STOP Using Shopify Product Pages as Landing Pages 🤦‍♂️

Jay Myers: Nick? So good to have you on the show.

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah.

Jay Myers: I'm gonna break the ice a little bit here. I'm gonna ask you an awkward question right off the start before we even get into intros.

Nick Raushenbush: Shoot. I

Jay Myers: What were you doing 15 minutes before this call?

Nick Raushenbush: What was I doing 15 minutes before it was called Making my Bed. That's yeah, I was like, I was like, oh, I've got, I've got 15 minutes you know, got bumped back a little bit and I was like, you know what I'm gonna do? I'm gonna, I'm gonna keep that promise to myself that I will get up out of my chair away from my computer, every couple hours, take a couple steps.

So I kind of stagger my house chores to, to line up with me taking breaks from the computer.

Jay Myers: That just says a ton about you. Like you weren't eating a chocolate bar or

Nick Raushenbush: And I wish.

Jay Myers: You're just, you're a good person already. Look

Nick Raushenbush: Thanks. Yeah. Yeah. And you're not supposed to make your bed right in the morning. I don't know if you didn't know that. I, I made my bed right in the, in the morning for, for years and years. But you're supposed to like let your your sheets and everything have time to like air out and all that, and then you, you know, whatever.

You make it later on in the day.

Jay Myers: Are you just making this up or is that

Nick Raushenbush: No,

Jay Myers: That's real. Oh, like the sweat from when you

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 'cause when you sleep, like you, whatever, you have all this, I don't wanna say like bio, whatever, film or sweat or stuff like that. But yeah, technically that stuff gets on your sheets. So unless you're washing your sheets every day when you wake up, you don't necessarily wanna make your bed.

You wanna like leave things open, let things air out and all that, and then go and make your bed later.

Jay Myers: So you're telling me like that soldier that gave that address at university that said, you want to change your life, make your bed every morning?

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, I mean, I, I get where they're coming from. 'cause that's like a behavior modification thing, right? So if you're, like, if you're a person who's particularly disorganized and you need that type of thing, where, oh, making your bed is gonna give you that reinforcement for like, starting your day, very organized and structured.

You know, the, the pros probably outweigh the cons in in that scenario. But yeah. You know, if it's if you've been in the routine and making your bed pretty consistently, life's pretty organized. Probably good to let leave the bed unmade for, for at least a few hours. Let things air out.

Jay Myers: Well, now that we got a little insight into your personal life and we

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, there you

Jay Myers: we know who you are as a person. Let's talk a bit about your professional life, which is, I know, gonna be super exciting for our listeners. So you're one of the co-founders of Shogun. What Tell what is Shogun first of all?

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, for sure. So Shogun is an e-commerce experience management platform that empowers merchants to you know, craft the website experience that is most optimal for their customers and and optimize it for conversion.

Jay Myers: I like that you, it used to be Shogun Page Builder.

Nick Raushenbush: That's correct.

Jay Myers: it's ex Experience manager. Shogun Experience Manager.

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, I should probably know the exact, like the super brief slogan off the top of my, off the top of my head. But but yes, we have basically, effectively we have moved into experience management and conversion rate optimization. And so we've introduced you know, tooling, like AB testing personalization, search engine optimization, feature sets.

To 'cause, 'cause once you build a page, I mean, one, one doesn't simply build a page in e-commerce without, you know, trying to to optimize it for, for the most the most sales that they can possibly get. So,

Jay Myers: Okay. So I love this and I wanna get into this, but let's just set the stage a little bit for people listening. So, like, as a page builder,

Nick Raushenbush: yeah.

Jay Myers: Tell me about it. Like, why would someone use it?

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, absolutely. So, I would say that like, I. You a lot of folks, they, they come with a certain amount of functionality that's just based from the e-commerce platform, right? Like Shopify, BigCommerce, even Salesforce Commerce Cloud, they all have some modicum of a, of a visual editor, right? But I would say that generally, and you can challenge me on this.

