Sometimes customers will say, well, how long is that going to take? And what will it cost? So they can work out your hourly rate, for example. Interestingly, I studied building surveying many years ago, and one of the many things that stick in my mind from that degree that I did was the cost of refurbishing old property is way more expensive than new build. Yeah, because new build is like there are no unknowns. We understand every aspect of this building because we're going to create this building. Whereas with all buildings, until you rip that wall down, you have no idea of knowing what's behind it.
But I think that analogy works with websites. It works with brands too. It works with.
Strategy because until you actually start to try and figure out how you know where to play and how to win, i.e., you know, a simple way of describing a strategy until you actually sit down and try and do that, you have no real idea how much effort it's going to be required to come up with something that's got a chance of succeeding. Right. Um, this, this episode of, uh, digital marketing and politics and other stuff from the coalface.
We'll try and keep it.
Yeah, well, we'll keep it sort of digital marketing ish. Well, it's up to me in it because you haven't prepared. So there you go. Um, I noticed that um.
There we go.
We both got coughs. Yeah. That's what I was gonna say. Good timing. So I don't know if you're familiar with the Fast Show and the Bob Fleming character on, on the Fast Show, but it could turn into a bit of a Bob Fleming kind of episode. Um, in fact, we'll have to make a decision whether we're going to edit all the coughs out or just leave them in. I think we should leave them in. So people hate you even more.
Yeah, absolutely. I think I've annoyed everyone in the office. So now it's time to annoy the.
Oh, you've annoyed everybody in the office.
Yeah. Nothing to do with my cough, though.
No. Nothing to do with your cough? No, just sort of five minutes after you arrived. So have you prepared anything? I know you said before we came on today that you had something that you're trying to remember, and maybe something will jog your memory as we chat away. So I've got a few sort of random subjects and I also there was an email came in just before we started recording this, and it was about, um, twelve fundamental fundamental steps for creating an effective SEO strategy, right? So it's from search engine land. So it's, you know, it's pseudo what I thought we might do if we get on to it is actually look at them in a kind of irreverent way and see whether we agree with those twelve steps and what those twelve steps mean in a practical sense for business owners, as opposed to like a geeky sense of twelve things to do or not, it's just nonsense, all that stuff. So the first subject on my list is something that comes up a lot and it's not. It comes up in other businesses as well, and I don't know whether there's any mileage in it, but I thought we'd have a little chat about courting for immeasurable stuff. So one of our guys, Phil, who's who's actually a subcontractor, has been since two thousand and six or something. So he's not just like some random guy who lives in some.
Stupid.
Economy country. And we, you know, we use him because he's cheap. I mean, he's actually the best. You know, he's a fantastic, uh, sysop and programmer, etc. and, you know, quite often we feel, I mean, one of the things that Phil maybe doesn't always get right is communication. It can be quite blunt and he doesn't mean it in any sort of, in any, in a bad way. But he can, as we all know, he can be, he can be a little bit to the point. Um, and quite often when we're talking to him, we're talking about something, it might be a piece of work for a customer and it's maybe a technical piece of work might be some programming, coding, whatever. And we, we have to, um, try and at least get a rough idea of what it might cost. And he always says, well, I don't know, I've never done it before. And he's right.
Yeah.
But customers, whether it's coding, design, content, I mean design is an interesting one because it's like do a thousand pounds worth of design. Well, the designers presented with a challenge or Leslie's presented with a challenge for a fantastic piece of video work. You know, it's difficult to do that to a budget because you want to do you want to produce the right outcome irrespective of how long it takes. But commercially that's a challenge. And so how do we how do we price things, um, that are somewhat immeasurable if we think about PPC pay per click, which you're an aficionado of, I'm going to cough in a minute. If you think about PPC, um, a model that people use is a percentage of ad spend. Yep. Just, just talk about that for a second and why you think it's a good idea or why you think it's a bad idea? Well, as as soon as I ask you to talk, you start coughing.
Well, you.
Quiet while you while you. Oh.
Um. It's a stupid idea. Um. Yeah. I mean, I think largely for the reasons that you're talking about here. So if you say to somebody, you know, here's some money I want to spend on PPC advertising, right? The amount that you need to spend to get in front of a given target audience depends largely on who else is bidding for something, but you can.
More or less arrive at that number.
Yeah, you can arrive at that number.
Clicks will cost how many were available. What? You'll have to pay for them, how many you want to get.
But that has no bearing on the amount of work that we do to build the campaigns, which is always roughly the same. It doesn't really matter if it's going to cost you four pounds a click or twenty p a click. Building the campaign, doing the keyword research, coming up with compelling ad text, thinking about, you know, which negative keywords you need. That is time and effort that you have to spend on every campaign, irrespective of how much it's going to spend. And this is the problem, you know, when people start saying, oh, charge a percentage of ad spend, well, then you're sort of incentivised to spend longer on high spending campaigns and less time on low spending campaigns, even though the amount of work that should go into them and the quality of the outcome are roughly the same. It's just sort of a nonsense abstraction, really. I feel, you know, you're going to spend seven or eight hours working out, you know, who, the who, the exact target customer is, what language they use, how you want to get in front of them, what you want to get in front of them with, and all that work has to happen irrespective of, you know, like I say, whether you're spending four pounds or twenty pounds or whatever per click. I mean, sometimes it's as much as forty, fifty quid a click, but we can't really justify charging a customer extra just because their clicks are really expensive, which doesn't really make any sense.
Anyone listening to that last passage from you will will be tricked into thinking that they accidentally pressed the play. This at one and a half times normal speed button.
I'll try and slow down.
Yeah. Just relax.
The longer we spend doing this, the less time we have to spend frantically.
Actually.
Working. Yeah, yeah.
Okay, so I've lost the train of thought now. So you're saying that the percentage of ad spend model is a bit of a nonsense?
Yeah. So time and effort on everything.
