How I turned a real store into a sellable Chinese SEO tutorial (without breaking the store)

The Cheese SEO tutorial is the thing I am most often asked about, so this post is the long answer to "how is it structured." It is a 5-module Chinese-language SEO course I built from the Pettivalpets experience, with all the numbers anonymized. You can read the case study for the real numbers — this post is about the shape of the product.

Module 1 — Enterprise setup (企业搭建)
UK Ltd registration, payment provider (Stripe Atlas works for US, but I am in the UK so it is Wise Business + a UK bank), domain strategy, and the WooCommerce stack. The point of this module is the boring part: 80% of the people who try to do cross-border commerce fail at the setup, not at the SEO.

Module 2 — Trend + keyword research (趋势 + 关键词调研)
Google Trends, Keyword Planner, the 480-search-a-month rule (anything below 100/mo is not worth a page; anything above 5000/mo is not winnable for a solo founder), and how to read the SERP before you write a word. This is the module the agencies charge the most for. The tutorial gives you the same checklist, with the same anonymized data, for $29.9 once.

Module 3 — Hub + spoke + AI generation (Hub + spoke + AI 生成)
The architecture. One pillar URL, one outline, one queue of supporting articles. The AI step is where most people over-spend — they let the model write 30 articles from a one-line prompt. The tutorial walks through the prompt chain I actually use: pillar → outline → spoke briefs → spoke drafts → editorial pass. Five steps, not one.

Module 4 — WordPress + WooCommerce specifics (WordPress + WooCommerce 细节)
The bits that are not on the agencies' decks. The plugin stack I use, the schema types a Woo product page should declare, the llms.txt file, the AEO audit (does the page actually answer the questions voice assistants are asking). These are the bits that take a page from "ranked #7" to "ranked #1."

Module 5 — Notion + Ko-fi delivery (Notion + Ko-fi 交付)
Why the tutorial lives in Notion (because the content is a wiki, not a book) and why checkout is Ko-fi (because for a one-person shop, a one-click checkout beats maintaining a merchant account). The delivery flow is the part I get asked about the most, so it gets its own module.

The whole thing is $29.9 once. No subscription, no "AI credits," no upsell to a "Pro" tier. If you outgrow the 5 modules, you outgrow them on purpose. Most people do not. Most people stop at module 3 and start shipping.

The data-anonymization rules I used:
- All store names are changed (Pettivalpets is the real name; the screenshots in the tutorial use the placeholder "DoodleBay")
- All revenue numbers are shifted by a constant offset I do not remember
- All Search Console screenshots are from a different time window than the live site
- The five-module structure is identical to the real one I used — only the data is fake

The reason I am writing this post is to make clear: the tutorial is not a stripped-down version of the real thing. It is the real thing, with the data faked. The structure, the modules, the prompt chains, the Notion shape — those are all the real ones. You get the same playbook I would build for a paying client, minus the screenshots.