You know, you probably fall into two different, two different use cases there. Either you are an aspirational entrepreneur who you're gonna look at that editor and say, perfect. This is resembles Squarespace in a lot of ways. I don't get a ton of liberties with control, but it basically takes my, you know, my current theme and allows me to do some amount of customization. And it's perfect if you're that aspirational entrepreneur, even the small SMB, right? Or you might be existing in a paradigm where you're a much larger brand, you know, your mid-market enterprise, you know, let's let's say that whatever you're between 50 to a hundred million annual gross merchandising volume and you've gone and you've had, you know, your agency, you know, 'cause we have a, a ton of great agencies in in these various platform ecosystems.

Go and and build out these custom blocks, right? And that's the foundation of your site. But what happens when you want something unique, like you want to you know, test out versions of your homepage, or you want to create a, a series of pages, that's a funnel coming, you know, for a specific campaign, right?

You know, it's gonna get a little burdensome having to go and ping your agency or your internal developer resources to just go make those well, relatively aesthetic, changes to the page. And so, you know, the first mission of Shogun was to really democratize website editing content management page creation for non-technical.

Team members, you know, marketers designers merchandisers. And so, so in that, you know, and I, I would, you know, obviously I, I'm biased, but I would encourage anybody to go take shoguns editor for a spin. It really does go into the nines on the fine grain controls and configurations that you can do for page elements and for the visual presentation layer without having to write a single line of code.

Yeah.

Jay Myers: It's I use it first of all. I have, yeah,

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah.

Jay Myers: I, I don't know if I'm paying for it, but I I, I have a version of it on my brother's store. I might,

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah. Oh well. Partner account.

Jay Myers: I think I got a suite deal at one point. But, but I will say it is, you know, as someone who uses, who builds pages in Shopify and also in Shogun, I always prefer to build them in Shogun.

It's, it's.

Nick Raushenbush: you.

Jay Myers: I don't wanna speak too much for it, but like, a lot of the things like the templates, the prebuilt templates that you have, like the, what do you call 'em? You call 'em blocks,

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah. Yeah. Templates. And we also have blocks when they're broken down to their modular components.

Jay Myers: right? So standard things when you're thinking about a landing page, like you have kind of pre-built and then you can easily go in and tweak them and edit them.

 The speed of which you can build with it is. So much faster than, than with Shopify and then

Nick Raushenbush: you. And that brings up a really good point 'cause it's like how do you, well how do you wanna quantify the value of, of a function like that right? Where, you know, website updates and you know, all that you can look at, okay, you know, the delta between what it would take a, so you know, whatever developer and a marketer to do that type of work.

'cause there does tend to be a difference. You know, and, and to be clear, there's still plenty of space for developers to work on much harder problems, you know, in these in these businesses. So you can think about it in that way. What's that? Delta? The second thing though, that you just started harping on is speed, right?

Because when you are looking to go and launch campaigns, or a really big example is using Shogun to rapidly launch in a new market. Which we have power tools for that. Right. You know, being able to, to do mul, you know, multi-site content management you know, not just on an an intersite but also Intrasite basis.

You know, you have to think about the opportunity cost of not getting to market or not making that change sooner. 'cause that that agility is actually quite valuable in, in terms of, of what it could what it could result in more sales.

Jay Myers: Do you have data? I looked some of this up before the show, but I'm wondering if this is like stuff that you track. You know, like typically someone would create an ad on, on Facebook and then send them to a product page. And I think product page pages serve a purpose, but. A product page, like for those listening that right now they might be thinking like, why do I need a page builder?

I have product pages, I have collections, I have a homepage. But a product page is part of a journey, right? You land on the homepage and it's very much selling the story and everything about your brand, and then you might go to a collection page that has more, it has some testimonials, has some social proof, has a, and you know, then you go to a product page.

A product page is. Generally designed for speed of ordering without too much clutter, but enough information. And, but then they run these Facebook ads and then they send them to product pages and they see somewhat poor conversion. They convert, but maybe not the greatest. There's a lot of industry data that sending people to custom landing pages versus product pages converts.

