132: How to Get Your E-Commerce Website Found on Google: LIVE SEO STRATEGY

In this episode, Jules White is joined by Carly Parkin from Carly's Candles for a live website and SEO audit. Carly sells eco-friendly home fragrances - candles, reed diffusers, and wax melts - and wants her website to do more of the heavy lifting when it comes to traffic and sales.

Jules walks through Carly's Shopify site in real time, identifying quick wins across SEO and conversion that Carly can act on straight away, without needing to overhaul everything at once.

Key Takeaways:

Getting found on Google: Jules explains how to use Google Search Console to understand which search queries your site is already showing up for, and how to use that data to identify the pages with the most potential to improve.

Google Merchant Centre for e-commerce: Jules highlights why this free Google tool is a must for product-based businesses, and how connecting it to Shopify can help your products appear in shopping results and AI search.

Targeting keywords on the right pages: Jules shows how Carly's collections page is already ranking for "eco-friendly candle" and explains exactly how to strengthen that - from the page title and H1 through to adding descriptive text and updating internal link wording.

Font size and mobile readability: A simple but often overlooked fix — Jules explains why font size matters for both conversions and SEO, and what Google's minimum recommendation actually means in practice.

Resources mentioned in this episode:

• SE Ranking: keyword research and SEO tracking tool
• Episode 108: Why Your Website Feels So Overwhelming - and How to Make It Easier 
• Episode 125: Website Accessibility Basics: Small Changes That Help People and Search Engines With Rachel Mess
• Book a Power Hour with Jules
• Visit Carly's Website

Transcript

[00:00:00] Introduction & Goals

Jules White: Welcome back to the Website Success Show. It's Jules here, and today I have a special guest with me. I am welcoming Carly from Carly's Candles.

We are diving into a website SEO audit for Carly's website today. So hopefully by the end of this episode we'll have identified one or two key areas you can focus on to reach your goals over the next six months. So welcome, Carly. It's great to have you here.

Carly Parkin: Hi. Yeah, thank you so much for having me. I really appreciate it.

I welcome. Excited.

Jules White: I am. I'm really excited to dive into your website as well. So before we start, quick question, which I always ask is, if we were to meet in six months' time and you were telling me the amazing things that were happening in your business, how would your website be helping with that?

Carly Parkin: So I'm really hoping my website is actually going to really increase in traffic.

And I'd really love a higher conversion rate and also a higher spend, or a higher average spend with my customers. And it is definitely one of the arms that I really need to focus on in sort of the next six months to six to twelve months really. So actually I see it as being quite a big proportion.

Of my business growth in the next six months.

Jules White: Yeah, definitely. It's really important, I think, especially for e-commerce businesses, it is really important. Your website is your shop, so, you know.

Really important to focus on that.

[00:01:22] About Carly's Candles

Jules White: So, tell us a little bit about your business and how your website currently sort of sits within your marketing activities.

Carly Parkin: I create home fragrances, which are all about clean living and those people that really want to just make their home a safer place. So we have all our candles, reed diffusers, wax melts.

They all smell great, obviously because I make them. But yeah, they're really for that person that's slightly more conscious about waste and about the toxins that we are exposed to in our day-to-day life.

With regards to my website and my marketing, I'm generally a bit rubbish to be fair.

It's kind of just there and it's ticking over and it's great. When I get a good, I've, you know, I've just had a big campaign, so I've had a brilliant amount of traffic directed to my website, but it's not doing the work that it needs to do behind the scenes in terms of coming up in Google. And I'm just not really utilising it as best as I can, so.

Jules White: Mm-hmm.

Carly Parkin: Yeah.

Jules White: So how are people finding your website at the moment? Is it social media, or are you paying for ads or anything like that?

Carly Parkin: No, not paying for any ads.

It's all through social media. My email marketing, obviously reminding people and getting my business cards and promotional flyers and stuff out to people when I'm out and about at events, so that then they've met me, they know me, they know where to go for their next thing. So, yeah, it's kind of a mixture.

But there's no strategy. I've got no strategy with my website.

Jules White: Yet. Not yet. I mean, the fact that you've just said you've got an email list, that's good. That's definitely helpful. And not just relying on social media.

