My old boss used to say sales causes marketing, but once we get some sales in, we'll be able to do some marketing. I'm like, yeah, that's a bit tricky. You need to do the marketing before you get the sales in.
So I mean, we even get contacted by people who've built the website. They've spent usually all of their money and now they say, right, but we're not getting any business, you know, and it's like, yeah, we've kind of gone about this the wrong way. You're better off going into these battles with your eyes wide open than just kind of bumbling along. So for the uninitiated who don't realise this, there are tools which will give you an indication of how many times certain search terms are typed into Google to gauge whether or not there's a ready market. Are people searching for whatever it is help with? Yeah.
Even if people aren't necessarily searching for the exact business idea that you're kind of offering, if there's interest in it, and if there's a kind of market for it, they will at least be searching for questions related to it. So you can always kind of get a feel for how popular something is going to be.
Okay, so I'm surprising everybody just now by just starting this podcast because they're still kind of ruminating and talking amongst themselves about what we're actually going to cover. It's, uh, this is Dave Red evolution. This is digital marketing from the coalface. Um, and today is our fiftieth podcast. Probably.
Probably should have made a cake.
Probably, probably will go out as the fiftieth. It will. This is our fiftieth podcast and there's four of us.
He says confidently.
There's four of us involved in this one. It's normally only two maximum three in the past. So there's actually four of us involved. Whether or not everyone will contribute, I don't know. But what we thought we would talk about was we do a, we do an episode of the show to talk about how you can use digital marketing tools and investigative techniques.
Easy for you to say.
To, uh, to actually figure out whether your new business, whether your new business idea has got legs. Um, this is kind of a result of a conversation that we had last week with a, I guess, a potential customer who contacted us, uh, looking for digital marketing services. Um, so what we thought we'd do is we'll just have a talk about it and see where we go with it. So the idea is if you're thinking of starting a business, or if you've got a business that's really in the early stages, then these are some of the things that you can do in order to figure out where your market is, uh, the size of the market, how difficult or potentially easy it's going to be to reach your target audience and that kind of thing. So all in favor, say I.
Do we have a choice?
Yeah. No, I think that could be really interesting. And, you know, I'll probably take it back a bit beyond, you know, before even that bit, you know, talking about the sort of marketing approach to it as well.
Go on then.
Oh, right. Right now. Yeah. Yeah. No, as you were speaking, I was thinking, you know, the size of the market we're talking about, you know, the market for communicating online, your business idea. But, you know, when somebody comes to us saying, I've got this business idea and I want a website or I want to promote it, I want SEO. We're kind of hoping that they've done the basics in terms of, you know, what is the size of the market out there for people to buy it? Are the people out there who want to buy it? You know, the kind of Dragon's Den stuff, you know, what are the numbers? Have they done the numbers? Do they know that this is actually a thing that people want to buy? So, um, you know, we, we will kind of touch on that, I think if somebody comes to us, but, um, you know, it's almost broader than, than just the, the communication, you need to look at the whole market size and the pricing and the whole kind of marketing caboodle.
Okay. So what would we use?
Which tool would we use initially if we were trying to get a feel for the size of a market for a particular business?
Are you talking online?
Yeah, because.
Julie was rolling it back.
I know.
You jumped in very quickly there.
Well, I'm trying to take it as you know, take it from a digital marketing perspective, the stuff that that we're totally comfortable with. I mean, if you want to go further with the non-digital side of what you were talking about, the non-digital marketing marketing stuff, then you can. Yeah, but I'm talking about somebody contacts us, you know, either they phone up or they book a Zoom chat.
Yeah.
And we're sort of sitting down and straight away we're while we're talking to them, we're doing all this stuff and actually.
Assuming and they come to us and they say, look, you know, we've done, we've done some number crunching. There is a market. We think there's a market out there that we have had feedback that people want to buy this thing. So yeah, then we'd look at something like SEMrush and see, okay, really basic, you know, how many people search for this thing every month? It could be that it's something that doesn't exist yet and they know that it's filling a gap in the market and it doesn't exist. So nobody's actually searching for it because they don't know it exists, so they don't know. Then this method doesn't work. But but, you know, on the basis that it's something that exists and people look for, then yeah, you'd look at something like SEMrush and see, are people actually typing this into Google and how many of.