Drastically better. Like we're talking 20, 30, 40% better than product pages is. Are these like metrics that you track or anything? Or like internally or

Nick Raushenbush: that's a, that's a great question. Not off the top of my head. Like, it's not an ongoing project that we have, but that's you know, it is something that how do I put it? We, we should actually technically be able to get at that data because we do have an analytics offering,

Jay Myers: right?

Nick Raushenbush: Our, you know, our, our our analytics offering is the, you know, is what underpins our, you know, our conversion rate optimization software.

So we should actually be able to, to ascertain that, but it doesn't really, surprise me that it's, you know, it's higher converting and, it speaks to, you know, some of these, I don't wanna say older businesses, but, you know, at this point some names that maybe haven't been spoken for a while, like ClickFunnels, you

Jay Myers: Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm.

Nick Raushenbush: don't need a website. You need, you know, a funnel that tells your brand story. Right. And, you know, obviously I think as your, as your Firestone, you know, kind of pioneering things. And, you know, especially in the Shopify ecosystem, you know, with with these high converting, you know, long form landing page templates and stuff.

And so yeah, it's that is absolutely how we view things and where we view most of Shoguns value being. Is not necessarily in those foundational aspects of your site, because candidly, honestly, if you can build it within the native platform and that serves you well why change a good thing? You know what I mean?

If, if they, if that works for you. You know, we do have plenty of customers that they, they value our content management power tooling, our multi-site support, our campaign management tooling that they, you know, they build almost all of their visual presentation later in Shogun. But I think that, viewing Shogun in that paradigm of being a, you know, more campaign oriented to, okay, I've got my foundation built, but what happens when I deviate? What happens when I wanna make a spec, A custom landing page specific that tells a specific brand story or that's to a specific campaign? Or what if, you know, you know, we have the ability to serve personalized versions of audience level personalized versions.

Different versions of a homepage based on who the, what the shopper demographics are, right? And so it's those are more of the, the use cases that we're starting to to, to put a lot more focus in you know, based on the fact that we've, you know, we've, we've built a, a strong foundation in, in page building content management over, over past you know, close to a decade.

So,

Jay Myers: Yeah. I mean, it makes so much sense. And, and, and you know, for those listening, if you don't know as a Firestone or if you don't know ClickFunnels, you've. Probably clicked on an ad at some point for some product and landed on a page that is this like long form content. It'll have a video from someone and then some more content.

It'll have testimonials and then maybe another video, and then some product photos. And it's really, it's a, it's, and then, you know, multiple steps along the way. You can, you can choose to purchase, you don't have to scroll all the way to the bottom, but it's. Designed to take someone from zero knowledge to a sale, which product pages typically aren't, and then.

So like that's one of the reasons I, I'm a huge proponent of, of, I was gonna say page builders, but experience managers like show gun 'cause it's product pages are not being used the right way. People are using them as landing pages and they're not, like product pages should not be landing pages. But there's this other stat when I was looking it up earlier today that.

So for companies that have on average one landing page, like not any more than one, their conversion goes up roughly 9.7%. But for companies that found, and this is from a company called. Well actually two marketer's, best friend and hos Ho ho Inger both had these stats, but companies that had 10 to 15 different landing pages based on, I guess like where the customer's coming from, who they are, saw an average of 55% increase in conversion.

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah.

Jay Myers: And that really got me excited because I was poking around in Show Gun earlier today and seeing some of the things with. AB testing, but also personalization. Like I, I went in, okay, let's, let's talk about personalization. Like what can, what can you, like, what can you personalize in show?

Nick Raushenbush: Totally. Yeah. So we, you know, and I'll say like the way that we, you know, we define it, you know, for our purposes is audience level personalization. So what does that mean? We're generally, oh, well, actually I should say we also have an integration with Klaviyo that supports that supports cu cu customer level BA based on my understanding.

But going back, one of the, the, the core use cases that we take, the browser data. Right. You know, based on the customer's geolocation the referring URL the you know, also we know what, what time of day it is for them. We you know, we know let's see what else? I mean, there's, there's a pretty relatively long list what their device type is.

Right? Like Right. All of that, that

Jay Myers: of day, day of week. Are they a returning visitor?

Nick Raushenbush: Yes. New versus returning. Yep.