So yeah, I think what we'll dive into today is we'll start sharing my screen and we'll have a little look at your website and just see if there's anything that we can do for quick wins realistically. I think you said you wanted to focus on specifically SEO. So we'll have a little look. There will always be conversion stuff, because I can't help myself. So there will always be things that we'll talk about around conversion as well.

And they do go hand in hand as well. I think you know that if people come to your website and then they immediately bounce back to Google, it doesn't send a good signal to Google, and that can harm your rankings as well, really.

Carly Parkin: Okay.

[00:03:49] Current Website Strategy

Jules White: So do you track anything with your website at the moment? Do you track anything in terms of where the traffic is coming from, what you are actually showing up for in Google versus what you are maybe not? I think that's something that a lot of people don't necessarily do.

Carly Parkin: No, I don't do any of that.

The only tracking and bits that I kind of look at are in the back of house for Shopify. So it will show me how many people I've had live on my website, very basic, but I genuinely don't look at anything else.

[00:04:21] Google Search Console

Jules White: Okay. And do you have Google Search Console set up for your site?

Do you get little notifications from Google saying there's a problem with this page, or congratulations, you've had 20 hits from Google this month, or something like that? That's normally where people know that they've got it set up.

Carly Parkin: Yes. So yes, I have, because I do remember briefly having an email from them saying about how many hits I'd had. Yes.

Jules White: Yeah, so that's an important thing to do. So Google Search Console is a free tool from Google. It helps Google to understand our website better, because there's a little tab in there for our sitemap.

And I would definitely suggest going and doing that. Make sure that your sitemap is actually submitted to Google. It's very simple and easy to do. You can literally, next time you get one of those emails or find one of those emails, click on it and then it will take you through to your Google Search Console.

And that, even just looking at that alone can, for some businesses, be really helpful.

So I can see some of this from my SEO tools that I see from the front end.

So I can see you are getting, yeah, at the moment right now you're not getting that much traffic to your website from Google. You know that anyway.

You know that that's happening. It's something that obviously is on your list as part of the reason why we are talking today, because we've talked about this in the past.

But it looks like you did have a little spike in November all of a sudden, and that was an organic spike.

That might have been leading up to Christmas or it might have been that you had a particular thing that one of your candles shows up for that suddenly became a trend.

So yeah, it's definitely worth sort of looking at this information.

Carly Parkin: Yeah.

Jules White: I mean, traffic fluctuates, and especially with Google and with everything being a bit up in the air with Google right now anyway, with AI overviews. And actually, just before Christmas, one of the things that happened was Google started adding shopping results in the AI overview. And we started also seeing that in ChatGPT as well, where we could literally find shopping results within AI search.

Yeah. So it's definitely worth making sure that that kind of stuff is set up.

[00:06:23] Google Merchant Centre

Jules White: Do you have Google Merchant Centre set up?

Carly Parkin: Is that the one with like my address and where I'm looking?

Jules White: No, that's your Google Business Profile.

Carly Parkin: Oh, okay.

Jules White: So Google Merchant Centre is actually one that's really important for e-commerce businesses.

And what that actually does is it's specifically for product-based businesses. Again, it's another free tool from Google.

That then helps Google to show up, you know, when you get the shopping results that come up in a search results page.

The reason that they come up is because Google Merchant Centre is set up, and you can actually, Google can understand the information about your website in a structured way, which is something we'll look at when we look at the front end of your website.

We'll look and see if your website is structured well, but I would definitely suggest that. So looking at some of those tools from Google will immediately help you understand some of the things, as I say, that you are showing up for versus that you aren't. And so some of the words you need to increase on your website.

And then the Google Merchant Centre with Shopify — I think you can literally link it to your website and it will then draw in all the information directly from your website.

Carly Parkin: Oh, okay.

Jules White: It's something you can use for Google Ads as well.

If you did want to run Google Ads down the line, I would say not to do that until your pages are converting well and until you know what would be some good words to target with the ads, really.

Carly Parkin: Okay.

Jules White: But having that Google Merchant Centre I think could help to generate some traffic and hopefully generate some sales like immediately, really. So I would definitely suggest doing that.

[00:07:52] Keyword Research & Rankings

Jules White: So some of the things that we are seeing that you're showing up for — things like eco-friendly candle. That's good. And so this shows us the amount of searches, and this is set to the UK, the amount of searches roughly each month for these particular search terms.

