Fabian van Til

Running a portfolio of ecom brands. Also founded

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@thedennis @scottsimnz same, rebuilt product pages for a client with it, focused on both SEO and CRO. organic revenue up 30% in 3 months

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@omarecomuk Congrats man!

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

This pet brand did over 2M$ on Facebook last year, and wasn't even ranking for their own product name on Google.

That changed fast. In just 28 days, we claimed the top 3 spots for their main products and secured 12 new page-one rankings so they actually own their brand.

The problem first.
Big paid spend creates massive brand demand. People who see the Facebook ad go to Google hours or days later to verify the brand before buying. That moment decides whether the ad money turns into a sale.

For this brand, that moment was happening on a SERP they didn't own.

Their product name: not in the top spots
A Reddit thread asking if they were a scam: page 1
A 3-star review aggregator: high in the results
Their own About page: still on Shopify placeholder copy

The audit showed why.

Schema split across 5 files, half broken, conflicting product data
Two different cities listed as the business address across the site
Customer count on the homepage didn't match the count on product pages
Trust rating in the marketing copy didn't match the actual review score

6 of 8 product pages had almost no real content

No favicon
3 weeks of work:
Rebuilt all schema from scratch (10 types, one clean file, validated)
44 new meta titles and descriptions site-wide
5 new pages live: About, How It Works, FAQ, Reviews, Contact
Heading hierarchy cleaned across every template

What changed in 28 days:
Main product term (880 vol): position 7 → 3
Second branded term: 4 → 3
Third branded term: 4 → 3
22 new keyword rankings appeared
12 of those are now top 10

Every dollar you add to Meta drives more brand searches on Google.
Capture those clicks with pages you control and paid ROAS keeps improving month over month.
Skip the work and you're scaling a leak.
Brand SEO is the floor under paid spend.

[Shaun Eng @shauneng]

Dozens of clean ecom brands lose their Shopify Payments every month.
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Shopify finally said why. It's exactly what I've been saying.
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Dudes with <0.5% chargeback rates, zero fraud disputes, custom products. Still getting hit.
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You can't stop holds entirely. Scale fast and you're a target. Doesn't matter how clean you are.
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Most of you think just because you have low chargeback rate and run clean you won't have issues. But that doesn't mean you seem like a real business in Shopify's eyes. End of day we're just a number to them.
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We've seen a ton of different issues and figured out how to navigate through them. It comes down to your backend:
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The basics:
• Good Product
• Don't leave orders unfulfilled
• Fast shipping
• Active & accurate social media presence (both business and personal)
• Great customer service
• Chargeback mitigation (Disputifier)
• Tracking numbers uploaded for every order (Parcelpanel)
• Non generic Policies and T&C on the website
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Trip wires:
• No Kaching Precheck-style subscriptions (common flag recently)
• No fake reviews / AI doctors on the site
• Strong standing on external review sites (e.g. Trustpilot)
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You could be running an entirely legit business, but your store doesn't feel that way when these companies use LLMs to scrape it.
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The LLM scrape test:
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Run your site through an LLM. Ask if it looks like a scam. Have it point out where it looks fake. Fix those.
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Applovin does the same thing. Works for Applovin rejections too.
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If you run a legit operation, getting it back is much easier.
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You can prove stock where you're selling. Orders fulfilled and delivered fast. Happy customers. Site and social that don't look AI-generated.
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But nothing in business is guaranteed, so if you don't have a backup processor ready, get one. If Shopify Payments goes down you lose all momentum while waiting to get back.
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When you get hit, spam their email, live chat and phone with documentation every single day.
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Be persistent. It becomes way easier to remove or lower your holds.
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And don't send weak shit without proper documentation and evidence like 'I've been a Shopify merchant for X years and have always followed your terms.' That won't cut it.
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Use Claude to write a legal-sounding response with all your proof points. Attach manufacturer invoices, tracking numbers with delivery confirmations, proof of address, proof of inventory.
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Most ecom bros complain about these issues but never fix the foundations. The problem keeps following them no matter what they do.
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Everyone wants to scale to $100k days. Few want to fix the backend that lets them stay there.
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Few

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

POV: Every dollar you add to Meta drives more brand searches on Google
(and you don't rank for any of them)

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

https://t.co/PnBklzSBIY

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@akmedddd Hard to find this level of transparency in this game, pure gems 🙌

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@rankjet_io Spot on, I always say you shouldn't pour water into a leaky bucket. Now that the technical foundation is completed, building authority through off-page is exactly what's next on the roadmap 😉

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

https://t.co/PnBklzSBIY

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@oliverbrocato Love this!
Founders usually just see the stolen revenue, but the SEO damage from knockoffs cluttering the search results is insane.
Quick question, did their organic rankings recover right away once you got the fakes taken down?