You're saying that we should just sell time?
No, I'm saying that. Well, yeah. I mean, this is really complicated, isn't it? It is. No, I.
Struggle with this. Not just agencies who are in our line of work. You know, anybody who sells intellectual property or, you know, sell stuff. That means you have to sit and think and then produce something and then fine tune it and change it. And, you know.
Bear with me then, because I think, I think what I would say about this is what we're actually selling and putting a price on is an output, right? So somebody comes to us and they say, I want a PPC campaign. Well, they actually mean is I want a well oiled machine that will allow me to put a specific offer in front of a customer that will take that customer to a page on a website and get them to get in touch with me. And, you know, you can add extra steps or you can take bits away, but that's roughly what they're actually trying to buy. And you can and you probably shouldn't use time. You should probably look at the value of it, but you can sort of price that output. And the way that you do it will always change the keywords that you use, the size of the campaigns. But the output of functioning PPC campaign, a channel, if you like.
I knew that was going to happen, but trying to hit that glass.
That drives customers to a landing page and gets them to convert, well, that's always the same. And I guess maybe that's where I mean, maybe you can say the same thing about design, too. You know, the output is a website that convinces people and generates leads, and it doesn't really matter whether it takes thirty or fifty hours to get there. Mhm. The value of it is the same. Yeah. Maybe. I don't.
Know. It's difficult, isn't it? Customers are as confused as we are about it, I think, you know, because sometimes customers will say, well, you know, how long is it? How long is that going to take and what will it cost? So they can work out your hourly rate, for example. Um, I don't know. I don't know what the answer is, but I think more than just, um, talking about whether or not you charge by the hour or you charge by value or anything else. I'm talking more about things where like, we literally have no idea how long that's going to take. Now I'm often, I often refer in my mind to a podcast or something that I listen to or possibly read. I don't know, because I do have voices in my head. So it could have been I read it and the voices in my head made me think I listened to it. Um, and it was about if you, if you, if you're really an expert on something, then you should be able to put together a reasonable estimate of what something's going to cost. Because if you are literally saying, I've got no idea, are you really an expert? Now, I don't entirely agree with that. And if you look at like big civil projects, civil engineering projects, where you've got lots of knowns and very few unknowns, right? We've got a gap and we need a bridge to go across that gap so that we can get from this place to that place. We understand the tidal flow or the river flow. We understand this, that and the other. We know how much concrete we're going to need and how much steel we're going to need. And so yeah, we can work out absolute confidence that bridge is going to cost two million pounds and it finishes up costing five million pounds. Now, did the costs go up? Are they incompetent or did they just kind of get the guess wrong or I mean, that's only a silly example. But with the work that we do nearly cost manage not to with the work that we do, it's sometimes very difficult because we don't know the answer to the problems that we're being presented with. Like our business needs to penetrate this market. It needs to generate leads. It needs to, um, you know, we've got a few examples of customers we're working with at the moment. And it's, you know, their expectation is like, well, you know, we need, we need leads for our product. And we're like, well, you know, we, we still don't fully understand what the real demand is for the product that you're selling, given the competitors in the market, your, your version is different. It's supposedly better. It's also a lot more expensive, but they've never heard of you. And there's lots of variables. And I'm not just talking about marketing. I'm talking about whether it's a piece of coding, a piece of design, a piece of content, or whatever, you know, it is really hard to put a price on something because it's hard to stop working on it when you've got to a point where you've supposedly spent the budget, for example, this isn't really making a lot of sense.
No, it is making a lot of sense. I don't really know how to articulate this point, but look, there's a there's a fundamental sort of, um, sort of curse of knowledge thing going on here. I think when you have a cursory understanding of a field, you can look at it and you can reduce it to outputs. You can say, right, that company there, they design bridges. So they probably have some drawing paper and they probably do some measuring and they know some physics and they draw some bridges. And that's, you know, in your head, you sort of reduce it to something that's quite simple. It's just a sequence of outputs. And then you say, okay, well, you know, if that's what's required to do that job, how come they got it so wrong? Because you don't understand the complexity. And the complexity is, is in exactly what you were talking about there, the quality of steel that you can afford, the quality of steel that's available on the market, you know, some weird hitherto unknown thing about the bedrock that you're trying to build on that you can't know until you get there and start digging. And I think if you speak to any expert in any field, they will say, well, there's lots of variables that you literally can't know until you start. A builder starts tearing the walls down. They can't tell that actually they were built on rotten foundations.
I'll give you an example. Right? I'll give you an example because, um, we recently acquired a holiday cottage. It's, it's kind of in the same plot of land as our house, which is why we bought it. I'm not trying to build any property empire, but we bought this old cottage. It was built in about eighteen forty, eighteen fifty, something like that. First thing I did was get a new roof put on it cost a lot of money. It's now got a roof. So in theory, if it rains, water doesn't get in through the roof, you know, start at the top sort of thing. Um, I've got a building contractor in and we're ripping the place apart. Now, what I thought we would do is that room, you know, that room at the end won't go into the detail of it, but that room at the end probably just needs decorating. Yeah. Some paint. Okay. And the bathroom probably should modernise it. And. Yeah, let's put a new kitchen in. Right. If I showed you some pictures of the house just now, it looks like rubble. I mean, every single room's torn apart. We're right back to the walls, including the room that was just going to need decorating. No, no, the joists underneath were rotten. There was damp coming in through the wall. It's an old random rubble construction. Um, and so we're we're stripping it right back. You know, the staircase, which was a bit narrow. We thought that'd be fine. It'd be fine for the purposes of a holiday. No, that's gone as well. We're gonna have to put a new staircase in. The project has grown arms and legs like you wouldn't believe, which will mean it's going to cost a lot more money. I'm actually quite happy about that. I don't mind, you know, because in my in my head, I knew I knew there were some unknowns. And I'm just gonna I'm just being very pragmatic and practical about it because in the end, what we're going to finish up with is going to be lovely. I'm not gonna have to worry about it. It's going to be warm. It's going to be watertight. It's going to be not maintenance free, but it's going to be fairly low maintenance for the duration that I'm going to own it or we're going to own it. Yeah, but there was loads of unknowns.