So, Carly is a random thing — that's like the word Carly's. It's showing it as a local and a commercial search term. Well, let's have a little look at what the search results pages are. You get these random things there, but you don't normally see that volume, search volume for that.

It might just be that there's lots of cafes in the UK called Carly's, or lots of whatever called Carly's, that Google is then associating with a commercial search intent. But anyway, you're showing up in position three for that. So that's a good thing. And for you, that then becomes a branded search.

And we really want the people who know about us to find us.

So Carly's Candles, if you are showing up for that, which it doesn't necessarily look like you are particularly. But maybe that's something you could build in — I don't know, I haven't looked at your website to see if you've got an about page yet, but that's something you could build in, making sure that the people who know about you, the people who've maybe seen you at a local event, if they type that into Google.

Or ask ChatGPT, then they can actually find that information.

And so you'll see this kind of stuff in your Google Search Console. What you'll see though is the amount of times that you've shown up for the search rather than the actual search volume. These are SEO tools that I use.

So this one is called SE Ranking, and you can get a free trial with that, where you can get a certain amount of searches a day and it will tell you how difficult something is to show up for in Google search results.

The average search volume each month, and also if you put your website in, it'll show you the average position of where you're showing up.

I find this really helpful. I'll link to this in the show notes as well.

But even within Google Search Console, what you'll be seeing in there is you'll be seeing these as search queries, and then you can click on them and it will tell you which pages are being associated with that particular search query.

So it gives you an idea of also the average position that you're showing up for in Google.

So if I was looking at eco-friendly candle, for example, it's showing that there's a search volume of 320 a month, which is good. It's not like a thousand where it's more likely to be much more competitive.

It's a commercial search intent, which means people are looking to buy something as well. And you are showing up in position 16, which is not a bad position to be in.

So it's kind of towards the bottom of page two on Google. But it's something where you could definitely improve that fairly easily.

So if I was looking for the keywords to focus on first, that's where I would be looking. And also it's showing it's got a search difficulty of four. So it says effortless here. Nothing is effortless in SEO, but we're wanting to look — these are out of a hundred, so if they're in green, if they're under about 20, then it's definitely something that's a bit easier to look at.

So what I would be doing for you is I would go into your Google Search Console, click on that search query.

You'll see it in there where it says queries. If you go into the performance tab in Google Search Console and click where it says queries, and look at these search queries of eco-friendly candle — whether it's got a dash in or not, you can have a look between those.

And you can actually filter as well. So you could do a filter on there of anything that contains either eco-friendly candle or eco candle or those kind of things, and see which pages of your website are being associated with that, and whether there's one that's kind of strongly being associated with that.

It looks like it's your collections page that's showing up for that, which is really good. Collection pages, especially for e-commerce sites, are often really powerful.

So what we could actually do is we could pop over to your collections page and see if there's anything we can improve with that page really.

So if we go to shop — and actually, one thing I would say is, if I'm coming into your homepage, is there an easy way for me to get to that collections page?

Carly Parkin: Okay. So I need, really.

Jules White: Yeah, so I would be having something in here on your homepage. Ideally, we want people to understand as soon as they come into our homepage what we do, how we're going to make their life better, and what they need to do to get it. And the what they need to do to get it here could be something like, shop our best sellers, shop our collections, or something like that.

And then ideally what you would want to happen is that collections page that you are linking to — you would want that to say something like, if you were trying to target that page for eco-friendly candles.

Carly Parkin: Mm-hmm.

Jules White: Shop our eco-friendly candles would probably be a better link or button text to use for that particular search term, because that then sends a really strong signal to Google that that page is about eco-friendly candles.

Carly Parkin: Okay.

Jules White: So then on that collections page, you would make sure that the page title and the page description contains that term eco-friendly candles.

And you can use those variations of it as well.

So if you see like it's eco candles, environmentally friendly, or you know, you'll have thought about this, no doubt, in terms of what does eco-friendly mean. What are other ways people might describe that? What are the synonyms, what are the different, related search terms? Put into Google that eco-friendly candle would also then show up for, and then using those throughout that page as well can be really helpful.

[00:13:47] Homepage Audit

Jules White: Okay, so coming back to your website and your homepage. So as I say, what we want to then see as soon as you come into your homepage is for it to be really clear what we are, what we're helping people with, and how they can get it really.