Them before we go any further, because there's four of us involved, you need to make eye contact with me when you want to say something, and then I'll bring you in. Otherwise, we're all just going to talk all over each other. Alex was. Alex was chomping at the bit. I could hear.
Him.
Squeaking, squeaking. He literally was, for the record. Go on, speak, speak.
I didn't have my hand up either. Um, no, I was just going to say that even if they're not, I mean, I think it's a really good point. I just think that even if people aren't necessarily searching for the exact business idea that you're kind of offering, if there's interest in it, and if there's a kind of market for it, they will at least be searching for questions related to it and that kind of thing. So you can always kind of get a rough feel for how popular something is going to.
Be, possibly something around the problem. You know, Right. I have this problem. What do I do?
Yeah.
Yeah, exactly. And then you go, well, actually, I've invented this thing that solves your problem. So yes, I agree.
And if you are on something like SEMrush and you're looking and you can't find any questions relating to your business idea or anybody else doing the same thing, then it might just be that there isn't that much kind of demand for it. There is no problem to solve, right? I think.
There's a worry if nobody.
You need to talk into the microphone. Julie.
It's quite hard.
I'm trying to look at Alex, who's.
Just out of my line of vision and speaking to the microphone at the same time. And I kind of need eyes, you know, like an owl with.
Well, on the side of your head.
Yeah. I know owls have got eyes. Yeah, they're famous for it. I know what you meant about an owl and the head turning and everything. Yeah.
But it's not like the owls mouth stays behind, is it?
Okay, so Julie's gone. So this is now a podcast with three people on it and, uh, somebody giggling in the background. It's okay. We'll bring it back. We'll bring it back. Don't worry. Okay. What I would say is we're saying things like SEMrush and things like that. I'll do a video and I'll put a link to a video in the show notes, uh, on redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface where I'll demonstrate how we actually use tools like SEMrush or SEMrush or whatever you want to call it to establish, you know, whether people are searching for whatever it is you want to try and sell. So I'll do that. If you stop laughing.
I have stopped laughing. And yes, I actually meant like a dog with eyes on the side of its head so I can speak and look Alex at the same time. But anyway.
I'm not like that.
No no no no no. Like a proper dog.
Oh right. Okay.
I'm offended all the pug owners now. Yeah.
I don't mind.
So yeah. So we would we would look and see are people searching for the thing. If they're not searching for the thing, are they searching for answers to a specific problem that this thing answers? Yeah. Uh, from there, we would get a feel for, you know? Yeah. Is there an audience? Is there, you know, something we can do with this?
So for the uninitiated who don't realise this, there are tools like SEMrush, which will give you an indication of how many times certain search terms are typed into Google. It's an estimate every month and that we can use to to gauge. It's one of the tools that we can use use to gauge whether or not there's a, there's a market, there's a ready market. Are people searching for whatever it is help with?
Yeah, yeah.
If it's really niche, it doesn't show up.
Agreed. Yeah. And that's where tools like SEMrush fall down. Yeah. It gets into the realms then of perhaps tools like the one we built, seed keywords where you have to pose a question to your network of contacts and ask them to type in to seed keywords, what they would search for and see if there are any patterns there. Alex, you wanted to come in.
I was just going to say that. The other good thing is Google Trends, which is a completely free tool. And that's just, again, kind of marrying up the idea that SEMrush will tell you monthly search data, but it won't necessarily tell you whether something's kind of growing or declining in popularity. So sometimes, especially if you're at that kind of ideation phase, it's a really good idea.
Did he say ideation?
I'm afraid he did. We might have to hit him.
No. But is that in the same class as investigative? So we've had two now. Okay. Okay.
Didn't you say to me quite recently, bullied.
Look at.
This. Didn't you say to me quite recently, Alex, that trends is a bit shit?
Uh, yeah. It is. I mean, it's abstracted, right? It gives you a score from zero to one hundred out of how popular something currently is. So it's kind of useless if you want any hard and fast statistics, but it's really good if you want to know, is this idea growing in popularity? Are more and more people searching this every month, or did people start searching for it in two thousand and six and nobody cares anymore?
That kind of thing. And isn't there a geographic element to it as well? Yeah, so that's quite handy.
You need to talk into the microphone. Caron. I'm not going to tell anybody. I'm going to turn them off.
We're all.
Gonna be removed from the podcast.