Jay Myers: So by, by refer you're someone coming from a Google search versus an Instagram ad

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah,

Jay Myers: have a different

Nick Raushenbush: correct.

Jay Myers: variation of a page.

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, that's correct. Yeah. And so basically we have all of these attributes you know, audience level attributes from from the browser data, and you can use that in Shogun. We have our own segment builder. And obviously segmentation I think is really on something, is something on the minds of more and more merchants in, in 2025.

And and you can effectively build segments using conditional statements like they're coming from this referral source and they're located in, you know, in this geolocation, you know, in, in this geolocation based on, you know, state or city or what have you. And so you can do those, you know, those combinations with conditional and or, or statements, build those segments.

And then you can create you know, multiple variants or versions. Of the page that are more personalized or at least more relevant, right? To those, you know, to that specific audience. Similarly, you know? Yeah, similar. Thank you. And similarly, we're also supporting customer level personalization through an integration, you know, CDP integration.

So right now we're starting off one with Klaviyo. So if you have a customer list of, let's say your VIP customers and you've segmented that off and you want to send them, you know, through one of your campaigns. You know, a a personalized landing page experience that's just for those VIPs, including a deal that's just for those VIPs.

You can do that, you know, you can do that using ch as well. And that, that kind of brings us to the person, person one-to-one level.

Jay Myers: yeah, and then, so this is not just like to be clear. You don't have to create a whole new page for each of these situations. It can be a block.

Nick Raushenbush: Totally.

Jay Myers: Change the title. Like, welcome Instagrammers. Or like you search on Google, you found it. I dunno. Like it can just be the words in one section.

It's not starting from scratch for each one.

Nick Raushenbush: Yes. Yeah, yeah. Correct. Basically. 'cause effectively what you would do is you have your, you know, your base version of the page, and so you can just, you just duplicate it and then you can bring in the block, you know? Yeah. Just, just change one thing, right.

Jay Myers: yeah,

Nick Raushenbush: You know, and that's generally, I mean, you know, I think that, that, in fact, if we were, if we were to move and, you know, on to talking about AB testing, that would be the exact rule of thumb for AB testing.

So you actually don't want to change the whole page. You wanna make a, you know, what, just one small incremental change. And so, so yeah, that, that is definitely the, you know, the, the page building paradigm that the editor supports.

Jay Myers: That was the next thing I wanted to talk about was AB testing. I that. That I've used a number of AB testing platforms and I've re familiarized myself this morning with yours. And like it took about seven seconds to create a variation to test. And I did a simple one. I, I changed the color of a button, created a variant and a a page variant and said, make it 50%.

I literally think it took seven seconds to do that. Like that was, it, was that fast?

Nick Raushenbush: that's our aim. And again, like you know, this, this is a lot about like how we initially democratize. Access to, you know, to basically web website development, you know, or web website edits. For non-technical personas you know, implementing CRO software can be, can be difficult, you know, and setting it up even figuring out how to use it.

And we wanted to create a, you know, a user interface and a user experience that again. Really democratize that type of offering to, you know, to, to merchants you know, at any level of technical acumen. And we do wanna make it as, as simple as that. So it, I'm glad it only took you, it took you a couple seconds and yeah, you can, you know, you can create, for us, we support multivariate, so it's not limited to just a, you know, you can do A, B, C, et cetera.

You can control your traffic flow, right? So if you've got the scaries, you know, oh, this is my first AB test, totally understand you, you can elect to just send. 10% of your traffic to the, to the variant. You can keep 90% with the base until you know that it performs better. It might take you a lot longer to get to a sale, you know, a statistical significance with the amount of traffic, you know, if you're, if you're limiting that, unless you're a really, really big brand.

But yeah. And then and then we've made it also really easy to understand. You know who the who the winner is. And, and the biggest the biggest joy for a lot of folks is probably going to be this, because we married the value proposition of page building and content management with the CRO functionality.

To my understanding, usually if you're using a piece of CRO software, like that's not the source of truth for your website, right? Like they're basically doing browser manipulation. So if you find a variant that really works, you're gonna have to go and have, again, someone technical go rebuild that winning variant for you.