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@bree_sharp "An E-E-A-T raise, not a new tactic." Perfectly said, Bree! In ecom the commodity content is usually copy-pasted manufacturer specs, sometimes the AI-rewritten version of them.

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

Google just published an official guide on optimizing for AI Overviews and AI Mode.

We have been telling clients this for two years. Now it's officially on Google's dev blog.

Their thesis: AI search is SEO. AI features retrieve from the same index, run on the same ranking systems. Real GEO is doing the SEO work AI systems retrieve.
Google's exact phrase for what doesn't help, in scare quotes: "AEO/GEO hacks."

Specifically:
llms.txt and AI-specific text files
Chunking content for AI
Rewriting copy for LLMs
Structured data as an AI-search requirement
Inauthentic mentions in blogs and forums

What still matters is the same thing that mattered before:
Unique content with first-hand experience.
Google's example: "Why We Waived the Inspection & Saved Money: A Look Inside the Sewer Line" beats "7 Tips for First-Time Homebuyers."
Crawlable, indexable, fast pages
Real images and video where they help

What this means for ecom specifically:

We run SEO for 7-figure DTC brands. Last week I pulled AI Overview citations for one client's top 50 commercial queries. Their site got cited in 8. The other 42 went to competitors, review sites, and Reddit threads.

The 8 they got cited in share a pattern. Not the schema markup. Not the rewriting tricks.

Real content:

Product pages with founder or expert-written specs, not Shopify default descriptions
Real photos (product on a real human, in real light, not the stock studio shot)
First-party reviews with substance, not five-star one-liners
Collection pages that actually answer "best X for Y" instead of "Our [Category]"
A real About/Why-We-Built-This page the brand stands behind

Most DTC brands have zero of these.
They have AI-generated product descriptions, stock photos, scraped review widgets, and an About page their copywriter wrote in 30 minutes.
Then they wonder why AI Overviews cite their competitor instead.

Google's guide doesn't say anything we haven't been saying. It just makes it harder for the GEO industry to keep selling llms.txt audits to ecom brand owners who don't know better.

If you can't rank in Search, no LLM is going to retrieve you. That's the whole game.

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@YioJoshua Yeah, the guide just makes it official

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@Orangek21865157 Solid checklist!

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@oliverbrocato Whatever wins gets ripped in days, thats why I keep doubling down on SEO for my brands. A quality ranking page takes real work and around 3 months to beat, not 72 hours

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

Most supplement and wellness ecom brands are still trying to ad-spend their way out of rising acquisition costs.

One of our clients in that niche pulled €198,361 from organic search last month.

Here is what built it instead.

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

Here is how we made a health focused brand €198k in a single month through SEO

No PPC. No paid social. No influencer drops.

Three things built it: topical depth, intent-mapped content and link building.

Most people in supplements and wellness assume the ceiling is content volume. Pump out 200 articles a month, hope something sticks. It doesn't work like that anymore. Volume without structure just buries you in your own thin pages.

Here's what actually moved it.

1. Topical authority

Topical authority isn't "we wrote a lot of articles." It's "this site covers the entire topic, including the subtopics most competitors skipped."

Before we wrote anything for this brand, we mapped the whole niche. Every parent topic, every supporting subtopic, every adjacent question, every product-level page that needed to exist. Then we pulled the top 10 ranking sites on the head terms and listed every page they had. The gaps in that map became the content plan.

The result is a site that owns the cluster, not a site with random posts. Internal linking ties it together so authority flows from the strong pages to the rest.

When Google sees a site that covers a topic this completely, it treats new pages on that topic differently. Indexing is faster. Ranking from new pages is faster. The site stops being one of many and becomes one of the answers.

2. Intent matching

Most content fails not because it's badly written, but because it doesn't match what the searcher actually wants.