And social listening as well. I mean, if it is something that is happening out there, then you can, you can look on social media and do some searches and see if people are tweeting about it or something like that. So that there, you know, it's something that people are talking about.
Okay. That's fine. Um, just bear with me a second. Keep talking.
I was going to ask Julie and Alex, are there ways to think about social listening that people maybe don't know about? Because we've heard people say, well, I've researched my plan, my idea, and I've got a newsfeed. Is that enough? I know what the answer is, but I would like to hear you say it.
News feeds literally only pick up things in newspapers and magazines. They don't pick up stuff in Google. Generally, they pick up things that Google thinks are news publications. So that's if somebody's got a really good PR effort going on, then they'll come up in news. But other than that, they probably won't.
Yeah. So alarm bells should be ringing in your head.
Yeah, but there are. There's plenty of social tools, um, for for sort of monitoring mentions in social. Again, if it's something fairly niche, it might not be much use. But for more sort of consumer stuff, it might show up in, in social.
Tools, like, uh, ask the public or whatever is it called? Ask the public that one.
Yeah. There is that one where you see what it's, it's, yeah, it's, it's what people are searching for.
And there's one that's got a sort of martial arts kind of name. What's that one? Buzzsumo.
Buzzsumo. Yeah, that's more the social listening one, the Buzzsumo, which was actually the one I was trying to think of while I was speaking there. That's the one.
Okay. All right. Good. So in a nutshell, there are lots of tools that can help figure out whether people are looking for whatever it is you're planning to sell.
Yes.
Services, products, whatever it is.
Yeah. There are. And I think that's that's a very good starting point to see, you know, if when you're doing budgeting and things, you know, how, how many people can we hope to reach straight away before they know this thing exists because they're looking for it already. You know, in the beginning when you launch something, those are the people that that are going to find you first because they're already looking.
So if we establish that lots of people are looking for what we're proposing to sell, let's say it's going to be a service. Is it just like, is that it? Yee haw! We've got a potential success. Now. We're just going to, you know, go after it, go after this business because we know it's going to succeed.
That would be great, wouldn't it? You know build it and they will.
Go for it.
So are you saying that's not the case.
If you're very lucky. You know what? If you invent something amazing that everyone's looking for and you do it better than everyone else, and it's cheaper than everyone else. Awesome. But yeah, probably it's going to take a little bit more work than that. But you know, it, it's, it's all part of how you put your package together. Like say that, you know, how much is it going to cost? What does it do if somebody's already doing it? Is it why would they buy yours and not the one that's already been out there for five years. So there's lots to think about in there.
Is that the next stage? I mean, you've already established people are looking for something. Then you figure out is it already being done? Who's doing it and how are they doing it.
Exactly that. It's yeah. Who else is doing this? You know, and have. Have I missed the boat or are they all, you know, are they already doing it really well and I can't compete? Or what am I going to do differently.
On that very subject of is anybody else currently doing this? A lot of the time people will say to me, and this happened in the instance last week, I've got this idea. Nobody else is doing it. And it might sound disrespectful, but within 30s, I'd found about four or five businesses that were doing exactly.
And what were you doing differently to that person that you found them? And after months of searching, they hadn't.
I think they were asking very, almost mechanistic questions, you know, for, for example, you might say, um cinema Aberdeen, right. If you were searching for it or you might say, uh, I want to go to the cinema in Aberdeen. What's on as I, yeah. So what I do when I'm, when I'm starting out is I'll, I'll ask really quite verbose questions. I mean, Google's an answer engine. It's very good at answering questions. Yeah, it's pretty good answering questions. And so I ask the search engine quite long questions as a starting point. Then I'll find some answers and I'll probably find some solutions. And then I'll hone in on those solutions and start asking more specific questions. And because again, going back to SEMrush, if you if you ask it, if you get like a seed keyword, if you get some, a starting point, it'll often go off people. People also ask this, type this in and they also ask these questions. And then the whole thing just grows arms and legs and off you go. But if you keep it very tight, you're almost certainly, um, going to finish up thinking, wow, nobody's actually doing this thing that I've decided to do.
Even in Google itself, as soon as you type something in, you go down to the bottom and it says, people also search for these things and you're like, oh yeah. So, you know, actually, you know, even without any tools, just using Google and seeing what it throws up and you can go in the click links in the bottom and it says, people also search for this. And then you click on one of them and go off and, and then the bottom of that page, you might find other things. So you can go off and, and find a lot more information just in Google itself.