Yeah. But critically, when the builder came to you and said, you know, we've taken up this floor, there's a ton of damp underneath it or whatever. You can see that, right? Yeah. And I think that makes it a little bit easier. And I think, you know, if you bring that back to the whole like coding and developing thing, you know, you build the strips out some wall and you can take you by the hand and you can show you, look, I didn't know this was here, so I didn't quote for it. And if you want it fixed, it's going to cost you extra. But when we find, you know, some like plugin that's written using some devalued, you know, language or whatever, you know, insert your favorite geeky thing here. The point is the customer doesn't really.
It's not tangible. It's not, they don't understand.
It well enough to say, oh, yeah, do you know what, actually, I get that you guys are the experts. You found something.
Or for example, you and I and somebody else might have sat for an entire afternoon trying to come up with a solution for a particular problem. And at the end of that, you know, we've made maybe a little bit of headway. Perhaps we've made no headway at all, you know, trying to say to somebody like we, you know, we were in the weeds with this, trying to figure out the solution. And, you know, we're still not there yet.
Well, this is weirdly common in marketing, especially because what will happen is somebody will come to you and say, I want a PPC, this landing page, by which they mean, I've got a landing page with an offer on it that I think is compelling. And now I want you to take that offer and put it in front of my target audience by building a pay per click advertising campaign. But inevitably, when we sit down around a table, what we'll figure out really quickly is like, they don't really know who their audience is. The offer isn't really that compelling, that it's missing really key things. The story isn't right. They're not differentiating themselves enough from their competitors. And then we will sit down and we will spend three or four hours going through and saying, okay, you know, what about this? Why don't we try this? Would this work? And then at the end, we go back to the customer with a nice, neat little output that is like, we've made some changes to your landing page and we've tweaked the language around the offering. Are you okay with it? And they're like, oh yeah, you know, somebody had a look at something and you can't, I don't think, ever bring clients with you and say, okay, right. Sit down and engage with the amount of thought and effort and time that goes into this. And I suspect that's why really big marketing agencies just charge an absolute f*ck ton of money for everything they do because they've baked into that the idea that actually to, to produce anything, we're going to have to do a load of work here. Um, I don't think we're quite at that stage, but I think it is interesting because I think the model, effectively what it comes down to is, do you want to keep going back to the client and saying, this problem is more complicated than you thought? Can I have a bit of extra money? Or do you just want to say right at the very beginning, well, we're not going to touch it without, you know, unless you put twenty grand on the table in order to sort of like bake in the cost of all that back and forth. And I don't really know where I stand on that, but I think that is effectively all any agency can do. I think that's where all of those pricing models end up. You're either saying, I don't know, so give me a ton of money and I'll try and use as little of it as possible, or you're going to keep having that conversation where you're like, well, we've burnt through your budget and you need more. And it's never like we're doing it on purpose. It is just like the builder finding damp where you didn't expect to. It's like, it's not cost effective for us to keep working on this without, you know, we can't afford to keep the lights on if we do free work, so. But yeah, I think that is effectively where we end up, isn't it? It's definitely the same with design that you can get started on something, realise that actually, you know, there's no sort of you need a better concept of a brand, you need better guidelines, you need a more sort of thought out idea for the whole thing. And suddenly it's grown arms and legs.
Good. Well, I wasn't quite sure where that would go. And, um, I don't know if, whether we really covered it off in the way I thought we might cover it off. But, you know, this this whole idea, and I'm sure again, other people will be able to identify with, um, the conundrum of trying to court for immeasurable stuff. Interestingly, I studied building surveying many years ago. And one of the things, one of the many things that stick in my mind from that, uh, that, that degree that I did was like the cost of refurbishing old property is, is way more expensive than new build because new build is like, well, we, we, we, there are no unknowns. You know, we, we, we understand every aspect of this building because we're going to create this building. Whereas with all buildings going back to the holiday cottage thing that I'm talking about, it's like until you rip that wall down, you have no idea of knowing what's behind it.
So I think that analogy works with websites. It works with brands too. It does.
It works with strategy because until you actually start to try and figure out how you know where to play and how to win, I, you know, that's a simple, simple way of describing a strategy until you actually sit down and try and do that, you've no real idea how much effort is going to be required to come up with something that's, that's got a chance of, well, we have.
This exact same scenario with a client who we started working with quite recently, didn't we, that they build very high tech, um, small modular laser equipment. And um, yeah, same thing. Like they came to us, they were like, right, we're pretty sure this is our product, this is who buys it, you know, sort of go away and market it. And then when we actually dug deep, realised that that whole strategy is sort of built on very rocky foundations, because they're not one hundred percent sure who buys this stuff, and they're not one hundred percent sure how to market it. And then you've got to sort of do that whole piece of building the strategy right from the ground up again. And I think that is yeah, I mean, like I say, I think probably what experience teaches you is that all jobs are unknowns. You know, you're going into everything blind and you'll always find things that you don't necessarily want to, to deal with.
Yeah. Okay. Um, it was the best of times. It was the worst of times.
Um, talking about working with you or.
