Louis Smith

I've made it to 9 months living in Dubai:

1. I've not bought a $70,000 Lambo
2. lobster is not something I dine on
3. I don't own a 5-figure watch
4. I've done 1 brunch
5. been to 1 beach club
6. I don't shop at the Dubai Mall
7. I don't drink Matcha lattes daily
8. still haven't stayed at the Atlantis hotel
9. we don't splurge $200 on fancy restaurants

Are we boring?

How life REALLY looks for my little family:

I take my son to nursery, and pick him up
We enjoy time at the beach (Free, woooo)
I work from home 5 days a week
I bought a 10-year-old Audi
My fave coffee costs £1
I respect other cultures
I've met 100+ awesome people
I run in the desert under the sunset

----

Social media shows a side to Dubai.

But it's an incredible place for families.

Today I had breakfast in the world's tallest building.

I spent the morning with my wife.

It cost £25 per person for eggs, coffee and juice.

But more importantly I got to "log off" for 3 hours.

That's the good thing about being remote.

I work with dream clients. But I get to manage my time.

We very rarely do stuff in the week.

It was nice to reflect on the last 6 months:

- smiled at how tough the first week was in Dubai
– hired to help two £30m+ brands
– hit 100K LinkedIn followers
- joined Dubai's official creators' hub
- happy our 2-year-old has taken to life here
- also glad my wife has found her feet in Dubai

We even did a shopping spree in Dubai's new luxury Primark.

It cost £67 and we got an official Primark carrier bag for £2.

Anyway, back to work.

Let's see how the next 6 months go.

Dubai has not been the same over the last 48 hours.

I want to thank you so much for the messages.

It's been scary and heartbreaking for the UAE.

But the UAE government and public support have been incredible.

Proud to be here.

We’re staying indoors for now and keeping safe.

So I'm teaching my son about Shopify.

Stay safe ❤️

P.S My DM is open for anyone struggling and wanting to chat.

Agentic Shopping tip: how to see if your store is ready for shopping agents. Try these 9 steps (takes 2 minutes):

1. fire up your product page in Chrome
2. right click, inspect page
3. toggle on accessibility tree
4. see how agentic view your page
5. fire up the AI assistance
6. prompt it to analyse your product tree
7. export the AI analysis into your task manager
8. see which changes will improve your SKU template
9. make changes to product template
(HTML labels, buttons, missing alt tags, H1,H2 etc)

Shopping agents struggle with your poor UX and code structure.

There's 3 big winners here:

- you improve the semantic code
- you help your SEO strategy
- your organic shopping improves

Agents look at page rendering, but they can ignore your page's CSS. They may just use your Shopify page's accessibility tree.

Have you checked yours?

3 months ago, my client was worried about AI stealing clicks, but we've seen a 143% click increase.

And £80,535 to £151,266 YoY revenue increase.

Great numbers for our Shopify SEO campaign to date.

9 areas that's helped the revenue improve:

1. fixed Shopify crawls and bug issues that can hurt clicks

2. picked hero products and improved them for intent

3. created new collections to target specific search intent

4. updated schema as it wasn't great

5. tweaked the homepage to help collections rank

6. improved our authority using our 1000s of loving reviews

7. dropped internal links in to help the buying journey

8. updated the product Shopify metafields

9. let Google do its thing

87.8% revenue growth YoY.

-----

No SEO strategy is the same.

I work on what moves the needle for your Shopify brand and helps lower customer acquisition cost.

Have you made any of the changes to help your Shopify SEO?

I've crossed $300K on Upwork, kept a 100% rating and stayed in the top 1% of freelancers. It's changed my life and business. Here's 5 tips that helped me:

1. go above and beyond the contract

The part 99% of freelancers skip.

Why not deliver 10% extra of what's asked?

(I've slogged so many extra unpaid hours)

- send the opportunity the client didn't ask for
- find a problem they didn't know about
- make the client's life easier

I've had a lot of repeat work doing the above.

2. niche down (helps you and the client)

I don't offer "digital marketing" - I used to lol

I offer revenue growth for eCom brands.

What's that old saying?

The riches are in the niches.

A top 1% specialist wins vs a generalist on Upwork.

3. focus on ROI not deliverables

I made this mistake 11 years ago.

Clients don't want a 200-page report.

They want actions for revenue.

Frame your work around business impact.

Show what your work is worth in $.

Connect your output to their bottom line

If clients see possible ROI, they stop questioning your rate.

4. Give advice, not just answers

Be the consultant who builds the bridge from A to B.

Share what you're seeing with other clients.

Can you share trends? Then give your opinion?

Clients want teams who think.

5. invest time into learning

Watch Netflix, I do.

But I give 1 hour+ daily to learning.

You didn't need me to tell you this.

Look at our indsutry.

Shopify, SEO, AI, agentic search, man big changes.

You have to keep learning.

Clients are relying on you.

-----

WHAT IT ALL COMES DOWN TO?

Freelancing can be rough.

Being consistent and giving value goes a long way with people.

Upwork has opened a lot of doors for my family.

$250K was a goal of mine.

I've hit it.

What's freelancing done for you?

I was hired 6 months ago to work with a Shopify team on their SEO.

In the first 30 days I found 100+ SEO/Shopify issues.

But we chose to work on the 10% that moves the needle.

I recently logged into my eCom client's analytics to find a 9% impressions drop but a 27% click increase to their product catalogue.

Shopify, Google, and ChatGPT are making changes to shopping.

So my strategy is very product-led to acquire customers that buy.

You'll notice Google's AI overviews (and busy search pages) causes volatility.

FYI Your eCom team should expect volatility with informational search.

The framework is to invest in your product catalogue:

- build in rich data 
- manage merchandising
- look for outliers
- research how your customers shop
- build an SEO strategy for your SKUs
- audit + update your taxonomy

We did this.

Clicks to pages that help profits lifted by 27% (with a 37% CTR increase) over 90 days.