Zack Franklin
Detroit-born, Shenzhen-based for 8+ years. Zack has worked with hundreds of Amazon and Shopify brands, sold $3M+ on his own Shopify stores and advised 9-figure Chinese Amazon sellers.
Zack Franklin founded SmartEcomSEO after a decade in paid traffic taught him the same lesson over and over: when the ads stop, the revenue stops. SEO is the channel that keeps paying.
He is originally from Detroit and has lived in Shenzhen, China for more than eight years, the city he calls the factory of the world and home to more than 600,000 Amazon seller companies. Working inside that ecosystem taught him to move at what he calls Shenzhen speed.
What he has done#
- Sold more than $3,000,000 on his own Shopify stores.
- Worked as a marketing and operations consultant for Chinese 9-figure Amazon companies.
- Won the "Hardest Worker" award at his first Chinese company, Valuelink (a top-5 Chinese Amazon seller), out of 700 employees.
- Spoken at 200+ live events on marketing, ecommerce and AI, from Beijing to Bangkok to Barcelona.
Speaking#
Zack has spoken at Global Sources Summit, Cross Border Summit, Affiliate World, Ecom World, the Shenzhen SEO Conference and SEO Mastery Summit, and with Chinese seller communities including Cifnews (雨果网), Xnurta and KanKanwang. His current talks cover Shopify SEO and AI automation. See every talk and podcast on his speaking page.
How he thinks about SEO#
"SEO isn't a mystery. Look on the first page of Google and you'll see exactly what Google rewards for any keyword." Zack's approach is to reverse-engineer what ranks, then build the pages that win it, starting with collection pages, because one product can rank for thousands of buyer searches.
Credentials & track record
- $3M+ in sales on his own Shopify stores
- Marketing & operations consultant to 9-figure Chinese Amazon sellers
- “Hardest Worker” award, out of 700 employees · Valuelink
- 200+ talks on marketing, ecommerce and AI
Articles by Zack
Fake Shopify Store Outranking Your Brand? How to Report, Remove and Outrank Clones
A fake Shopify store copying your photos and name can outrank you for your own brand. This is the order we report clones in (Shopify, Google, registrar, ads, payments) and how we take the brand search results back.
How to Get Recommended by ChatGPT: Get Your Products Into the “Best Of” Lists It Cites
ChatGPT recommends the products that trusted “best of” lists, reviews and threads already name. Here is how to find the lists AI assistants cite for your category and earn a place on them, from reviewer kits to samples for high-ticket products.
Linkable Assets for Shopify: Calculators That Earn Links for High-Ticket Brands
For a store selling $3,000 pool tables or $8,000 saunas, the linkable asset that works best is usually a calculator that answers the buyer's math question. Here is which calculators to build, how to build them on Shopify so Google can read them, and how to promote them.
The Shopify Apps Slowing Down Your Store and Quietly Hurting SEO (Plus a 20-Minute Audit)
Shopify apps slow down your store, leave code behind after you uninstall them, and sometimes change what Google sees. This 20-minute audit shows where to look and what to remove.
Crawled – Currently Not Indexed on Shopify: Why Google Skips Your Pages
Crawled – currently not indexed means Google fetched a page and chose to leave it out. On Shopify most of those URLs are harmless; here is how to find the few that cost you sales and fix them.
Shopify Speed Optimization: Fixing LCP on Collection Pages Without Killing Apps
Why Shopify collection pages fail LCP, how to find the real LCP element, and the fixes in order: image loading, animations, app scripts and Liquid render time.