Ten Years Ago Today, I Started My Shopify Store
On 1 September 2016, at the age of 61, I started a Shopify store selling PDF download products.
I certainly wasn't an SEO expert. Heck, I hardly knew how to turn my computer on!
I remember seeing the meta description box at the bottom of a Shopify product page. I had no idea what a meta description was or what I was supposed to put there, so I ignored it.
Tags were another mystery. I didn't know what they were supposed to do either, so I ignored those as well.
I kept asking myself, “Why do they have to use words like that? Surely they could use normal words that everyone can understand!”
Then there was the page title. Well, I knew what that was, but Shopify kept telling me I could only use a certain number of characters. That annoyed me. It was my website, so as far as I was concerned, I'd put whatever I wanted in the title.
My website. My rules!
Looking back ten years later, perhaps I wasn't quite as knowledgeable about running an online store as I thought I was.
By the end of that first month, I had sold six products for a total of US$72.29.
It wasn't exactly going to make me rich, but people I didn't know had found my store and bought something from me.
And that fascinated me.
Over the years that followed, I kept adding products and changing things. I watched what happened. Some products were found by people searching Google. Others weren't. Some changes seemed to make a difference. Others did absolutely nothing.
Gradually, I began to understand something that had completely escaped me when I started.
There was one slight problem with my “My website. My rules!” approach.
Google had rules too.
I began learning how Google understood the products on my website and how seemingly simple things such as product titles, descriptions and images could make a difference to whether people found them when searching.
I'm no marketing or SEO expert. I learned by changing little things here and there, watching what happened and recording the results. I made mistakes — lots of mistakes — but gradually my sales started to improve.
Today, exactly ten years after I started, the website has around 1,800 products and has sold over 17,500 items.
In February 2025, Shopify sent me an award recognising my 10,000th order.
And during those ten years, I have never spent a cent on advertising.
I've carried out just two email campaigns to my customers during that entire time. Although the business has a Facebook page, I've never used social media to promote the website.
The overwhelming majority of those customers simply found the products they were looking for through normal Google searches.
And that brings me to today.
After all my trial and error, testing different things and generally mucking around with my website, I decided to write SEO? What's That?
I didn't want to write another book filled with technical terminology that people don't understand. I wanted to explain everything in plain, down-to-earth English so anyone can follow along and improve their own Shopify store.
I remembered the 61-year-old sitting in front of his computer wondering what on earth a meta description was and why Shopify was telling him how long his page title should be.
There must be thousands of Shopify store owners looking at those same boxes today and thinking exactly what I thought:
What the hell does that mean?
That's who I wrote this book for.
Ten years ago, I didn't know what SEO meant.
Today, I have released a book explaining SEO in plain English for people who are exactly where I was 10 years ago.
SEO? What's That? is the book I have written explaining the simple methods I've learned over the past 10 years for getting noticed on Google without advertising, written in plain English and without the technical language.
Find out more about SEO? What's That?
Want to see how we actually created these articles using AI?
We're putting together a free book based on the real conversations behind our articles — including the ideas that worked, the ones that didn't, the disagreements, the changes of mind and the occasional trip completely off the rails.
It will show you how we used AI to:
- write and develop an article from an original idea
- improve the SEO foundation of a Shopify store
- take an honest look at Google advertising and when it can be useful
- create a free giveaway that people may actually want
This isn't a book telling you how to use AI. It's an actual conversation with AI showing you how we use it.
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