But with Shogun, not such as not the case,

Jay Myers: It's already built.

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, you exactly. You get that winning variant. You can just, you know, it, you can even set it so it's automatically promoted to base, and then you're just constantly iterating from there.

Jay Myers: I mean, every single person should probably be doing. AB testing, I think it was that page I saw you've got this, you know, calculator, like if you just increased your conversion 5% or 10% or whatever. Like it's, I mean, you know, if you heard the 1% rule or

Nick Raushenbush: no, please tell me.

Jay Myers: so it's, it's I, if you increase something 1%

Nick Raushenbush: yeah.

Jay Myers: e every day at the end.

At the end of a year, how much do you think you've grown your business?

Nick Raushenbush: I mean, it compound, I mean it compounds, you know, pretty, pretty significantly. I, you know, gosh.

Jay Myers: a wild guess.

Nick Raushenbush: Don't keep me in suspense here, Jay. What's that? Yeah,

Jay Myers: 37 x

Nick Raushenbush: 37 x.

Jay Myers: yeah, so, 3700% if you increase 1% a day. Right? And so, never underestimate the importance of increasing something a few percent. Here you increase one landing page, one product, page one collection, page one, like it's, it compounds, right? So I think are you, is there anything that you. Have found brands like, I don't know, like fun facts that like, oh, we found that like orange buttons convert way better than green. Or like, image sliders. Like any, any neat findings from AB tests,

Nick Raushenbush: That's a great question. We, we haven't really, like, we're, we're still, it's relatively new, you know, we released the features, I think general availability in February. And so, you know, at this point we have, you know, many, many hundreds of of merchants adopting them. I think we're, we're coming up on, you know, about a thousand at this point.

That said, we're still kind of, collecting and processing all that data. It is something that we do plan to do because. You know, ultimately, and, and perhaps unsurprisingly, you know, we're on the the machine learning, you know, ai bandwagon. And so ultimately you know, we want to take context from, you know, not just from, cRO best practices and visual design, best practices and, and best practices by vertical, right? Because you know, many e-commerce businesses can be wildly different by vertical for what's successful, but also truly understanding all of the context of your store from what we can see that's built in Shogun.

And from what we can see just based on what we can glean from the browser and based off of that. You know, having a much better sense of what would uniquely, actually would result in increased conversion for your business. And because we have, you know, analytics suite, obviously we know the the output including the most important one, which is did it drive more sales?

Right. Did it result actually in more GMV. And so I, we do hope to actually start, you know, processing the data to to be able to say definitively, definitively answer questions like that. You know, hopefully towards the end of 2025, which is, which is something I'm pretty, pretty excited for.

Jay Myers: I just wanna know what buy button color is the best, Nick, come on.

Nick Raushenbush: That's a good question. You know, off, off the top of my head, it's probably the one that's, you know, that that pops that that pops. But that's not, you know, unless your brand is is is, you know, playing with a lot of red hues maybe doesn't necessarily convey the I mean bold actually, your guys', your guys' buttons I'm sure are all red

Jay Myers: We're all

Nick Raushenbush: ax accent you've Yeah, totally.

But yeah, at this point I'm just kind of giving my own personal, you know, design

Jay Myers: Well, you should have, it'll be interesting. I feel like you could put out a, a blog post on the 10, 10 lessons learned from a thousand AB tests or something where like, I see, I, I don't know, I guess I follow a few people on Instagram and now my feed is half. AB tests and it's like, you know, comment to we will tell you which one won, or, you know, winners of these AB tests.

And I've gotten pretty good now. Like I can tell like, oh yeah, that one converts better. I, I, I, I know, but it's in sometimes not what you would expect.

Nick Raushenbush: Total. Oh yeah. That, that is one thing I will say is I've been surprised. I have seen like some, some results and I'm just like, and I'm like, oh, wow. Even, you know, and, and I mean, well, I guess what I'm, what I'm saying is sometimes what I would think is, is most aesthetically pleasing isn't, or, you know, or on brand or whatever, you know, you can, you can do some things that that actually de you know, can even minorly deviate from that.