Yeah. I was gonna say this is one of the like, I think this is like touches on a problem that we see with a lot of our clients, both startups and entrenched clients. Isn't it where people kind of assume that the language they use to discuss their business or to ask about their idea or whatever is the language that their customer uses? And that is often, I would say the majority of the time that's not actually the case, isn't it? The language you're using as a business person, as a prospective business owner isn't going to be the same as the, the ideas and the things that your customer base are typing into Google.
Yeah, we see that a lot.
I was going to say there's a psychological aspect to this perhaps as well, where you have an idea and you are so in love with the idea that you. I don't think you do it consciously, but you almost avoid looking for the clues that will say to you, this is not going to fly. I am so sorry. It's not going to fly. And you may be a little bit of head in the sand, a little bit of avoidance.
People see what they want to see. And also a lot of times people run it past their friends and family who, who kind of don't want to offend them. And they say, oh yeah, that's a great idea. Well, actually, it's a terrible idea, but I didn't want to hurt his feelings.
And by the way, the whole purpose of this, this, this, uh, podcast and this information that we're sharing, um, and the conversations that we have with people who come to us because they've got an idea and they want some help is to make sure that they don't invest their life savings or their redundancy pay into a business that's not going to go anywhere. I mean, you know, we genuinely want to make sure that doesn't happen. We're not interested in getting, you know, twenty, thirty, forty thousand quid off of business to deliver something which we know is not going to work for them.
No, we won't do that.
We wouldn't do.
It. We've been asked to do it before. And, and we've we've said, look, what about doing some sort of test first to see if it's got legs before we take a load of money and build you a massive app that's going to cost you an absolute fortune and may not work. So test out the idea first in a, in a smaller way, which I'm sure we'll get to in a minute.
Get to a minimum viable product as quickly as possible kind of thing. Okay, so recap. Alex recap. What have we got so far?
Um, make sure there's people actually searching for what you want to do and make sure that if they are searching for what you want to do, that there isn't hundreds of competitors doing it better than you could ever hope to.
Right. So that's a great point. The competitors. So what we've done so far is we've established that people are searching for what we're trying to sell. And as I said to Julie in a kind of leading question. So does that mean if they are that we're onto something? Well, it might, but it might not, because the next thing we have to think about, um, with our fledgling business idea is how do we get a brand new website with no authority? No, you know, Google doesn't trust it. It's got no rank ability, if you like. How do we even start out? And so if you think, for example, that because people are searching for X, Y, or Z, that you're just going to build a website, and then people, when they search for it will find you. That's a big no no. So then the next thing I would suggest is you, once you've established what people are searching for and you've established the search terms that you hope that when they search for them, they'll find you is like, well, who is currently getting all that traffic? So a good example would be if you, if you carry out a search and, and the first page, even the first pages of a search result are household names, then you might be up against it.
Yeah. Unless what you're doing is kind of groundbreaking or disruptive, and it's solving the same problem, but it's doing it in a much better way. Or it's like half the price or something. Well, or.
Or you have a massive budget, right? Because I mean, it does happen. I mean, I'm just thinking about Gymshark, for example, right? So they entered a really saturated space, which is gyms. And they just threw a load of money at the wall, did some really funny marketing and spent a lot on it. And now are kind of entrenched as a really big brand. And it is possible, I guess. But yeah, I think that's the thing, isn't it? Either you have to have a really good key differentiator or a lot of money.
Yeah. Or yeah, a great. Yeah. Either your product's really different or your, your way of promoting it is really different. Mhm.
So going back to our entrepreneur, something, you know, that I find myself saying quite often when I'm speaking to people or in this situation is you will spend a lot more on trying to get this thing found, trying to establish this thing. Then you're going to spend building your website because a lot of people, you know, they focus in on building a website. They focus in on the sexy bit. I want to build a website, create a brand. Then I've got something to show for my efforts and, and they don't really want to talk about how hard it's going to be to get that proposition in front of people.
But your brand's no good if nobody knows who you are or never sees your website, is it?
We always say that building the website is the easy bit, and it's it's getting people onto your website and buying something. That's the hard bit.