One thing I would say — it is a bit of a conversion thing, but it actually is an SEO thing as well — is I would look at the font size on your website. It's a bit small. You don't want people to have to get their glasses out to buy from you. And I think you've actually got, when I checked, your font size set — I think it's a 16, which is the minimum that we really want to have.

Google doesn't like fonts below 16 pixels.

Carly Parkin: Okay.

Jules White: I very rarely use less than an 18 on a website, just purely because 16 is often very small and sometimes 18 is too small as well. It does depend on what font you're using, and if you're using a font that is quite slim lines, which yours, it looks like it is, yeah, you might find that even just going up a couple of font sizes makes a big difference to how visually easy it is to look at.

One thing I would just do is check on the mobile version. This might not be exactly what you see on your phone because it does just render it slightly differently.

But even with that, I would be thinking, okay, this still looks a bit small. Sometimes we can think, oh, on mobile I need to go smaller because it's a smaller screen.

If anything, we need to kind of go the other way. So this is a nice size font here, but I would just be upping this one a little bit.

And also the button font as well — up the size of that. So we want our button to be really obvious, and the text on the button should be really, really obvious as well. And even with this button, maybe having — this is where you could have, rather than shop, it's shop our eco-friendly candles or something like that, or browse our candle collections or something — you'd sort of put some thought into that in terms of what you want that to go through to, really.

So the difference on mobile versus desktop — obviously we can see the font a bit better. Yeah. Whereas here it's kind of buried a little bit in the background. Ideally, what you want is for the words to stand out. So maybe just making this heading a bit bigger.

And definitely this one a bit bigger, but maybe you just need something like an opaque background overlay that then makes it easier to read.

And simple things like that can really help with conversions. So if you are already getting traffic to your website, then that can really help to make the most of that traffic, really make sure that people are able to take the action you want them to.

So is this the collections page? Let's have a little look. Yes. It looks like that's the collections page. Okay.

[00:16:36] Collections Page Audit

Jules White: So coming into this page, one thing you can do that can really help to improve search rankings is making sure that any page that we want to be showing up on Google has a minimum of 250 words on it.

So if I was wanting this page to show up for eco-friendly candles, I would be having a paragraph at the top of the page talking about what eco-friendly candles means and why people would want to explore that.

You may have a similar sort of thing on your homepage, but this page is more specifically about the eco-friendly side of it.

And then maybe you have — I don't know if you've got different collections there. Are they all going on?

Carly Parkin: It looks quite messy, to be fair.

Carly Parkin: I didn't realise how messy it looked.

Jules White: It doesn't look messy, I don't think. I think it just, there's — it definitely could be easier for people to understand where to go. And it's worth even thinking about, is it immediately obvious to people how to shop the collections? There are always simple tweaks that you can do.

So even something as simple as having — like, you've got Autumn Collection here. That should now be spring's collection or summer collection, and then maybe move the autumn collection down, because people still like shopping the different seasons.

But just moving the spring collection up to the top is something that might encourage people to be more likely to click through there.

You've got this review us on Trustpilot here. I think potentially that might be doing more harm than good.

I don't know if you track how many people do actually click on that and go through to your Trustpilot.

But ideally, if you were using your Trustpilot thing here, what you'd want it to say is, for example, like, trusted by 150 plus eco-friendly shoppers on Trustpilot, or something along those lines.

And then that would link to your Trustpilot.

You could maybe at the bottom of your page have something around like, review us on Trustpilot or something like that. But I think for here at the top of the page, it's more important for the shopper to be increasing the trust really.

And you could even have that — rather than having this hello bar, this attention bar at the top of your website carousel through different things.

Carly Parkin: Mm-hmm.

Jules White: You could have that trust signal up there of trusted by 150 happy shoppers on Trustpilot, and there, maybe the sign-up.

So you have it as two things that are in there. It's worth spending some time to think about this — about how you can increase trust on your pages.

Yeah. Particularly on the homepage. So if you've got a review where somebody is describing the transformation and how using your candles has helped them, basically having a little something like that here, just below your call to action on your pages.

That can also be really helpful.

So yeah, that's something where you can immediately get trust across and will do more than this review us on Trustpilot, which is probably at the moment just a bit of a distraction really for people, and especially on mobile as well. I think every part of our page is important, but this hero section — this above the scroll, above the fold section, so before people start scrolling down the page — is our most valuable real estate on our website.

And if that thing on that particular part of our page is not performing, then it doesn't need to be there.

It is basically just taking up valuable space. And I would think about that. Just coming back to your homepage on this one, let me go back to your homepage on the mobile version.

Think about if there's a way that you could maybe use this space a bit better here. Because at the moment it's just a picture of the candle.

Maybe you could just squeeze things up a little bit. So if you didn't have that review us on Trustpilot, you maybe would see a little bit more, so people can immediately see when they come in here, like the hand-poured candles.

I would think about what the benefits to people are.

So what's the benefit of it being hand-poured and a soy candle? Maybe that's something to focus on a little bit more in this section.

Carly Parkin: Yeah. Okay.

Jules White: Yeah. And you can flip that, and you could maybe think about what's the downside, what's the problem you are solving here?

And obviously that is the toxins and the sustainability of the candles. Is there a way you can flip that into the positive for people who are coming into your site?

Carly Parkin: Okay.

Jules White: Yeah. So, coming back to the collections page — having at least 250 words here that talks about the fact that it's eco-friendly candles, the benefits to people maybe there as well.

A little thing about the collections. You could even have something within that paragraph at the top of the page — maybe it's, if you like, shop our best sellers. So you don't have to just have it like this.

Or even shop our most popular candle — having that within the paragraph text with the actual link that says our most popular candle is another way to take people to where you want them to go on the website as well. So that's another little trick that you could add in there.

[00:22:01] Page Titles & Descriptions

Jules White: And then let's have a little look at your page titles and descriptions.

So, okay, so we've got collections, Carly's Candle Company here. Ideally, we want this page title to contain the words eco-friendly candle, if that's what we're trying to get this page to show up for.

You don't necessarily need your brand name in every page title, and quite often it's just taking up space.

So you would want that probably in your homepage, maybe in your about page in the page title, but you certainly can use these collection pages better. And this is one of the things that AI can be really helpful for in terms of actually writing these page titles.

So if you tell it, I'm writing a page title for my collections page, my target keyword for this page is eco-friendly candles, please write me a page title — and then just humanise it really. Quite often it comes up with really good stuff anyway.

And the same with your page description as well.

Yeah. So when you write that little paragraph at the top of the page, think about what you can take out of that — around a hundred, between 119 and 135 characters is good for a page description. That if you were looking at a Google search results page, the page title is the blue link that we see.

We used to see them more; we don't see them quite so much now.

And the description is the bit that shows up underneath it.

So ideally, if you can have something that encourages people to take action — so maybe here it would be, shop our eco-friendly candle collections today, or something like that.

Carly Parkin: Yeah.

Jules White: Then that can be really helpful in this description area.

And then, so we've got an H1 and we've got a random H2 with empty text at the beginning, at the top of the page. That might be something to do with this review us on Trustpilot, or it might just be a random thing on the page. But you should be able to see that in Shopify.

And so even in the H1, we would want that to say eco-friendly candle collections or something like that.

So we are targeting that phrase in the H1 as well, if that's what you decide you want this page to show up for.

So this is all sort of based on what we are seeing there. And then what are we seeing here? So, okay, so we want to think of our page like an English essay.

So think of it like you want one heading at the top, which would be shop our eco-friendly collections, and then we want just H2s from there.

So see how we're jumping from H1 to H3. That's not ideal in terms of hierarchy. And I don't even know — oh, so we've got two "all things Christmas."

Carly Parkin: I do, but I've still got all things Christmas on there. That's terrible. You can see how much I dislike my website.

Jules White: Do you know what, I didn't even notice it. So maybe when we up the font size here as well, maybe that will help people to be able to shop.

Carly Parkin: Yeah.

Jules White: Shop through here as well better.

My goal is to make you passionate about this sort of stuff on your own website, because this can make such a big difference, and I think probably then you can see the potential with it.

Carly Parkin: Yeah.

Jules White: And you can see that actually you just need to come in and look at these kinds of things. And these are easy fixes, right? These are things that are not technical. Yes, some of the H1s and H2s can feel technical, but you are familiar with your website builder. You're familiar with Shopify.

This is just the case of going in and tinkering around with them really. I talked about this back in episode 108 of the podcast, where I talk about the different brain modes that we use when we're trying to create our websites and edit our websites and why it all feels so difficult.

And I think this is probably a little bit of that where we end up — I know you said you find it boring — but we end up trying to create the strategy and write the content and do the implementation all in one go.

And it just gets a bit overwhelming. Whereas actually, if you even just go in and write yourself a checklist of, oh, I need to move the all things Christmas and I need to bring spring up to the top, and I need to add a page description — and then just go in with a checklist and do it — you're going to feel amazing having actually ticked all of those things off your to-do list.

And it's going to help Google to understand what you do. And even just if you went in, worked out why you've got two of these — and it might be the desktop version and mobile version; sometimes that can be why you see these duplicates. Or it might be, yeah, you'd have to do some investigation in Shopify as to why that's happening.

But even just if you change those to H2s, which you should be able to do — I would imagine that Shopify would allow you to make those H2 headings.

That will make a big difference because it then tells Google what these pages are that you are linking to.

So even with like bestsellers — it could be rather than bestsellers, bestselling candles. All things Christmas, Christmas gift candles, you know, Christmas candle gifts, spring candle collection.

Even just adding the word candle in there, and especially eco-friendly candle, thinking about different ways you can say eco-friendly as I say — but adding that in sends stronger signals to Google about what this page is about. And also it helps with accessibility as well.

I talked about this a couple of weeks ago. I had Rachel come on from the Inclusive Design Company.

Rachel came on and we had a chat about accessibility, so I will link to that in the show notes as well. But even just that — even if you did nothing more than went in and increased the font size throughout your website if you can.

Ideally, if it's something that you can do it all in one go, that would be really amazing, because then that's a big win.

Thinking about your homepage and just adding something in of shop our bestsellers, shop eco-friendly candles, or shop our bestsellers, or something like that. It's just a little bit easier to navigate and people immediately know they're in the right place when they come to your site.

And then with this page, there's definitely that potential there of adding a paragraph in at the top and changing this hierarchy that can make a big difference. Definitely. Yeah.

So, anything in particular that's kind of stood out to you? I want to stop sharing my screen.

Carly Parkin: Just that I need to get my act together really, and try and stay on top of it.

And like I said before we started recording, just trying to allocate that dedicated time to working on the SEO and just the website in general.

I think will really help, because then I'm kind of like, right, this is my hour that I need to get, like you say, a tick list and just say, this is all the things that you just need to update. I'll feel so much better. And doing it in bite-sized chunks I think will really be good. But I genuinely never thought about the text size.

Jules White: Yeah.

Carly Parkin: I could read it. I was like, oh yeah, that's fine, you know. Not thinking about the customers and what have you. So yeah, that's been really good, and just understanding a bit more, like you say, about the keywords.

Because you hear that all the time — people going, you need to make sure you've got your keywords for your website. And I'm like, but where do I put them? Like, and you don't just want to be repeating the same thing all the time, but in those different ways. So yeah, that's all been very, very interesting.

Jules White: It's one of those things — I think the more you do it and the more you can see where the opportunities are, hopefully, the more you see the results from it as well.

And I think that's where sometimes just having a look at the data, looking at your Google Search Console, looking at Google Analytics as well, and actually thinking, okay, where is traffic coming into my website?

Where are the sales coming through my website as well, because especially with e-commerce, if you've got your analytics all set up properly, you can literally see where people are actually buying from you.

And yeah, it's all about moving it in the right direction and just taking those steps really.

And you won't fix it all in one go — it'll probably take you a good chunk of time to fix it. And it's never fixed. It's never done. Our websites are a living, breathing part of our business, and especially for e-commerce brands. So yeah, it's really important.

Carly Parkin: I do have one very quick question for you.

Jules White: Go for it.

[00:30:03] Seasonal Content Strategy

Carly Parkin: Christmas. So when would you recommend having a page put on that is about Christmas? Because I hear there's lots of different things, and some are like, well you need to put it on, like have it there in the background, just not live for like six months before. Others say, you know, just get it live two months before.

Like, is there a key time for me to start thinking about — obviously mine's already mentioning Christmas, but that will be removed.

Jules White: Well, let me stop you there, because I would not be removing that. You don't want Google to find pages and then not find them, because that's not going to send great signals to Google.

And we don't know when people are looking for Christmas ideas realistically. And also, it might be that they just want to have a browse or they're looking for a particular scent or something like that. So that Christmas page should stay there on your website as a live page.