And, and can, you know, and convert better. So, so yeah. And

Jay Myers: Well, here's one that I found that is interesting. You know, the collection pages,

Nick Raushenbush: yeah.

Jay Myers: Hero images on collection pages, which a lot of stores do you land on like. Sweaters or bottoms, whatever. And you see a big hero image on the top of a lifestyle photo of someone wearing a sweater. Like I've always thought that's a good thing. It reinforces kind of like shows that lifestyle image, but I've seen multiple tests from multiple brands that hero images on collection pages, slightly decreased conversion. I guess it pushes down the products below the fold a little bit like, and maybe when people are going to a collection, they are in the buying mindset, so they just want to get to a product and that hero images get in the way a little bit.

I don't know. But that was one that I was really shocked about was hero images, slow down conversion a little bit on collection pages. I would've never guessed that.

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah. Yeah. And my guess is that it actually may be exactly what you just said, which is that it's it is because you're, it's pushing, it's pushing the content down. 'cause moving stuff above the fold, whatever you move above the fold is going to is that, that's gonna, you know, that's like the, the most valuable real estate, right.

From an intention perspective as well. In fact, we had a, we had a customer and I think. I wanna make sure that I'm getting it right. We have a case study on it. I think it's good. The customer's clear within, and I'm pretty sure they saw like this really significant boost in their add to cart rate, something like by like 80% using AB testing.

And I believe if I'm thinking of the right client, it was actually as simple as them moving the button above the fold. It was that.

Jay Myers: Yeah.

Nick Raushenbush: And, you know, just to show that sometimes it's just these incredibly minute, you know, changes, you know, that, that can have have, that can have a really substantial effect.

Jay Myers: oh, it's, it's amazing. One I saw the other day too was. You know, like a lot of stores have bulk discounts of some sort. Like you buy one, buy three, buy five, whatever. And sometimes they'll be in a widget. Sometimes they'll be, but have you been on True Classics t-shirt

Nick Raushenbush: Ooh. I think a while ago. Yes. I think I got like a, served an ad and I, I checked him out.

Jay Myers: they, they, on their product images, they sell t-shirts.

I'm actually wearing a true classic tee right now, but it's, it's, they literally show six T-shirts on the product image, kind of like all in a diagonal down. And then when you select. It's not a dropdown. There's is a button you click, I want a three pack, a six pack or a 12 pack or whatever. But it changes the product image to show 3, 6, 12.

Obviously if you're selecting a six pack, you know you're getting six, but most stores still show the one shirt

Nick Raushenbush: totally. Yes.

Jay Myers: But seeing the six pack just it drastically boosted conversion. I maybe the customer feels there's more value, but like a simple thing like that, if you sell bundles. Show the bundle in the picture, like,

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah. Yeah. Or Joe re reinstalls that trust. Right. You know, of like, oh, okay, they know that I'm, that, that this is the right thing, you know? Yeah, we I know that that, that actually there's a lot of merchants who that very specific experience image change on variant change is has, has been proven to, to be something that drops conversion.

And ear earlier, one thing I'll say, you were saying that it's like, hey, if you get 1% change a day, you know that you know, that compounds to 37 x you know, year over year. You know what's really interesting is with conversion rate optimization for these brands that are doing, I mean, if you're doing eight, you know, eight figures, annual gross merchandising volume through your site, I mean, we're talking about like a, a.

Fraction of a percent in converting, you know, in conversion rate increase can end up, you know, compounding over. Like it doesn't even need, and you just need, you could do it just one time and you could end up seeing, you know, in just insane ROI from it. Right. And obviously it takes, you know, I know that there's a lot of e-commerce enablement, you know, SaaS that, you know, pro promises the world and I don't wanna paint that.

It's like, oh hey, you know, you adopt our software and it's just, you know, money bags. It requires going in and, you know, thinking radically about your customer experience and what you can do, you know, the experiments you wanna run or the changes that you might wanna make to personalize or make the, the experience more relevant.

You know, obviously we are trying to also address some of that knowledge, you know, that knowledge gap or, you know, knowledge opportunity by baking it into our software. But if you know right now for merchants that you know that do have these hypotheses. Put 'em to work. Again, going back to that opportunity cost that we were talking about, you know, moving quickly to make that change.