Yeah, that's the ongoing bit, isn't it? Okay. Um, so anything to add on this? I mean, where, where do we start then in terms of trying to figure out whether, you know, we've got the search terms, we know people are looking for what we're proposing to sell. We've now looked at the websites that are currently getting all that traffic. So how do we now, what do we now need to do in order to, um, decide whether or not it's a fight that we can win?
Well, either you look at what they're doing and throw more money at it or do it better, or you go around the side and do something slightly different. So look at what they're not the sort of traffic that they're not getting. So people are searching for this, this and this and they're showing up, but people are searching for also this thing that's maybe slightly more niche or a slightly different question, and the competitors aren't targeting that. So we'll kind of go around the corner and, and do it that way. So you could start that way by getting the people that aren't currently being served by what the competitors are doing, or you just have to look at what they're doing and do more of it and do it better and put a massive, massive amount of effort into it.
And unless they're not doing a very good job of it, I guess, I mean, I guess I kind of feel like where potentially you could start out by, by looking is, are the people who are currently ranking number one for the search term? You know, do they actually have good domain authority for their website? For example, are they actually doing any kind of proactive SEO? Have they actually tried to optimise their content for the search terms you're going for? Or are they they're kind of by accident? Because I think, yeah, one of the things we do see sometimes is this kind of like older, entrenched historical websites that don't really try to rank for search terms. They just are, because nobody else has really gone after them yet. And often you can kind of type something into Google and be left with the impression that, you know, the only, you know, loads of good high quality websites are ranking for this. I don't stand a chance. But when you actually kind of drill down to look at what they're doing, there's actually space for you to maybe muscle in a little bit.
Yeah.
So you're talking about domain authority. And I mentioned I used a made up word rank ability. That is something that's really important. And I think a lot of people miss it, you know, like a brand new website. It's like, it's like a new kid on the block. And I suppose in simple terms, Google might look at that website and go, well, I have no idea whether I should put that in the mix in a search result because it's got no trust signals. I don't know if the information in it is any good. I've got nothing to go on. So you're fantastic. Website isn't ranking very well and isn't getting found. And it's frustrating for people because they see some of the maybe the people who are getting all the search traffic who've been around since God was in short pants. I just don't appear to be doing anything to, to earn that traffic. You know, they're simply just, just getting it. And that that doesn't seem fair, does it? That's that doesn't seem right.
Except that you probably stand more of a chance of actually getting above them with a bit of effort than if they're doing everything right.
Is it fair to say that in some situations we should just give up? You know, it is the right advice to somebody just to say, look, you're not going to get any penetration into this area of search anytime soon unless you throw a massive amount of money at it.
Probably. Yeah. And that's where you'd sort of say, right, you know, try, try the back door, try going, going for a slightly different angle on it and get, get people who are, you know, not searching for the, the sort of main keywords, but a slightly different way of approaching it. And you've kind of got to think a little bit more creatively is that, I mean, we speak to people like quite a lot people with holiday cottages, and they're trying to compete with Airbnb and TripAdvisor and people like that.
It's like, well, can I just speak about that briefly? Because because somebody local to us contacted us very recently, somebody I know quite well. And, you know, they say, oh, wait a minute, you know, Dave Red evolution, they're actually here. You know, we could speak to them. So can you build us a website because we're currently renting out our property through Airbnb and we're paying a lot of commission. And it's close to your heart. I know, because you've got a holiday cottage. And so I said, right, number one, we can build you a fantastic website. Number two, do not do it. Stay with, stay with what you're doing because people will not find you. I said, unless you've got a whole list of people who've been staying with you for the last four or five years who are regulars, they come back every year for the fishing or the gliding or whatever in the local area, and you can contact them and say, hey, you can book directly with me now. But I said, unless you can fill it with those people, you're going to have a problem. Because the likes of I don't know if Airbnb do it, but holiday cottages, etc. do it like where you have to commit to say to a certain amount of availability, you're only actually allowed to book it out yourself for like four weeks of the year or something.
Doesn't matter with Airbnb.
Doesn't matter with Airbnb. Okay. Yeah.
So you can do both.
Yeah.
But you're never going to compete. You're never going to rank above Airbnb in Google. And there's so many of these engines that do the bookings that you're never going to get in page one for your holiday cottage. Mhm. Um, and you know, holiday cottages aren't that lucrative that you can afford to out compete with.