Last week we parted company with a client. Well, they're not really a client because we've never charged them for anything. So they've never paid us. We've never sent them an invoice. So they've never paid us. They've got basically it was a job that just derailed very quickly. And we tried to kind of bail out quite early on and should have stuck to our guns and bailed out, but we kind of went along with it. So what I'm the reason I'm saying this is that the reason the engagement didn't go well is because we weren't allowed to do what we do best, i.e., you know, do the stuff that helps businesses grow, helps generate enquiries, all that kind of thing. We got derailed by internal politics at that organisation and, um, a lack of cooperation from some of their, some of their people. And it was just altogether bad. But the end result of it was that we parted company with them in the same week. We had a situation with another client where they actually sent us an email, which we said, look, do you mind if we use that as a testimonial? We didn't ask for a testimonial. The client, like just unprompted came to us and said, you know, that's this project has now gone live. And, you know, I basically want to say, you know, it's, it's been fantastic working with you night and day compared to the guys we were working with previously and all the rest of it in the topsy turvy world of, um, running an agency and doing what we do that's, you know, comes with the territory where sometimes you get it wrong and most of the time you get it really good. You know, you get it, get it right. And now and again, people think you're, you know, just the bee's knees.
Yeah, yeah.
It's an interesting, you know, like I said, going back to the, the one that went wrong, as soon as they were questioning what we were trying to achieve for them in their best interests, we were doing what we absolutely believed was the best thing to do. We, we probably should have like pulled out at that point, but we did what we didn't with all the for all the right reasons. Because, you know, we're not we're not quitters. We want to try and do a good job for people. But ultimately, you know, it turned out to go that way. Um, but I, I don't, I don't really know what the point of this is other than, you know, I think in business sometimes, you know there isn't a good fit. I think in business, sometimes you have to just recognise that some things are never going to work. And it's happened to us. It's happened to us a few times. Um, it's happened to us before we've started an engagement because we just the mood music dictated that, you know, it just wasn't going to ever work. And sometimes you've started, we've started engagements and very quickly realised, wait a minute, this isn't going to work for whatever reason. You know, quite often organisations, people in those organisations are dealing with internal politics, and we fall foul of that to a certain extent. Now, you're either bored right now and you've got nothing to add, or you really are desperate to jump in because you've got some real insights.
Well, I don't know if I have insights on it, I doubt it. Um, thanks for that. Um, what I do want to say is I think so can we put a bit more flesh on the bones of the job you're talking about?
And just be very careful. We don't we definitely don't want to identify them. And I don't want to go into too much detail about about what went wrong.
The ins and outs of it aren't really important, but I think what I was going to say is, like, largely speaking, what happened is somebody came to us and said, can you do a job? Uh, we did the job. And then somebody else inside that company took a look at the job that we'd done and said, oh, but, but, but what about all these things I care about? And inserted themselves and their preconceived notions about how things should look.
People who could have been doing the job that we did for the last two or three years, but.
Decided not to.
And decided not to or couldn't.
And I'm gonna be a bit a little bit bolder than you, um, and say that I think ninety percent of the times when there isn't a good fit, it is actually because of the situation where somebody has come into things with like really strong preconceived notions. And I don't know, there will be people listening to this who, you know, offer services and products or whatever to people and probably come up against this from time to time where, you know, somebody just says, right, I already know what I need. I just want you to do what you're told. Um, maybe I think it's particularly Transactional.
Uh, gigs are never good gigs.
Well.
I just need somebody to do the transactional bit, like design it, build it. And, you know, I'll tell you exactly what I need. Well, in a weird way, well, in situations like that.
In a weird way, it connects to what we were talking about before with the whole bridge building analogy, doesn't it? I mean, you wouldn't dream of bringing in some engineers and saying, right, I just need a four and a half ton bridge in here. You'll make it out of mild steel. You'll get these parts from China. You know, this is what you'll need. This is how much it'll cost. Off you go. You just wouldn't assume that. But in marketing, and I'm sure in other industries, too, there's this particularly sort of bad type of client that crops up from time to time where they've sort of decided they already know all the things that you're an expert in and are just going to sort of manage the job over your shoulder and it'll be better. You know, it's like the homeowner that sits and follows the build around and is like, oh, are you sure about that? Oh, you've missed this. Or it's, it's frustrating because you really want to do a good job for these people, but you cannot take the time to educate them about why their preconceived notions are wrong and execute properly. That's just not possible. And they just sort of get it in their heads. And I'm thinking of other examples in the past where things have gone wrong. And I'm just thinking, you know, largely they are all because somebody said, well, I know it should be like this or I know you're wrong or, you know, this is my target market. This is what will, you know, land with them. And when clients are willing to say, okay, we've brought you in because you guys are the expert. And it's not that they're disinterested, but we're going to get out of the way and let you advise us. Things generally go very smoothly, but when people sort of decide that, they also know how to do your job. Oh, and you know, by the way, once, once upon a time I was a, you know, graphic designer or whatever. So I can tell you it's like you're not helping the situation, I guess is my point.
Yeah. And that's, that's valid. Um, on, you know, on plenty of occasions, for example, we have had a conversation with a potential client who said, um, something like we need you to fix our SEO and help us generate more business. We will look at their digital presence might be the way that they're using social media, their website and so on, and conclude that like, what they've got is absolutely not what they need. And they will then immediately say, oh, no, no, we've just spent a small fortune on our website. You can't change that.
That's a great one.
Okay. Happens all the time. That is the problem. The reason that we can't fix, we can fix things that are broken, but we can't fix it if it's just wrong. We can't turn your Land Rover into a Formula One car. You simply can't do that. It's physically impossible. We can make it run really nicely, but it'll never.
It's never going to be a Formula One car. Yeah, absolutely. You have to start from the ground up if you want that. And I think this is the thing. I mean, I'm thinking of examples in the past as well where like people have had like, um, there's one that you'll probably remember where the client had spent ages internally developing a really hideous set of logos. And we went to, we went to the meeting with them and they were like, whatever else happens, these logos, like it's ironclad, like we love these and we're gonna use them everywhere. And we were just like, well, they're not right.
And what happened in that? I'm only remembering that vaguely. What did what was the.
They just didn't. Nothing came of it in the end. They went. I think they went with somebody who was more willing.
Who just wanted the money.