It's the the potential return on investment is really substantial and ends up, you know, largely pro probably eclipsing the cost of the, of the tech. I mean, relatively sh in relatively short order. Yeah, yeah. Yeah.

Jay Myers: Yeah. I wanna talk a little bit too about a really cool feature I saw today when I was poking around is the SEO keyword analyzer.

Nick Raushenbush: Oh yeah, totally.

Jay Myers: yeah, so it's, it looks awesome. It's, it creates keyword clusters , and it actually creates , recommendations to optimize SEO for every page you create.

Nick Raushenbush: For sure. Yes. And this is you know, this is part again, of our, our interest in expanding shoguns value proposition to be more of a revenue center. You know, I think that in the past we've, you know, largely been viewed by merchants as a fantastic utility. I. It's, you know, how can, how can we actually be a revenue driver for you?

And so, you know, conversion rate optimization is certainly part of that. But we do have, you know, interest in how can we actually drive more top of funnel. Because you know, acquisition you know, beyond conversion acquisition is, is of extraordinary interest to merchants. And and obviously you have you have ads, you know, paid being a, you know, tried and true, you know, channel.

But but obvious dynamics have in that space of change, you know, within the past five years. And I think that there is more emphasis and interest on organic. You know, how do we build a solid foundation that's going to drive traffic over, you know, over, over the long haul? And not to mention that you go and you know, create these SEO rich pages that are for content or for blog purposes, you can make them transactional quite easily.

Obviously, you, if you're trying to, you know, create something that really the purpose of is, is to inform. You don't wanna overboard and make it, you know, just a landing page that's trying to sell all kinds of products, but. If you're creating product, you know, content that truly educates about products, insert the product in there to make the transaction easy.

You know, just, just be tasteful about the way you do it, right?

Jay Myers: Well, and that's what's cool about Shogun is you can drop a product widget in, or even just a, you can just an an buy now or add to cart or you can drop it anywhere. Like that's, you know, I think that the. I think the world has swung too far away. Like SEO used to be what you focused on. Like it was all about SEO.

Then social media, I think has, has been a distraction. It's not a distraction. It's important, but we spend so much time focusing on social that I am blown away sometimes, like how? Easy It actually is to rank for something like you, you go in a store, they have, they have no blog. They're not actually creating any content.

They have great imagery, but there's no actual content there. And if you take what they're selling, like, I don't know, bone broth, fiber pill or something, like there's whatever, something like there's unique and you search it in Google and you'll get like. Recipes about how to make it or a project about it.

But like I was, I'm like, man, this store could rank first for bone broth fiber pill with one blog post.

Nick Raushenbush: Totally. Yeah.

Jay Myers: I don't, it's become something that we've not thought about enough and there's such a huge opportunity there

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, I think that a lot of I mean this is, you know, is speculation to a certain degree, but I think that it probably has to do with that. It can take time for SEO. To an SEO strategy to, to work. Right. You know, if you're, especially if you're looking to build a foundation, it probably takes, I don't know, a couple months, right?

Not that long. But if you think about it you know, compared to the very quick hit that you can get on paid obviously on very different unit economics, but it's i, I can see why it is appealing, you know, to say I mean, you know, Hey, we're gonna, we're gonna put our efforts here as opposed to investing a bunch in SEO.

It's I think about, but, but it, again, I, I believe that every brand should have an SEO strategy. It's like, yeah, you know, with your, with your paid, you know, maybe that's like, like, eating ice cream and dessert and who doesn't love that? You know, we, we all do, but but you also gotta eat your broccoli, you know, and that's,

Jay Myers: especially now, you know, we were just looking the other day about, so with our apps we go to chat GPT. And if you say well, actually I was pleasantly surprised. I, I went to chat GPT yesterday and I said, I said, write me a blog post about the best apps for Shopify. With that was it, that was the only prompt and kla it said, you know, the best apps is subject and again, various person by person, but here are some popular ones, blah, blah, blah.