Well, here's an example in the accommodation sector, if you think of Premier Inns now they've got is it Lenny Henry who's there. He's their brand ambassador. Yeah. I think he still is actually. Um and they advertise on television a lot, which must cost them a fortune. And every single advert, they say you can only book Premier Inn directly at Premier Inn. You know, don't go to hotels dot com, don't go to bookings dot com. You can only book Premier Inn hotels on the Premier Inn website or by giving us a ring. And they've had to spend a fortune to overcome the problem that we've just established is, is a, you know, for the smaller businesses where if you're not on Airbnb or if you're not on holiday cottages or whatever, then you're just not going to get found. And you know, the effort they've had to put in to overcome that.
Yeah. And that's, well, like we're saying, if, if people are in a market where, you know, their competitors are doing really well in Google and they're like, it's really hard, then you've got to find another way. Um, and, you know, television advertising maybe isn't that one, but there might be another way of reaching them so that they come to Google and actually type in your name and find you that way or find something else that you do.
Uh, I think you wanted to say something, Caron.
Well, I was going to ask Julie because she was saying, you know, find something else and sort of circumvent that, that.
That.
Popularity of you.
Like doing that thing without having.
Something with your hand.
You can't see that on a.
Podcast going around a corner. Um, but, but if you haven't, if, if that doesn't marry with the differentiator that you're trying to establish.
I mean, in.
Has to, you know, it's you're you're not going to have a corner to go around, are you?
Yeah. You've got to work out what what you're going to do differently. And then look and see what, what if people are searching for something different or look and see what people are searching for. That's not the mainstream thing. And then then sort of put that message out there and focus on that thing that you do that that hits that mark. It doesn't always work. There may not be one, but there might be.
And there's a danger that everything we're talking about sounds like we've got a big down on entrepreneurs and people start trying to start new businesses, and nothing could be further just.
Trying to stop them wasting their money.
Exactly that. Be realistic. And because these tools are, um, some of them are free, some of them are low cost. Nearly all of them give you some sort of free trial. Then anybody who's thinking of starting a business should sign up for a free trial of SEMrush or Buzzsumo, or ask the public and all of these things and and get as much research done as possible. It's not particularly exciting and interesting.
But what it is, if it's your business and you're digging about to see if you know what's happening out there and where am I going with this, then it actually is probably a lot more interesting than it sounds, because this is your business you're talking about, and you're trying to know everything about the market. So it should be interesting.
It should be interesting, but it's not as exciting as building a website or an app.
Yeah.
That's the.
Problem. Designing a new logo. Yeah. It's not, it's not. Yeah it is. But it is interesting because you're, you're knowing, you're trying to understand well, you know, it.
Is.
To understanding your audience, who your ideal customers are, things like that. That's what, you know, floats my boat. But yeah, it is really, really important.
I mean, okay, rewind, um, rewind a number of years where these tools didn't exist and somebody came to you like, I've got this idea for a business. Where would you have started then before we had these tools.
Um, like, like market research, you'd go to the library and, you know, look in directories and, and look at printed reports and, you know, see what, what research was out there about the size of the market and that, that, that sort of thing has always existed. Um, and then, you know, speak to people, get them to go out and actually talk to people who were there some ideal customers and see if, if there's a market there, see if there's a demand.
So it was hard art. It was hard.
It's hard.
Hard, hard, hard.
Hard.
Labor intensive.
Yeah, very, very expensive. Very expensive. Market research is expensive. Um, and, and it's like, yeah, getting people to dig through printed reports or go to the library and find these things or order reports from somebody that produces them, you know? So yeah, it was a horrible process. It's much, much easier now.
Yeah. I think you could probably sit with a laptop and inside two or three hours, you'd have a pretty good idea as to whether or not your business has got a waiting, ready and willing audience.
Yeah.
Pretty much.
Rather than two or three months probably before.
Yeah. Alex, you can either say something or go make some tea.
I mean.
I know which one I prefer.
I'm gone. No, I was just gonna say that. Yeah, that. And like I say, I think profiling your competitors is a lot easier now than it ever was before. I mean, we, you know, we talked a little bit about kind of plugging competitors into things like SEMrush and seeing what the domain authority is, but it's also really easy to do things like see where they're advertising online. Look at how much they're spending on AdWords using the same tools. This is, you know, you can look up people's, um, ad catalogs in Facebook as well because they have to disclose the adverts that go through their networks and stuff like that. So it's now kind of possible sitting in your own bedroom with a laptop to see not only is there a market for my business, but what exactly are my competitors, key competitors in that marketplace doing to market their business? And can I copy them?
