and in the US you might see two and in the UK you might see one. And it’s really clearly branded and so that is something we are looking out for.

Google’s Algorithm: RankBrain

Another thing we’re looking out for is RankBrain. RankBrain is Google’s algorithm that was launched in 2015 and it’s machine learning. One thing we’re noticing right now, and it hasn’t been announced, and that’s one of the fun things about SEO is it’s like, well no one announced this but this is a trend I’m seeing. So I’m going to assume it’s either being tested or this has been deployed is if somebody’s meta content is not good enough. If they haven’t written a good enough meta description on their own, Google just like arbitrarily pulls information from their page and makes up a meta description. And it’s just like words. It’s like, you know an eBay listing and it’s just a bunch of words to try to get read. It looks like that and that doesn’t even follow Google’s best practice. So I think it’s being tested. I’m hoping it’s not deployed in permanence because it’s not good. Or people are going to have write better content and better copy.

Correlation Between Paid and Organic Search

Phil:
Right. Okay, so you mentioned before that there is a very strong correlation of like paid search and organic. So how can these two work together? Can you give us the best practice?
Rhian:
Absolutely and this is something that coming to this conference, has been a lightbulb moment because I don’t work with media buyers. And I think we can work together because it’s important. Because if you’re spending let’s say, I don’t know, $10,000 a week on buys. We talked earlier, I don’t even know what they’re called. Maybe if you spent $1,000 of that on working on really optimising your site, instead of sending your traffic to a product perhaps that’s not optimised at all, if you ever stop sending traffic there, Google like drops it out of the rankings. However, if you’re sending traffic to it and it’s fully optimised, if you decrease the amount of traffic you send, even by 20%, then maybe you can increase your profit margins by 20%.

“Women In Tech”

Phil:
Fantastic. I have a last question. So you being a powerful woman and as you mentioned there is not too many around conferences like these, unfortunately. What would you recommend to other female entrepreneurs or women in tech?
Rhian:
Okay, that’s a great question. It can be overwhelming sometimes. I once did an event in San Francisco and it was my own event and at the end of the day there was a hundred people there and I was the only woman. And it was kind of this moment where I was like, “This is my event!” Well, I made a mistake and I think one thing that women can do for each other is help other women and empower one another. And then also you have to have a lot of grit and tenacity and be outspoken and be direct. Be yourself because if people don’t love you as yourself then you don’t want them to love you anyways.
Phil:
Good point, I agree.

Tips For The Younger Generation

Rhian:
So I guess that’s my, and for young people if they’re watching this, for girls. Study computer science, study data science but soft skills are important as well and most big tech companies are hiring for soft skills. So a lot of people, I think they can’t get jobs in tech because like for me, I have a history degree.
Phil:
That’s very different.
Rhian:
Yeah it’s very different. I have a history degree. I have a women’s studies degree. I have a liberal studies masters degree. They’re like, “What are you doing?” I can run data now. I taught myself.
Phil:
So, alright. Well thank you so much.
Rhian:
My pleasure, absolutely.
Phil:
Absolutely fantastic, thank you.