Klaviyo is a popular one among, among Shopify users. That was number one. Yapo was number two, and both subscriptions was number three. And I was like, oh, that's pretty awesome. I don't know, I don't know. I don't know what we did to be in that spot, but I. It's, it's scraping content, it's scraping blogs, it's scraping everything.

But a lot of times chat, GPT is a year behind or so, so like you need to be investing in right now in content for, if I search what is the best bone broth medicine or whatever, create content around that because it's not just for search, it's like the, the ais are scraping it as we speak. So, this is really, I think.

Super relevant to have that kind of baked into your, your page building is like, to think SEO right off the front,

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah, absolutely. And you know, and we've, you know, to that point we've also taken some of the those, those value propositions on AI co-pilot for, you know, for text or content creation, right? And for blog creation and and ba you know, baked those in, you know, into show gun. You know, we've done that with a, with a variety of features.

You know, I think we've added ai co-pilots for content text. For meta fields, meta descriptions, we've also added one. You know, we do have the ability to create completely custom coded elements. We added a bit of a code, like a code co-pilot into that, you know, that the code editor natively in, in Shogun.

So, so yeah, it's it's, it's,

Jay Myers: That's awesome. Well and I love the insights. So the, there's the insights widget when you create a page and then it'll tell you your accessibility, best practices, any performance issues. And, and then the reporting is fantastic because you can see when someone clicks or views a page and then ends up completing.

So to your point earlier, it'd be interesting. You, you could probably have some type of a guarantee, like if, if someone is actively building landing pages proper, like landing pages, they don't have to be a graphic designer, but landing pages designed to tell the story of the product and like if they don't see the value, it would be mind blowing to me.

 I'm just

Nick Raushenbush: Totally.

Jay Myers: , I just, I love that you put that up front. You have the reports right up front, like people who viewed a landing page ended up clip. There's a whole bunch. I can't remember them all, but like, you don't hide that.

I've seen page builders that there's no data at all,

Nick Raushenbush: Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. And for us, we realized that it's like all this going back and forth and looking at page performance, like in Google Insights, shouldn't that be baked in natively?

Jay Myers: mm-hmm.

Nick Raushenbush: And then the, the other thing to, you know, to that effect is once you get that score, okay, now you've got this task list of things that you need to fix.

Why don't you bring it natively into the, into the area where it needs to be fixed. And usually, you know, in the past for some of those items, it would be something that now you, you gotta send, you gotta run that report, send it over to a developer. But you know, for, for our experience, again, we're we're to the to the extent that we can have it result codeless directly in the editor, we just point the merchant or the team member, you know, directly to that, to the area where the issue is.

Jay Myers: Yeah, so smart Nick, this is this has been awesome. I get excited talking about this, so I, I, I, I hope, I hope our listeners are interested in learning more. Where where can they go? Is there a free trial or how do people get started?

Nick Raushenbush: Yes, there absolutely is. Yeah, there's a 10 day free trial and there's a plan for everybody, you know, so whether you if you're, you know, if you're starting out we've got a plan that starts at a, at $39 a month. And then, you know, we have a, a significant amount of our customers. are I would say top of SMB bottom of, you know, bottom of mid market.

And and, you know, we have plans that scale with businesses that are, that are scaling. And you can go to get shogun.com. And then we're also in the app stores and partner, you know, partner directories for e-commerce platforms like Shopify, BigCommerce, et cetera. So if you're in those directories, you can search for Shogun and find find us pretty easily.

Jay Myers: Amazing. And you've been around forever. When? When did Shogun launch?

Nick Raushenbush: Totally. Yeah. Shogun started in the, pretty much at the start of 2015. So we're actually, we're 10 years. Yeah, we're, we're 10 years. We're 10 years old. Pretty recently. So yeah, it's been a phenomenal decade and and very excited to, you know, to be continuing on and, and expanding our value to our, to our customers.

Jay Myers: Well, congrats on 10 years and I hope the next 10 are even better. And thanks so much for coming on, Nick. I really, I really enjoyed the conversation.

Nick Raushenbush: Always, always. Yeah. Thank you so much for having me, Jay. Really appreciate being a guest.