You can look at their social media. You can see how many followers they've got. See what engagement they get, you know. Have they got a sort of, you know, group who who are loyal to them or not.
A tribe.
A tribe. Yeah.
Seth Godin would say, one of the interesting stats that I often throw at people when we're having these conversations. And by the way, if anybody has got business ideas and they want to sit with us for, you know, twenty minutes, twenty minutes, half an hour to go through this process that we're talking about, we're happy to do it. Um, but one of the, one of the key stats that we talk about, um, is the cost of the traffic that the site gets. Let me explain that a little bit better. So SEMrush will tell you if you want to buy the traffic, that site A gets through organic search, i.e. free, this is how much you would have to spend. And sometimes that number is scary. I mean, it's not unusual to see five, ten, fifteen, twenty thousand pounds worth of traffic. Or rather, if you start off with a brand new site, so you're not going to get that traffic organically. You can try and buy it using paid search and that's what it would cost you. Yeah. Caron wants to come in.
I was just going to say you need to elaborate on that, that you're talking about ad spend.
Yeah. We're talking.
About you would have to spend on online advertising.
To get the equivalent.
Equivalent.
Visibility on search. Yeah.
Yeah.
Yeah, absolutely. Um, there's another, there's another area of research which we haven't looked at. And as you know, that Steve and I, with our Alert Eyes project, we look at strategy quite a lot. And when you're developing a strategy, I'm not talking about marketing strategy. I'm talking about any strategy. Then there's a lot of available external data that can help you understand the markets in which you operate. So, for example, the ONS here in the UK and there are equivalents in Australia and America and around the world, the ONS. And there's what's that commercial site. Statistica. Is it called. That's very good as well. They get a certain amount of free data from them, but the available information that's just so easy to access with your laptop or even your phone, I guess from the ONS and the like can be hugely valuable. It can show you what's happening in a particular market, whether it's rising or falling, you know, just exactly what's going on. Volume of sales in a particular market, how sales, for example, might be one of those, you know, so there's a, again, there's a massive amount of desk research that you can do without spending any money. You can't just all nod at me. You've got to say something.
I mean, there's tons of research out there. I mean, I worked very briefly in a sort of fast moving, fast moving consumer goods company, um, on a secondment. And I mean, we got these huge reports every week to see like for each brand of juice, like how if it's gone up, if it had gone down, what percentage of market share? So I mean, that stuff all exists as well. Um, and you know, there is a lot, a lot of stuff out there and some of it's paid and some of it is, you know, available publicly.
To your point, Alex, about investigating competitors. I think you touched on it, but just to be crystal clear to people, and I'll make this clear in the video that I stick in the show notes on redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface. Um, you can plug an established player into these tools and it will not only tell you the value of the traffic they get and what they're spending on AdWords, it will list out the keywords that they actually rank for. It'll say this, this website ranks for this keyword at this position, this many people search for this keyword and it's generating X percent of this business income, or rather visitors if you like, which hopefully would translate as income. It is unbelievable. You can't hide online. And by the way, once you're an established business, people will be doing it to you as well. So don't feel bad about it. You can, you can plug anyone in and interrogate their website and find out all kinds of amazing information.
And just to go just to kind of pick up on that. You can also see exactly what articles or pages of their website are ranking for specific search terms, which is really important when going back to what we were saying earlier, You're sitting down and trying to work out can you realistically compete with them? Can you invest the time and the resource and whatever? And if you're looking at competitors who are ranking for really good keywords that you think you want to rank for, and they've got a three hundred word blog post they wrote ten years ago, you can realistically say, yeah, you know, I can, I can do something better than that. But if you're there and it's a six thousand word article that was published two days ago, and it has a load of like integrated research and videos, and it links to a podcast and stuff like that. You might think, well, actually, that's, that's far too labor intensive for me. I can't realistically compete with that.
As backlinks as well. You know, if they've been linked to from the BBC or the Guardian or something and they, you know, they've got loads of really, really important links from, you know, really authoritative sources. Then again, you're going to struggle.
Yeah. And for anybody who wants to know what the heck Julie's talking about, link links are almost like the currency of, of search rankings. It's, it's like if people are linking to your web pages from their web pages, they're effectively saying to Google, we trust this resource. This is a good resource.