Yeah. Blow smoke up their ass. As so often happens. But I think that's the thing. Like it takes real bravery and courage to turn around and say to somebody, you know, this is this is completely wrong. I'm really sorry, but you've invested a lot of money in the wrong product. We don't do it for fun. We certainly don't do it to line our own pockets because those are really annoying, you know, sort of situations where you then have to deliver something on a shoestring budget to try and make up for the fact that somebody's already spent all of their budget on something that's completely incorrect. Yeah.
Um, on the wrong trousers.
We only say it to, to try and help. And I think a lot of people, they're just very sort of set in this idea that like, well, I've spent this and it's got to be good. So I'm going to pretend it's good until it is good. And that's that's not gonna happen. Mhm. It's a really tricky one. And I get why people get really invested in things that they've spent money on, and they don't want to hear that things are wrong. But sometimes you really do just have to let somebody sort of tear the carpet up and start again. Mhm.
This is what we did in the cottage.
Exactly.
Lovely new carpet. Tore it up. Put it in a skip. Um. Right. I'm gonna just do something that we don't normally do. And this email came through right. So I haven't even really studied it particularly, but it came through from one of the well-known, um, search engine optimisation outlets.
And it was this the one that got bought by SEMrush recently?
Uh, yes. In fact it is. Yeah. So twelve fundamental steps for creating an effective SEO strategy. So I'm just going to go through them. Number one, align SEO with business goals and define KPIs. Do you disagree with that?
Um well no because it doesn't mean anything.
Go on. What do you what do you think it means? Let's cover some of these things off.
And put.
Them into plain English.
Here's a is a fun idea. Like what are my business goals? Well, I want to grow my business. My KPI is revenue. Align my SEO with my desire to grow revenue. Mhm. Mhm. Make it good. I'm struggling to think where in the world.
Here's my take on it. Then. If you take, uh, take a website and do search engine optimisation on it, right? Maybe buy a load of crappy links to it and get people to it. Get traffic to it. That traffic may well not turn into good business because the two things are not aligned. You've got, you know, like, we don't care what our website looks like as long as we've.
Got loads of.
Traffic, do the SEO get loads of traffic to it actually aligning. That's one way of looking at that particular thing, I think. Yeah. You think?
Well, yeah, actually it's really interesting you say that because I was making fun of a situation where somebody wouldn't have figured out that, you know, the idea of SEO is to improve revenue. But I'm also also remembering a situation I was in where the SEO team were literally reporting on traffic growth, and everybody in the C-suite was like, look, traffic's growing. And they'd never thought to ask, is revenue growing? So yeah, maybe it's not so stupid, actually.
They didn't go. So what?
Yeah, well, it feels really fundamental, but, yeah, it's a fair point.
So aligning SEO with business goals. So I mean, what that that did make me think like when if we get an enquiry in, as we do from time to time, which is like we need somebody to help us with SEO, just SEO, that's a tactic, you know, the tactic of doing search engine optimisation, and we prefer gigs. Most of our gigs are more rounded than that. It's like we, we need to generate business. We want leads. How can you help us with that? Well, certainly SEO will be one of the tactics that will employ. But it's not like we are not a dedicated SEO agency. But sometimes we you know, we do get SEO enquiries in. And, you know, that's one of the conversations that we will have straight away is we'll try and understand or try and try and communicate and educate people and help them understand that getting the traffic is only part of the problem. If people are not convinced, if they don't see a compelling offer when they land on your website, it's very easy to hit the back button and go and find somebody else who does. So you have to connect your offer, your business proposition with the search engine optimisation that you're doing. And yeah, define the KPIs. If the KPI that, you know, gets you out of bed in the morning is the number of visitors to your website, irrespective of whether that's generating revenue, fine. But it's, it's a stupid thing to measure. It's not.
Also rankings. I still, you know, I saw an SEO report from an agency quite recently actually, and the first thing it had was a page on rankings rankings up, rankings down. It's like, dude, websites rank for so many random keywords that are never, ever, ever going to make you any money. Like it doesn't matter. Just fundamentally doesn't matter. What matters is, you know, is this increase in traffic or rankings or whatever.
Actually, what's the engagement look like? What does the revenue look like? What are the enquiries looking like? Yeah. Okay. The next one was set realistic expectations. Number two I love that don't you.
There's the CEO's favorite.
That's probably our hardest job.
It's impossible. It's impossible. Because again, back to the thing before so many of these things are very unknown. And I don't know how you you know, I it's a real struggle. I mean, some people make an art out of forecasting or bullshitting with SEO and being like, well, this is the traffic growth you can expect, but it's never really like that once you hit the ground. And I think, yeah, I think we do spend a lot of time telling saying to people, look, you know, you these are the mechanics, this is what we're going to do and this is what we hope the outcome is.
But is it not the case that when people come along, um, quite often their expectations are either wrong or their expectations are that they don't know what their expectations should be? Yep. That's more likely, isn't it. And that's fine. That's absolutely fine. Why should they know? It's not what they do. It's what we do.
Yeah. There are, there are part of the problem is SEO agencies. Um, I will say that a lot of misleading expectations. You'll be top of number one in Google for X keywords in so many days. You know, that sort of bullshit. Um, really does sort of muddy the waters for us. Um, and also, like you say, people coming along and just saying, well, I don't know, what does this get me? And then yeah, going from there.
Okay, some of the next ones are just a bit trashy. And have we exhausted the set realistic expectations thing?
I don't know. I don't know what realistic.
