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I analyzed 90+ Shopify Plus Certified partners

Howdy. The last issue was a hit; new folks from Loox, Gorgias, Recart, Vajro, Omnisend, and even Shopify joined. Thanks a bunch!

(Special thanks to Jon Kennedy for featuring bucket on his LinkedIn).

In today’s newsletter:

  • 🔥 A heatmap tools’ SEO efforts that are on fire.

  • 🕵️‍♂️ I analyzed 90+ “Book a Demo” pages of Shopify Plus Certified partners.

  • 📈 How to increase CTA visibility on your homepage.

  • 🤑 The latest acquisition in the Shopify partner ecosystem.

  • 🤝 Shopify’s latest partnership.

COVER STORY

How to dominate in saturated SaaS markets (without spending any money on ads)

I know, I know. The following tool is not primarily DTC SaaS, but here are some insane numbers that will make your heart beat faster anyway:

  • 571K in organic traffic.

  • 200K ranked keywords.

  • 25.8M backlinks.

Those are the stats of heatmap and website analytics tool Hotjar. And they didn’t achieve it by spending millions on ads or because of brand. In fact, more than 80% of all the organic traffic is coming from non-branded keywords. They’re a true authority.

The strongest contributor to this success was SEO. To be more precise; tons of extensive guides about their key topics. It’s called “topic clusters”, but I don’t have time for nerd SEO talk today.

And what started as a small project with a handful of guides turned into their main organic traffic effort. They understood what works and doubled down.

The best part? They’re driving attributable revenue from it. In an interview on the How The Fxck SEO podcast, Sean Potter, the mastermind behind Hotjar’s SEO efforts shared stunning results. (Sean’s LinkedIn). 

Here’s their SEO “guide” structure:

It’s not hard to see how everything unfolds from top to bottom. It’s easy for the reader to navigate through everything without missing important resources. UX and UI play a crucial role in such a project and so Hotjar focused on making things very straightforward.

But those guides are not just longer blog posts. Each of the 65 guides contain several sub-articles. 

To make clear what I mean by that, let’s take a quick look at the heatmaps guide:

hotjar.com/heatmaps is the main page of this guide. Readers will find a very extensive introduction into the topic and why they’re important. Including a video, audio version, and FAQ section. 

And then there are sub-articles:

All inside the /heatmaps subfolder for proper SEO structure.

This is how it looks in the real world:

And it gets even better:

It’s not just a pure traffic effort. It shapes the positioning of the entire company. Hotjar is known for Heatmaps. But over the years they added several products. Like feedback collection, surveys, and 1:1 user interview tools. And to position the company strong in all of those product categories, they use guides to say “Hey! We’re here and we’re an authority!”.

If there’s some solid search demand for what you do, maybe try Hotjar’s strategy.

P.S.: Here’s a service where you can find top-notch writers (some even wrote for Shopify).

P.P.S.: Hotjar’s strategy is similar to what Veed, Miro, and Canva are doing. (s/o to Harry from Marketing Examples).

P.P.P.S.: There are 3 Shopify apps that just exist to install Hotjar.

TODAY’S ISSUE IS BROUGHT TO YOU BY AppStoreResearch

No matter if you’re just starting to build your app or already serving hundreds of thousands of merchants; understanding the needs, pains, and desires of your audience has to be a crucial part of your product and marketing strategy.

Now, one way to do this is to interview your existing customers. And while this is for sure important, it doesn’t give you a true inside look into the thoughts and decision-making processes of merchants that aren’t yet your customers. Wouldn’t it be amazing if you could speak directly to your competitor’s customers and learn what you could do better so they’ll sign up for your app instead?

Well, you’re in luck.

My buddy Jonathan Kennedy built AppStoreResearch for you. It’s a premium service that is being used by leading Shopify app companies (Pushowl, Kimonix, Convertwise, and more). They all use it to book 1-1 research interviews with real Shopify merchants. And heck; they’re seeing amazing results.

Wanna target participants by role? Or by category? Or by apps they use? No problem. Recruit, schedule and pay your research participants - all in one place. Only available on AppStoreResearch. It’s really that good.

Now you.

Try AppStoreResearch today by clicking here.

Did you notice this? If you scroll on Gorgias’ gorgeous (sry…) homepage, a neat little CTA widget appears. This way, the visitors always have an opportunity to sign up or book a demo. Not bad.

I analyzed 90+ “Book a Demo” pages of Shopify Plus Certified partners

This was exhausting but worth it.

Most Shopify Plus Certified partners aren’t self-serving. The usual funnel is:

  1. Visit the website.

  2. Visit the “Book a Demo” page.

  3. Book a demo.

  4. Get a demo.

  5. Buy.

And so the demo page plays a critical role. It’s early in the funnel and if you can’t convince merchants to request a demo, you’re losing an opportunity. To see what the big boys are doing I took a look at every single demo page of Shopify Plus Certified partners (agencies + tech).

I would have liked to give you a straightforward conclusion on what to do, but all pages look quite differently. I mean, yes, they all have an intake form, a pitch and some form of social proof. That’s the base framework everyone’s working with. But depending on the industry, use case and audience, all those partners had a slightly different approach.

So instead of trying to give you any sort of advice, I screenshotted all demo pages for you. You can access the folder with the screenshots here. Feel free to share it with your teams or agencies. 

Interesting: Since Shop Circle offers a wide range of apps (42), they offer a “Tech stack audit” instead of a single demo. This doesn’t only fit their business model, but it’s also framed more as a service than a task you have to do (= listen to a demo). Smart move.

  1. They’re cookin’: Shopify & X collabo.

  2. Exit: Aftersell was acquired by Rokt. Here’s the only tweet you need to read.

  3. More Aftersell: Unusual Twitter bio. I love the social proof.

  4. Cloud: Shopify joins Google Cloud Marketplace.

Thanks for reading. Next week, same time?

If someone forwarded this newsletter to you, you A) have some good friends and B) should hit the button below to stay in the loop about the Shopify partner ecosystem. It’s free: