Matt Turned 10 Years of Amazon Sales Experience to Transform eCommerce Forever

Most Shopify merchants start with the storefront. Matt starts with the search box, because a decade of selling physical products on Amazon taught him that the buying decision happens before anyone forms an opinion about the brand. 

Not a theme problem, but a visibility problem: where the product and collection pages rank, whether there is social proof on them, and whether they answer the question at all. That view became matthapgood.co.

What makes Matt’s story worth reading isn’t just the Amazon-to-Shopify crossover. It’s what he does once he is inside a store. To prove the orders are already there, he pulls the merchant’s own Search Console and shows them the keywords they are paying Google to buy back through ads. It works well enough that he now sells the diagnosis as a fixed 24-hour product, and sometimes tells the store owner not to spend the money at all.

About Matt

Matt is the founder and SEO consultant behind matthapgood.co, a solo Shopify SEO and AI-search consultancy built on a simple premise: the boring, compounding work is what grows an online store, not another ad campaign. 

He spent ten years selling physical products on Amazon before crossing to the other side of the table, where nobody visits your store, they type a search, scan the results, read the reviews, and buy. He now works with established UK ecommerce merchants doing £1m to £5m, and draws a line at stores under £30k a month.

He took his own site from roughly 400 to 5,700 organic clicks a month on title tags, clear H1s, internal linking, killed duplicate pages and schema, then did the same for a Welsh trade merchant whose product pages, collection pages and checkout were quietly losing buyers. 

The consultancy now sells that diagnosis as a product: a free Revenue Snapshot, and a £750 24-Hour Revenue X-Ray credited against the first month. Matt runs all of it solo, from the Algarve, and says the day he hires account managers is the day he becomes the thing he sells against.

Key Takeaways

• Matt took matthapgood.co from roughly 400 to 5,700 organic clicks a month using title tags, one clear H1 per page, internal linking, killed duplicate pages, a clean sitemap, and schema.
• The fastest lever he has found in a store is internal linking plus fixing titles on pages already ranking position 8 to 15, because those pages already exist and already rank.
• On the Welsh merchant’s store, product pages carried duplicate manufacturer descriptions and titles that were just SKU codes. After the rewrite, traffic moved in about six to eight weeks and revenue lagged another month, because the pages that had to climb were the commercial ones rather than blog content.
• The 24-Hour Revenue X-Ray costs £750, comes back within a day, and is credited against the first month of work. The finding that shows up in almost every store is pages ranking position 6 to 15 with weak or missing title tags.
• Matt works only with stores doing £30k a month or more, because below that the problem is usually the offer, the margins, or the product, and there is not enough transaction data to read.

The Interview

AI search is now sending buyers to product pages that were never optimised for it. What are you doing differently to a Shopify store today that you were not doing two years ago, and what have you stopped bothering with?

Two years ago we optimized for a human skimming a blue link. Now I write the first line of every key page to be liftable – a direct, self-contained answer ChatGPT or Google’s AI can quote without needing the rest of the page. Headings framed as real questions, specs in plain text instead of trapped in images or PDFs, schema so machines can parse it. I wrote the method up at matthapgood.co/get-cited-by-chatgpt.

What I’ve stopped bothering with: keyword-stuffed 2,000-word intros and chasing tiny tweaks on page-two terms. AI doesn’t reward padding. It rewards whoever gives the clearest answer in the fewest words.

Ten years selling on Amazon is a very different business from running a Shopify store. What did Amazon teach you about how customers actually find and buy a product that most Shopify owners get wrong on day one?

Amazon beats the romance out of you fast. Nobody “visits your store.” They type a search, scan the results, read the reviews, and buy – the whole decision happens before they’ve formed any opinion about your brand. The search box IS the shop.

You say reviews and search visibility make or break a brand long before the storefront does. What did you watch fail on Amazon that convinced you of that, and what does the Shopify equivalent of that failure look like?

On Amazon I watched genuinely good products die because they launched with no reviews and got buried in search – page five for their own main keyword. A better mousetrap nobody could find. Reviews were the trust layer that unlocked the click; without them, a listing was invisible even when it technically ranked.

The Shopify equivalent is a beautiful store with no search visibility and no social proof on the product page. You’re page two of Google, ChatGPT never mentions you, and the handful who do land don’t trust you enough to buy. Same death, just slower – because on Shopify you can paper over it with a bit of paid traffic and fool yourself for a year.

Your own site went from roughly 400 to 5,700 organic clicks a month doing what you call the boring work. Name the specific boring things, and which one moved the number first.

The boring things: a real title tag and meta description on every page, one clear H1 that matches what people actually search, internal links from strong pages to weak ones, killing duplicate and thin pages, a clean sitemap, schema, and answering the question in the first sentence so an AI can lift it.

The one that moved the number first was internal linking plus fixing titles on pages already ranking in positions 8 to 15 – striking distance. You’re not creating demand, you’re stopping Google ignoring pages you already have. Cheapest, fastest lever every time.

The Welsh merchant you work with went from a few hundred clicks a month to tens of thousands in organic revenue. What was structurally broken on that store when you took it on, and how long before the revenue actually followed the traffic?

Structurally broken: hundreds of product pages carrying duplicate manufacturer descriptions, titles that were just SKU codes, collection pages with no copy at all, and a shipping setup quietly strangling the checkout. Google had nothing unique to rank, and the buyers who did arrive bounced at the cart.

We rewrote the copy, the titles and the internal structure, and fixed the shipping friction. Traffic moved in about six to eight weeks. Revenue lagged another month, because the pages that had to climb were the commercial ones, not blog fluff – and because I’d rather rank the pages that pay. It compounds. Boring work always does.

Your pitch is contrarian: stop spending more on ads, go find the traffic you already own. How do you make that case to a merchant who is currently profitable on paid and scared to touch it?

I don’t tell them to switch the ads off. I show them the money they’re renting. I pull their Search Console and show forty-odd keywords sitting position 8 to 15 – demand that already exists, that they’re currently paying Google to buy back through ads. Then I show one competitor outranking them, for free, on a term they pay for every day.

Framed as maths, it stops being ideological. You can keep paying rent forever, or spend a fraction once and own the asset. The paid campaigns stay exactly where they are. Organic just plugs the leak underneath them.

You have drawn a line at £30k+/mo stores. What breaks when you take on a store below that, and what does a merchant at that revenue level have that a smaller one does not?

Below thirty grand a month the problem usually isn’t visibility – it’s the offer, the margins or the product. SEO can’t fix any of those, and I’d be selling a nine-month play to a merchant who needs sales this week. That’s how you take someone’s money and disappoint them.

What a 30k-plus store has is enough traffic and transactions that the data tells the truth. I can find real striking-distance keywords, real revenue leaks, real winning pages, because there’s signal to read. Under that level, you’re guessing. I’d be optimizing noise, and they’d feel every penny in the price.

Walk us through what a Revenue X-Ray actually surfaces. What is the finding that shows up most often, and what is the one you find in maybe one store in twenty that changes everything?

The 24-Hour Revenue X-Ray (matthapgood.co/x-ray) is exactly what it sounds like. Give me access to your store and your Google data in the morning, and within a day I tell you the truth: why you’re getting no sales, whether it’s fixable, whether it’s worth fixing, and the three things costing you the most right now in priority order. No 45-minute discovery call. £750, and if we go on to work together, it comes straight off your first month.

The finding that shows up almost every time: pages ranking in positions 6 to 15 with weak or missing title tags – revenue sitting one nudge from page one. The one I find in maybe one store in twenty, the one that changes everything: a store quietly dropped from search. A stray canonical tag, a noindex, or duplicate URLs telling Google to ignore its best pages. The owner is convinced they have an ads or conversion problem. They’ve actually been half-invisible to Google for months, and nobody ever caught it. Sometimes the honest answer is “don’t fix this, don’t spend the money” – and that’s part of what they’re paying for.

SEO and CRO pull in different directions more often than agencies admit. Give us a case where the change that would have won the ranking would have cost the merchant conversions, and what you did.

Classic one: a collection page ranking well precisely because it’s long and keyword-rich, with a wall of text above the products. Great for Google, miserable for the buyer who has to scroll past an essay to reach anything they can add to cart. Winning the ranking that way was costing conversions.

What I did was keep the copy but move it below the product grid, and leave a tight two-line intro up top with the keyword in the H1. Google still reads the full text; the buyer sees products immediately. You rarely have to choose between ranking and converting – you usually just have to reorder the page.

What is one growth initiative in your own business that surprised you, either by working far better or far worse than you expected?

Free tools surprised me – I built a couple of tiny single-purpose calculators and generators, gave them away with no email gate, and expected a bit of goodwill and nothing more. What I actually got was steady long-tail traffic and, more usefully, ChatGPT and Google’s AI citing them – which sends me exactly the merchant already trying to solve the problem I fix. An afternoon of work each.

The flip side: long-form guides I sweated over for days convert far worse than a two-line answer that happens to rank. The effort and the payoff almost never sit where you’d expect them to.

Running this from Portugal while serving UK merchants is a deliberate setup. What does that buy you, and what has it cost you in deals you did not win?

It buys me focus and headspace. No commute, no office, no agency overhead to feed – so I can price on value, take fewer clients, and only the ones I actually want. UK hours overlap fine and everything I do is remote anyway, so the work never notices where I am. Better weather to think in, healthier lifestyle, fewer distractions, lower drag on the business.

What it’s cost me is the deals that want a face in the room. A few larger merchants went with an agency they could sit across a table from, and I don’t win the ones who equate “local” with “serious”. I’ve stopped chasing them. The clients who care about results have never once cared where I sit.

You are a solo operator selling against agencies with account managers and retainers. What is the ceiling on that, and are you building toward a team, a product, or staying exactly where you are?

The ceiling is hours. I trade time for money and there are only so many stores I can genuinely go deep on. An agency scales by adding headcount; I won’t, because the day I hire account managers I become the exact thing I sell against.

Where I’m building is productising the front end. The free Revenue Snapshot lets a merchant get a first read without so much as a discovery call, and the paid 24-Hour X-Ray turns the deep diagnosis into a fixed, fast product instead of an open-ended retainer – £750, refunded against the first month if we go on to work together. Free tools and content handle the top of the funnel while I sleep. Not a team, and not staying frozen either. A leaner version of me that scales without watering down the actual work.

Lessons for Founders

• Fix the store pages that already rank before you chase new keywords. Matt is direct about this: “You’re not creating demand, you’re stopping Google ignoring pages you already have.” Internal linking and titles on position 8 to 15 pages moved his own numbers first.
• Show the merchant the maths instead of arguing the strategy. Rather than telling profitable stores to cut ads, Matt pulls their Search Console and shows them the keywords they pay Google to buy back every day. The paid campaigns stay exactly where they are.
• Turn away the stores your service cannot help. Below £30k a month, Matt says the problem is usually the offer, the margins, or the product, and there is not enough data to read. Selling a nine-month play to a merchant who needs sales this week is how you disappoint people.
• Reorder the page instead of choosing between ranking and converting. On a collection page with a wall of text above the products, Matt kept the copy, moved it below the product grid, and left a two-line intro with the keyword in the H1 so buyers see products immediately.
• Productize the store diagnosis so the sale does not depend on your calendar. The free Revenue Snapshot and the £750 24-Hour Revenue X-Ray give merchants a read without a discovery call, and the fee is credited against the first month of work.

For more founder stories and growth strategies from operators who have built from the ground up, read more at eFounder.club.