Generally speaking, yeah, it gives, it gives it gives Google idea of an idea of how authoritative your your page is on that same subject because people that it trusts say this is a good resource.
Yeah. A lot of what we've been talking about today, just to wrap this up, also applies to established businesses who are not killing it in search. So if you've got a business you've been around for a while, you've got a website that's been around for a while, but you're just not getting the traction. A lot of the things we've spoken about apply to that as well. It isn't just for start ups. And the one advantage that you'll have if you are in that position is that there's a good chance you could get what's known as a Google Search Console data, i.e., Google will give you data about the search terms that effectively you appear for, even though you appear for them on page two, three, four, five, six of a search result. So you never actually get any traffic, but it actually gives you some really fantastic data. We speak about the Search Console in so many of our podcasts, because it's such a fantastic and free resource that people can use. So if you are an established business, you're not quite as in the same situation. Um, although a lot of what we talked about applies, you're not really in, in as bad a situation as a brand new website. Caron. You want to come in on that?
Yeah, I was just going to say that although, you know, people say, well, you know, I've done this search and we do this search every day at the office and, you know, we're on page six. Search console will tell you exactly what you need to know, not the fact that you go into the office every day and do a search for your favorite keyword, you know, go into Search Console and see what's happening for real.
Yeah. See what other people are finding you for. And also remember that what you, what you see in Google might not be exactly the same as what someone else sees in Google because they're in a different location, they've got different Preferences and Google kind of figures out who you are and what you're doing and what you've searched for before. And it does show you something slightly different.
That's one of the quite useful aspects of the many useful aspects of SEMrush, in that you can set up, um, keyword monitoring in a project and say, show me what this search result looks like. If I'm in London showing me what it looks like in Birmingham, show me if I'm in Manchester and it is, as you say, it's quite interesting to see how search results vary depending on the location of the person doing the search. Something that a lot of people don't realise. Have we kind of done this to death? Are we happy? I know you've got a meeting in ten minutes, and you probably want to get a cup of tea first.
I don't need a cup of tea, but I do need to be at the meeting in ten minutes.
That's right. Okay. Alex, anything to finish us off? Are you quite.
Happy? I think that's everything.
Covered, Caron.
No. Absolutely not.
Julie.
Yeah, yeah. Don't be. Don't be put off by all this. Just, um, think it through. And there probably is a way if you've got, you know, if you've got a product that's a goer, then um, you know, just do your research and find the best way of doing it. Don't. Don't just leap for the most obvious way. Always.
The tools are available. They're free to use. There are people like us out there who are happy to offer offer advice. It might not be particularly sexy compared with building an app or building an app can be quite painful. But anyway, you know, it's not as glamorous as some sides of it, but it can save you an absolute fortune. And I always think you're better off going into these battles with your eyes wide open than just kind of bumbling along. I mean, we even get contacted by people who've built the website. They've done all that stuff. They've spent usually all of their money, and now they say, right, but we're not getting any business, you know? And it's like, yeah, we've kind of gone about this the wrong way. And it's, and it's, it's kind of upsetting in some respects because, you know, that hard earned money has gone into these projects.
Yeah. And you can't do very much with it because they've got to kind of wait until they make some money, but they can't make some money because they haven't got the traffic.
Well, how many conversations have we had where people have literally said, like, I'm in this situation, but I haven't got any money left. Yeah. As if, like they expect us to go. Oh, well, don't worry about that. We'll just work for free.
Like my old boss used to say. Sales causes marketing. They say, well, once we get some sales, then we'll be able to do some marketing. Yeah.
Kind of.
Yeah, that's a bit tricky.
Flip that on its head.
Need to do the marketing before you get the sales in. So it's very, very difficult.
Yeah. Okay. You've been listening to Digital Marketing From The Coalface. Yeah. If you've got any questions, if you've got any questions you want to send us for us to talk about from redevolution.com/digital-marketing-from-the-coalface or redevolution.com, whichever you prefer. If you want to come on the show, we've got again, we've got we've already got some stuff recorded. We've got some great guests coming up. If you want to come on the show. We're always happy to have people on the show to talk about stuff that interests them, and because of it interests them, it's going to interest us and it's going to interest our listeners. In the meantime, good luck with your digital marketing. Any questions, you know where to find us and speak to you next time.