Caleb Johnstone on Nailing SEO for Convenience Stores and Gasoline Retailers
Caleb Johnstone, SEO Director at Paperstack, shares how focusing on niche-specific SEO strategies for convenience stores and gasoline marketers sets his agency apart. This interview dives into why deep specialization and structured data are critical to local search success in an often overlooked category.
In this edition of the Ecommerce Authority Playbooks series, we dive into how
Paperstack grows, retains customers, and prepares for the future of search in 2026 and beyond.
The interview
1. What’s the quick origin story of your brand, and what makes your product or positioning genuinely different from other options in your niche?
Caleb Johnstone: Paperstack started because I got tired of watching small Australian businesses get sold cookie-cutter SEO packages that never accounted for their actual industry. I’d done web development for years before that, and I kept seeing agencies hand clients the same template strategy regardless of whether they ran a law firm or a fuel station.
So when I helped launch Paperstack, the whole positioning was built around going deep into a client’s specific category rather than running generic playbooks. We work heavily with convenience store retailers and gasoline marketers, which most agencies treat as an afterthought niche, but it has its own search behavior entirely, tied to location, fuel pricing, and loyalty programs.
What makes us different is that combination of technical development background and category-specific strategy. We’re not just writing content and building links, we’re fixing the actual infrastructure underneath a site while building a strategy suited to how people search for fuel stops or convenience purchases specifically.
2. Since launch, what have been the 1-2 real turning points for your brand-specific decisions, pivots, or experiments that noticeably changed your growth or profitability-and what did you learn from them?
Caleb Johnstone: The real turning point was when we stopped taking on generalist SEO clients entirely and focused almost exclusively on convenience retail and gasoline marketing. That decision felt risky at the time because it meant turning away revenue from other industries just to specialize.
Within about six months of making that shift, our results per client improved dramatically because we’d built deep expertise in things like multi-location schema, fuel price page optimization, and local search behavior specific to drivers looking for a quick stop. We weren’t relearning an industry with every new client anymore.
What I learned is that specialization compounds. Every new client benefits from patterns we’d already solved for a previous one, and referrals started coming from within the industry itself once word got around that we actually understood gasoline retail search behavior instead of applying generic tactics.
3. Which 2-3 channels drive most of your revenue right now (for example SEO, paid social, email, marketplaces, influencers), and what have you learned about making those channels work in your category?
Caleb Johnstone: SEO and Google Ads drive most of our clients’ revenue, and for convenience store and gasoline retailers specifically, those two channels have to work together rather than separately. Local SEO gets a location found for branded and near-me searches, while Google Ads captures the immediate, high-intent searches for things like specific fuel brands or urgent purchases.
What we’ve learned is that in this category, mobile behavior dominates almost everything. Someone searching for a gas station is usually driving and needs an answer in seconds, so page speed and clear location data matter more than they would for a typical retail business.
We’ve also found that Google Ads performs best when it’s tightly geo-targeted to a few kilometers around each location rather than broad city-wide targeting, since drivers rarely travel far out of their way for a convenience stop.
4. How are you thinking about search in 2026 – Google, AI assistants like ChatGPT, and other discovery platforms? What, if anything, have you changed in your content or site to stay visible as AI search grows?
Caleb Johnstone: We’re treating AI search as a parallel discovery layer rather than a replacement for traditional search, especially for local, in-person businesses like the ones we work with. Someone asking an AI assistant where to find fuel nearby still needs accurate, structured business data to get a correct answer.
We’ve restructured client sites to lean much harder into structured data and schema markup, since that’s how AI systems pull accurate details about hours, locations, and pricing. We’ve also started writing content that answers specific questions directly and clearly near the top of a page, since that format gets pulled into AI summaries far more often than dense marketing copy.
The biggest shift has been treating review content and first-party business data as seriously as we treat backlinks, because AI assistants weigh that information heavily when recommending a business by name.
5. What do you do to turn first‑time buyers into repeat customers and advocates? Are there specific experiences, content, or community touches that work especially well for you?
Caleb Johnstone: For the retail and gasoline clients we work with, repeat business comes down almost entirely to loyalty program visibility inside search itself, not just the program existing. We make sure loyalty sign-up pages and app download links show up directly in local search results and Google Business Profile listings, so someone finding the location for the first time sees the loyalty offer immediately.
We’ve also pushed clients to collect and respond to reviews consistently, since a business owner replying personally to reviews creates a sense of being seen and remembered, which matters a lot for repeat foot traffic in a category people visit out of routine.
One gasoline retail client started featuring loyalty member savings directly on their store locator page, and repeat visits from app users increased noticeably within a few months. It’s a small content touch, but it turns an anonymous first-time stop into someone who has a reason to specifically choose that location again.
6. If you had to write a short playbook for an ecommerce founder one stage behind you, what would you double down on over the next 12 months – and what would you stop doing entirely?
Caleb Johnstone: I’d tell them to double down hard on structured data and local schema before worrying about anything else, because that foundation determines whether AI search and Google can even understand what the business sells and where. I’ve seen too many founders spend budget on content before fixing basic technical issues that block visibility entirely.
Specifically, get every product page, location page, and pricing detail marked up properly so search engines and AI assistants can pull accurate information without guessing. That single fix has moved the needle faster than almost anything else for our clients over the past year.
What I’d tell them to stop doing is chasing broad, high-volume keywords that sound impressive in a report but rarely convert. A convenience retailer ranking for “snacks” nationally means nothing compared to ranking for “gas station near me” in their actual service area. Stop optimizing for vanity terms and start optimizing for the exact phrases someone types right before they walk through the door.
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