Well, if somebody said to you like if somebody came on the phone now. Right, and you answered the phone, I know you don't usually answer the phone. It's beneath you. If you answered the phone. Right. And they say, and they said, I'm um, I'm an accountant. Um, there are, you know, a, a firm of accountants. We're only small. There's like ten of us or something. We're based in Edinburgh. We're very good. We've got a great reputation, but we think our website should be working harder for us. You know, we didn't really put a lot of time and effort into our website. Um, what are some of the quick things that you could do to try and figure out to help set expectations? So what would we do? The first thing we would do is say, well, we'll, you know, we'll plug the website into SEMrush and see how authoritative it is. Right? So if it's, if it's getting like two out of one hundred, which isn't unusual. Yeah. Um, if it's getting like two out of one hundred, we, you know, you can set expectations by saying your website doesn't have a lot of authority, which is its ability to rank its ability to appear high up in Google for relevant searches. Doesn't have that. So we would say that, for example, straight away we could also look at the cost of PPC clicks. So say for example, you know, accountants in Edinburgh, you know, in Google, Google ads would cost twenty quid a click. Well, that suggests that that's going to be difficult to appear for organically, because people are already paying twenty quid to appear in the paid search. So so again, this is these are the mechanisms you might use for setting expectations.
You can look at volume two. I mean keyword volume is really important. And you can say, you know, well one hundred people search for accountants in Edinburgh every month and two hundred search for accountants near me while they're in Edinburgh. And look, we can see that there's a decent audience out there. There's lots of people looking for it and yeah, you can get somewhere. But again, I don't think that's what people's expectations are when they come into those conversations.
You know, one of the hardest things that I do when I'm speaking to potential customers, especially customers who. And it's quite often the case that they make the investment in a website because the website was maybe looking like it was built in nineteen oh two. So they've got a new website, they've been sold a new website. And, and somehow there are still businesses out there that will build you a nice looking website without thinking at all about what the website's real purpose is, i.e. to generate business. And so they've spent a lot of money on a website. And the hardest conversations to have are those where it's like, you know, we've spent all this money on a website and we're not getting any enquiries. And you do some basic analysis and it's like, well, you're never going to because it's, it's, there's nothing right about it from a, from a, it's a, you know, from the point of view of it generating business for you, I think.
Yeah. And this is the thing, and I think set expectations is sort of a misleading way of putting it, because what you're actually doing is educating.
I didn't write the article.
No, I know you didn't. And I think it's about.
Having a go.
At me. I think it's bad because what you're effectively doing is educating the client. A lot of people will come to us and say, oh, I want to be a page one for my top keyword. I know what my top keyword is. I want to be on page one for it. You're like, well, it's not your top keyword, actually. There's no intent behind that keyword. People searching aren't necessarily looking for you, and it's a complete waste of your time. But, you know, setting people's expectations is often about educating them. You know, this is the process. This is what you can actually expect. This is where we hope to get you. It's not as simple as saying, well, you might not do as well as you think. It is a sort of complex operation that.
The next thing on there is conduct an SEO audit. I mean, well, I mean, yeah, of course, I mean, I.
Gotta hate all this language so much though. I mean, it's just well, it commoditises something very complex, which is what you're effectively saying is at the beginning, at the beginning of an engagement, you have to contextualise a website. You've got a big lump of HTML that's floating around on the internet, and you've got to work out what does it exist alongside? What are your competitors saying? Where are your competitors ranking? You know, how do they perform? What's their backlink profile like? What's your backlink profile? Like? What's, you know, how well optimised are all the pages? It's a big, messy sort of intangible thing. And we as an industry, we've done this horrible thing where we're like, well, we'll just come out. It's just an audit. And then what? Lots of really.
Rank for twenty keywords you've got for backlinks.
That's not it doesn't tell you anything. And loads of really bad practitioners do this thing where they'll just plug your site into a piece of software that spits out a pre-generated audit with absolutely no context. And then they're like, here you go. And people will come to us sometimes with these twenty page audits that have been exported from Screamingfrog and be like, well, what do I need to do? And it's like, well, first of all, you can throw that in the bin. Yeah, yeah, yeah. I just don't think it's helpful. I don't think it's a useful. I mean, yes, definitely. We audit a website in the sense that we look at it and we look at how it's doing and we look at why it's doing what it's doing and what else is going on around it. But it's not a sort of discrete operation.
Okay. The next ones. Perform keyword research, but I'm not going to talk about that. It's sort of self-explanatory and we've talked about it in other ones. Next one was define your most valuable pages.
That's interesting, isn't it.
Mhm. What do you think they're driving at there? Because all I've got here are the bullet points, because they do expand on this in the article, but.
I guess where they're going with this is if you look at a website in the round, like say you open it up in Search Console, which is free software from Google tells you how you're doing for how you're ranking for different keywords, how.
You're performing in search.
Appear in search. And you can also see from that which pages of your website perform really well. And maybe what they're driving at there is if you go into Search Console and you look at a page that's, I don't know, just like bumping along on page two, it's doing quite well. It's getting a bit of traffic. You want to prioritise that one. You can put more effort into making it rank really well and get some quick wins and start to get some momentum. So charitably, I'm gonna guess that's what they're driving at.
Okay. Um, keep content up to date.
Uh, yeah. I mean, what, what, what does that mean? Um.
I knew you'd like this list.
This hinges on the idea that Google prefers recent content, and that you should sort of go through your website periodically and update things, but like, mechanically, that can mean all sorts of different things, right? It's like you could be completely rewriting some pages because the information in them is not correct anymore. You could be adding a couple of, you know, clarifying paragraphs and changing some dates on another one. It's generally important and a good idea to make sure that all your content is up to date. The idea that you should periodically go through and just change a couple of letters so that the last updated date changes, and that's somehow going to magically improve your fortunes in Google is, I think, a little bit of a myth.
Yeah. I think it's fair to say that keeping content up to date can be just a really good thing from a practical point of view. Nothing irks me more than seeing posters for events that happened two months ago. It just it just pisses me off that people took the time to put the posters up, but they didn't go and take the posters down. That's just a little personal, you know, annoyance. But no. I think when you're on a website, I think it's really valid. It's patently out of date. As in there's just information there that's that shouldn't be there. You know.