"Best supplements for X" is a buyer searching.
Selling there works. Education there gets ignored.

"How does X work" is someone researching.
Selling there gets bounced. Education there builds trust.

"X side effects" is someone looking for safety info.
Either intent there fails unless the page is dedicated to that question.

Every keyword we target gets mapped to an intent before the brief is written. Buyer pages have a CTA above the fold. Research pages don't. Comparison pages have tables and pros and cons.
The format follows the click, not the keyword.

This is the part most agencies skip because it's slower. It also roughly doubles conversion rate on the same traffic.

3. Link building

This is the part most ecom SEO advice pretends doesn't matter. It does.

Topical depth and intent matching get you ranked on long-tail and mid-tail. Real money keywords are competitive enough that on-page alone won't get you there. You need links from sites Google trusts.

Health is YMYL territory (your money your life).
Google puts heavier weight on E-E-A-T signals here than in most niches. Links from real sites with real audiences move the needle. Links from networks and link farms either do nothing or actively hurt.

For this brand we run a steady cadence of placements every month on sites we vet manually.
No drops. No PBN networks. Direct publisher relationships, paid at the publisher's actual rate.

We got tired of platforms draining our budgets. So we built RankJet, the link building platform that connects you directly with publishers. No broker markup.

That's the part most people get wrong on cost.

Skip link building and you cap around the long-tail ceiling. For a brand in a competitive niche, that means leaving most of the addressable revenue on the table.

What I'd change

The first stretch with this brand we under-invested in cluster depth and over-rotated to link building.
Links pointing at thin content don't compound. Links pointing at a real topical hub do.
Build the content layer first. The link layer hits 2 to 3x harder when it lands on something already structurally strong.

That's the playbook. €198,361 in a single month. All organic.

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

@KodyNordquist Did you scale content and SEO in parallel with the paid ramp, or is paid carrying it solo?
The brands I have watched do this cleanly always had organic catching the spillover.

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

https://t.co/hPe1BkmkgZ

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

If you are building a long-term brand, this is the moment to invest in SEO.

1-of-1 wins on every channel, not just ads. Positioning in someone's head and positioning in Google's index compound the same way: slowly, then suddenly.

Most of ecom is too short-term to start. That's the edge.

[Fabian van Til @til_fabian]

We launched 7 affiliate sites in 1 day with Claude Code.

Health and wellness verticals. Non-toxic living, GLP-1 patient education, peptide reviews, recipes, sleep, injection technique, nutrition systems.

Dimitar on our team built them. Here is the stack and why.

The sites:

Investigative non-toxic product reviews
GLP-1 patient education in 12 languages
Injection technique reference
Nutrition systems for lifters
Sleep and light, chronobiology-native
Peptide review database with methodology scoring
Recipe site on the Mediavine path

Each one has its own positioning, audience persona, voice rules, and topical map. Not the same template repainted 7 times.

The stack (rough):

Next.js 14 on Vercel
MDX content with custom components per site (each vertical gets its own scoring widget and callout blocks)
Schema markup done properly per page type
DataForSEO for keyword research and on-page audits
https://t.co/Uy4PCtUbCV for the photography

Claude Code does the actual building. One spec doc per site, around 5,000 lines each, covering positioning, hubs, schema, compliance, internal linking.
The spec is the work. Claude Code executes it.

Lighthouse on the cleanest one: perf 0.96, a11y 1.00, 250 KB page weight. Roughly 8x lighter than Healthline.

Why we did it:

We can productize site builds for clients. Agency clients keep asking us to ship niche content properties. Most agencies can't actually deliver them at this depth. We can now.
There's a skill gap. Claude Code workflows, 5 years of operator-level SEO, and an agency running real link campaigns.
Three skills that rarely sit in the same room.
The combo lets us own assets in niches where nobody is willing to do the editorial work properly.
We want to get into telehealth as operators, not just service providers. Three of the seven sit in the GLP-1 and peptide space. We're learning the audience, the search terms, the compliance landscape.
Owning content is step one. Owning more of the stack downstream is what we're heading toward.

Most affiliate operators ship templates. Most SEO agencies ship advice. Most engineers ship apps with no audience.

We are trying to do all three at the same time. 7 sites in 1 day was the proof it's possible.