All year round. I firmly believe in that.

Carly Parkin: Okay.

Jules White: Especially if we go to that and it says Christmas candles or something like that, then it's really important that Google already associates your website with Christmas candles before we get to whatever point people say is the best time to start promoting.

Christmas, obviously if it's, you know, Tesco's or somebody, it's the day after Easter finishes, but it's something that, yeah, I wouldn't be thinking about how I can remove Christmas from my website because it's spring. I would be thinking about, okay, right now Christmas probably isn't a priority page for you.

Yeah, but you certainly don't want to take it away, because you still want Google.

Carly Parkin: Smooth it right down to the bottom, maybe reword it slightly.

Jules White: Absolutely, you can, yeah. And I wouldn't even think too much about rewording it. The only thing I would maybe be doing is at the beginning of the year, changing it. So if you talked about Christmas 2025 last year, as soon as we get into 2026, just change that to Christmas 2026 — looking for early Christmas ideas for 2026. What's the worst thing that happens? Somebody stumbles across that page and they happen to think, oh yeah, maybe I can start thinking about that now.

But you don't need to make big changes to that page. Because it would probably be the things that you were doing outside your page that would then be bringing traffic into that page really. And you might then see the traffic increase to that page once you start doing those other things.

Really. Okay. Let's not give ourselves more.

Carly Parkin: No, no, no.

Jules White: Because we know Christmas is going to come round every year, and we know spring is going to come round every year. So all you're really doing is just rotating where things are appearing on that collections page really — just, okay, it's spring, we need to focus on spring.

And then you probably would bring that onto your homepage, and maybe closer to Christmas you would bring a direct link or an image or something. Almost making like a banner ad for your own homepage that says, shop our Christmas collections.

And it's an image that shows all the Christmas candles or a Christmas tree or something like that. But you would have that on your homepage in, I don't know, after October or something like that. And then it moves into spring, and then it moves into, you know, New Year or cleansing or those kinds of things, really.

Yeah. And that's part of that maintenance of your website. And once you've been through that for a year, you can also then keep a note in your diary. So you know, on the 1st of January — or not on the 1st of January, on like the 6th of January or whenever you're back to work after the kids have gone back — then you are, okay, I know today I need to go in, I need to take the Christmas thing off and put the spring one back in or something like that.

Carly Parkin: Okay.

Jules White: Yeah.

Carly Parkin: Okay.

[00:34:00] Wrap Up & Next Steps

Jules White: Good. So before we finish, I would love you to give your business another little shout out again and let us know where we can connect with you and find out more about what you do.

Carly Parkin: Oh yeah. So yeah, so Carly's Candle Company, all inspired by my kids, who are now six and three. But yeah, you can find me on Instagram, Facebook. Oh, I'm embarrassingly on TikTok, but I feel like, you know, but it's there. And obviously my website, which will be all shiny and new and more organised in the coming weeks, but yeah.

Jules White: So it's carlyscandles.co.uk.

Carly Parkin: That's it.

Jules White: Fantastic. And I would say, in terms of shiny and new, this can sometimes be a problem where people think they've got to change everything all at once, but Google actually prefers not everything changing at once.

Like, change things incrementally.

Go back into your Google Search Console and you'll see a little bar at the top where you can submit a URL of your website, and then you can tell Google basically to re-crawl this website. So things have changed — please re-crawl this website. So it's worth doing that when you've made any sort of changes to pages.

Once you're getting more traffic through to your website, it's not as critical to do that because Google may then be crawling through every day. But until you get to that point where you're getting lots of traffic, it's certainly worth doing that when you've made some edits to your website.

Carly Parkin: Okay. Amazing.

Jules White: Fantastic.

Carly Parkin: I'll let you know when I've done some.

Jules White: Yeah, absolutely. And let me know when you start seeing the traffic improving, which will definitely happen, and getting more sales.

That's the important part as well.

Carly Parkin: Yes, exactly.

Jules White: So if this episode has made you think about your website SEO, and you would like to explore getting some help with that, you can book an audit where I actually dive in and look at the most important things to focus on for your website first. Or you can book a Power Hour where we're together on Zoom over the course of an hour and really diving into those priority fixes that you can make straight away.

So thank you so much for listening. Thanks Carly, for being here, and we'll see you soon. Bye.