Where it always worries me is when I'm on like, um, like consultancy websites or websites where somebody professing to give advice about a field and you go on their blog and the last blog post was updated in like twenty seventeen or you know what I mean? Like the last event being pulled through into their feed from Facebook was like a post that they went to some conference six years ago. It's like, that's not a good look. Like definitely don't do that and definitely don't. I mean, we did an exercise quite recently where we went through and it wasn't recent. It was about a year ago now. We deleted hundreds of blog posts because they were written.
Well, they were rubbish because I'd written them when I was watching the rugby or something.
Well, they were written to an old standard.
They were.
And that's the other bit where I think that's really important advice. Keep your content up to date, as in keep it in line with current best practices. And if you've got a shit load of crap old content floating around, just just bin it.
Optimise for user experience. There's a nice kind of broad reaching, kind of meaningless. What does that what does that actually mean, do you think?
Well, I think, again, what they're driving at is that content that is engaging is interesting, is easy for people to interact with, easy to read, maybe easy to find the information that you're coming for. People will stick around for longer. It will generally play better both to users and search sort of crawl bots.
So this is down to the Steve Krug. Don't make me think it's down to making it easy for people to get what they need and not sort of like, oh, well, people will have to mouse over this thing here.
And it's interesting though, isn't it? Because the more you read into, I mean, like I'm, you know, I'm quite interested in user experience and in the way that people use the internet generally from a behavioral point of view. And I think what's really interesting is that advice like that, it's so broad that it's not just meaningless, it's actually harmful. It's like optimised for user experience. Like, do you mean like, go on there and make all the buttons green because more people are likely to create green buttons. Do you mean like go in there and, you know, remove anything that's longer than four lines? Or people have these sort of like preset ideas about what user friendly content is completely neglecting that that's very audience and niche specific. You know, what's what's easy for a seasoned SEO person to sort of like read and absorb and act on is very different from, you know, what a construction worker wants to read on a blog post. It's, it's, it's really that is know your audience and produce content that doesn't piss them off. I think that's what they're trying to say, you know, produce things that aren't frustrating.
Plain English. Yeah, yeah.
Not not deliberately padded, not full of annoying pop ups, sure. But again, you know, it all comes down to like, think about what the person you want to be reading this blog post or this web page is going to do and how to make that easy for them.
I mean, there will obviously be making reference there to the way that Google will analyse a site. So for example, and it really annoys me and I'm sure it annoys you as well, is like, how often have you clicked a button on a website and you've clicked the wrong button? Because just as you were clicking it, it moved because when the as the website comes in, it takes the time to sort of settle down and everybody, you know, it's a bit like musical chairs. All the content gets thrown in and then the music stops and all the content has to sort of suddenly appear in the right place. And it's kind of like it's very so things like that. I mean.
Google refers to as cumulative layout shift.
That's right.
Yeah, absolutely. There are definitely things that you should always.
Newspaper websites are terrible for it with their horrendous advertising models.
The other thing that I really hate about newspaper websites that I've noticed more and more recently is that newspaper websites that you can't interact with because some pop up somewhere to advertise your subscription is busy loading. And it's like, I just want to just like, oh, sometimes when I throw my computer out the window.
Yeah. Oh me too. Definitely laptop.
Computer don't do shit things, but I think you can probably take that advice of like, optimise for user experience a bit further in the other direction and say, try to think about things you could add that improve things for your audience.
Okay, this next one you're going to like and listen carefully. Conduct a competitive analysis, a competitor. So what you do is you get three people lined up really quick and you say, right, analyse this website three, two, one go and you see who's the winner. So I think what they meant was a competitor analysis.
I really like that you could take it in the other direction and use competitive as a sort of adjective there as well. And just say like, it's a really, you know, sort of like angry, you know, it's an analysis that's got to be, you know, sort of out there competitive. Other analysis is a shit.
All joking aside, looking at competitors, you know, one of the things that people often misunderstand, if you if if we're in a discovery with a potential new customer. And one of the reasons that we do pro bono discovery work is so that we can really get to know our business and figure out, you know, whether we're the right team for them and whether we can genuinely help them and all the rest of it. But, um, you know, it's amazing how often small businesses, big businesses are like when you say, who are your competitors? They tell you. And then if you do a Google search, they are not their competitors. They are their perceived competitors. Now, that doesn't mean that that if they're not online, they're not, you know, if they're not a competitor, that's not true because it's very much the case that a business might be competing with another business who doesn't do particularly well in search, but they know fine well that they take business from them because it's word of mouth. It's it's it's referrals, it's that sort of thing. So, you know, I don't want to just be sort of pigeonhole this as like, if it's not on Google, it doesn't exist or anything.
Well, it's not about that though, is it? It's it's more specifically, who are you competing with in the arena that you're trying to win in? And I think that's the key bit again, isn't it? We're back to strategy. There's no point in saying, oh, my competitor is Acme Engineering, who don't have a website at all and who win all their jobs because they have a cracking sales team. It's like you compete with them in terms of like the same customer base, but you're not competing with them on Google. And that's what we're interested in. It is what I would question is what step is that?
Oh, it's just it's number eight.
Yeah. So I mean, why the is look at your competitor's website. Step number eight on this SEO checklist rather than step number three. I mean, you know, you've got this far into the weeds where you're like.
It's almost step number one. It's like, you know, who's hoovering up all the traffic right now? Who am I customers right now that you might, you know, conceivably want a share of.
If I want yeah. If I want to win space in search, who do I have to kick off that.
Can dictate everything else. Because if somebody is absolutely killing it, you can you can look at it and even just, you know, superficially go, well, you're gonna have to have like a fifty, sixty, seventy grand budget to even start the process of competing in this.
Well, well, and this is the thing, and this is where it comes back to the keyword research, because the amount of times you'll do keyword research, knowing who the competitors are and just say, okay, well, that looks like a great keyword, but there's absolutely no chance that we're ever gonna rank for it. So forget about it. I think. Yeah, competitor research has to be right at the beginning. Really.
Okay. Number nine, and we're not going to talk about this is establishing brand authority and link building. So I mean, establishing brand. Yeah, yeah. We could just have a whole podcast taking, taking that apart, but let's not do that. The next one's quite interesting though. Integrate SEO into your workflows. Now. I quite like that.
Do you. Yeah. I don't know what it means.
Well, if you think about some of our customers who've got fairly expansive websites and they produce a lot of content and they have no SEO built into that workflow, they're actually only getting some of the bang for the buck of taking the time to produce that content that they could be.
I know who you're talking.
Yeah, I know you're doing.
Yeah, yeah, yeah, I get you if you yeah. If you've got a massive team of in-house writers and they're churning out content every day and they're not thinking, oh, I should write a title element and a meta description for that. Or oh, when I'm, when I'm putting the headings together, maybe I should think a little bit about who's searching and what they're searching for. Yeah, one hundred percent awareness of SEO, but it's an interesting one because again, I think, you know, you can't say to a content team, do some SEO, you have to go to them with very specific guidelines. These are the keywords we're trying to rank for. This is what we need to be thinking about. Don't cannibalise yourself. You know, if you're if you're writing an article and you optimise it for one keyword, you can't do that again tomorrow. Yeah. There's so much nuance there that that sort of like, you know, just, uh, just incorporate SEO again, it's sort of reducing it to this sort of finite.
Discrete, and as well as producing the content you want to produce, if you incorporate SEO into workflow, you can do analysis as is you start to gather information in the search console and you can actually say, look, there's a lot of interest about this. So you can feed that back to the content team and say like, it would, would be beneficial if we had content on our website about X, Y, and Z, because that's of interest to people and it's directly related to the products and services that we offer.
Yeah, absolutely.
Okay. So it does make sense to integrate SEO into your workflow. I'm just going to read this one out, but we're not even going to tip our hat to it because it just sounds like the weirdest episode of The Boys ever. It's called align your SEO strategy with your customer funnel. The last one in the list, because it was twelve in all, was a reporting measure. And this is, this is back to really what we were talking about earlier. You can report and we have seen countless SEO reports, right, where first of all, the customer never reads them. Oh yeah. The SEO company we have been working with send us this report every month. It's like quite thick as you say it, it's automatically produced. It's just lazy bullshit. And, and we don't do that. We will report and we will speak to customers and we will provide information, etc.. But why are you laughing so much?
Because marketers, they think they love data. Marketers do love data. They love to hide behind it. They'll have to use it to obscure truths. Yeah. Yeah. You. Yeah, you absolutely obviously ought to be measuring and reporting what you do. That's a bit of a no brainer, but like so much more time and effort needs to be spent thinking about why and what than you think. It's never a case of like, oh, well, we'll just report on leads then it's like, yeah, it's really hard. And I think this is the same with anything in life. You know, it's really hard to drill down to the meat of the problem and find out what you actually need to be measuring and reporting in order to and, and weirdly, you know, that's not the end of the process. It loops back around to the beginning because as you just sort of tip your hat to before, if you're not sort of looking at what's happening and integrating it into what you do and sort of feeding the loop, it doesn't get any better. Your strategy just sort of continues until it fizzles out. So Yeah. Yeah. Reporting and measuring is really important. But I think, you know, in all honesty, most of the time there are sort of two or three key metrics you need to be thinking about and reporting on. And that's what actually matters. And like you say, we see so many of these sort of obscure, arcane, almost esoteric reports with, you know, bar graphs over here and a pie chart over here. And it's just meaningless waffle, you know, you drill right down. What we actually care about often is, you know, in an SEO campaign, for example, you know, how much of the traffic that we're driving is converting?
Mhm.
Where are they converting and what do we think we can tell about the keywords that they're using and the audience behavior based on that? It is never a case of like traffic and impressions, and all of that stuff's just sort of there useful lead indicators, and they're useful to know, but it's not really what you want to be reporting on. I don't think.
If you're if we're not getting the leads, then whatever we're doing isn't working.
Well. That's the thing. And I always think reporting is best done backwards, isn't it? It's like we've had six conversions from search today. You know, those those conversions came from these pages. We're pretty sure they were triggered by these sort of search terms. We're pretty sure it was this kind of customer. These are the things they did on the page. And now we're starting to build a full picture of what we can do, what which bits we can replicate, which bits could be improved on. But you can't do it the other way around, which is, I think, how a lot of people look at reporting, which is like, here's a ton of data, figure it out. Yeah. The key to the reporting, I guess, is doing the figuring out for people and then showing them how you got there, rather than just giving them a bunch of data and saying, we'll work it out. Okay.
Well, I think while there is a hiatus in the coughing, you're not about to cough.
I know I'm not about to cough.
Okay. What about now? No. Okay, I think we'll wrap this one up. Um, we've kind of taken a bit of a wander there, haven't we, from, um, talking about how we, quote, free measurable stuff and we've talked about, um, how we got it wrong with a particular customer in the same week as we got, you know, a resounding testimonial and then went on to sort of like not so much pick apart, but give a sort of plain English take on one of these twelve ways you can improve your SEO type articles.
I think there's real value in doing that sort of thing. A it's interesting and quite fun.
And B it takes no prep.
Well, no. And B I think the important thing to remember is a lot of the people you'll say, nobody listens to this. People do listen to it. A lot of the people listening to this are also being inundated with this sort of information. And I think like, I really do sympathise with people who don't live and breathe this stuff because it is very misleading, that sort of thing. You get it, you see it. You think, oh, a simple process that I can follow.
It is. Yeah, it is. It is presented as that. I agree.
It is absolutely not that. Um, and it does lead you astray. If you don't know how to sort of pick through it and work out what they're trying to get at.
Mhm. Okay. Have you finished? Thank God for that. Right. That'll do for now. And we'll be back with another episode next week. Bye.
You don't get any more likable just saying it.