When people land on your content, whatever the search term they used to arrive there, you want what they see to give them a really good impression of your brand. It's not just content isn't just for kind of ranking in Google.
We've got to be very honest with ourselves. Is this content adding anything to the debate on this particular subject? Is it adding any value? Is it providing something that's educational going forward? My focus is going to be on creating educational content, but also absolutely making sure that it's entertaining as well. It's some aspects of digital marketing can be quite dry. In actual fact, what we do is quite exciting because we help businesses grow.
I think that's one of the things that in general at the moment, I've been thinking about a lot because there's the whole buzz about, um, AI content, which.
We're going to talk about next. Welcome back to Digital Marketing From The Coalface.
Hooray!
Three. Twenty twenty three. Um. What we're not doing here is is being, um, preachy in saying, hey, do this twenty twenty three. This is oh, no, we're not doing that.
We're not doing New Year's resolution.
We're not doing New Year's resolutions.
Whatever other things people do. Is that a thing you actually do? Have you ever done a New Year's resolution?
I probably pay lip service to it and sort of think, oh, I need to do more of this, less of that kind of thing, but I don't write them down and then monitor them or anything like that. That just too much like hard work. Um, my New Year's resolution is to get the band, which is, um, practicing at the moment gigging. So we're going to set ourselves the impossible task of getting a gig by the end of February. Um, currently we probably know about three songs. So there's another, there's another thirty plus to learn. I know we're gonna, we're going to go for it. I've often found with bands when I've, when I've played because I've played in bands since I was a kid. Um, you set yourself a target and you. And you then have something to go for. A bit like digital marketing. No, I'm.
Not.
I'm not.
Going.
There. I'm not going. I just I'm just that's just I just made that up.
It's interesting though. It's interesting that, um, I never really thought about the mechanics of getting ready to gig like that. You have to just learn a bucket list of.
Songs and you don't really, you don't really get them tight until you start gigging them. Yeah. So you can practice till you're blue in the face. Obviously you get the mechanics of it all there, you know, you know when to stop, when to start and what key it's in. Well, I'm a drummer, so I don't care what I sing as well. So it does, it does matter. But whatever they play it in, I'll sing it in that key, whatever that is. I have no idea. Drummer Guy who hangs around with musicians. Um, I, yeah, I'm looking forward to that. So my main resolution this year is to get back to gigging regularly. You know, it's kind of what I've always done in my life is like played in bands. Some people play football, some people play rugby. I've done all of that badly. But banding stuff is something I've always done really well and I enjoy it, but a really long gap where I just haven't had a band that's been that's been good and gigging regularly, and I get a buzz out of it anyway. This is just nonsense really, because I'm not here to talk about.
As opposed to the rest.
I think we might have just found the what we're going to do for our for our other non digital marketing related podcast, maybe just, just general, general chat about nothing.
Well, I was gonna say the music direction because that's what I wanted to do when I was in uni. I wanted to be a music journalist. That's what I was. That was my fallback plan. You know, you don't.
You're my cousin's son. So my. No f.u. Mhm. Yeah, definitely. Um, he wanted to do the same. And he studied English at Manchester Uni. Uh, Connor, he now plays in a band, works for a local rag. Small local rag, I think. And, um, I don't think he's doing music journalism, but that's what he wanted to do. It's probably a tough gig to get. Is it?
Yeah. Well, it's just not very many. Yeah. Outlets for it nowadays.
No I suppose. Yeah. Um, talking about not many outlets. Um, this, uh, podcast first for twenty twenty three is, uh, it's not a checklist. What I thought we'd do is we just chat about some of the things we're doing for ourselves. So not specifically clients, we might, we might touch on some of the stuff we're doing for clients. We might not. Um, but obviously digital marketing isn't just something as listeners to the podcast will know that we do for our clients, red evolutions clients. We also obviously spend a lot of time, a lot of time doing our own digital marketing because that's how we generate most of our business by attracting people to our website and then engaging with them for conversations, etc. we do get some referrals, but we do a lot of we do a lot of business because of inbound.
Yeah, we do, we do practice what we preach.
Mhm. So one of the things that we started towards the end of twenty two, and we're going to very much continue with in twenty three, is a content audit, which you and I are heavily involved with.
Yeah, pretty massive content audit.
Just like in very broad terms. Tell people what we're doing well.
Mhm. Well, I guess ostensibly the simplest way to put it is that we are going back through all the blog posts that we've published for the last. I don't even want to say I.
Started the blog in two thousand and seven.
A long time.
Mhm.
Um, so we've got hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of old blog posts. Not anymore. And so what we're doing is going through all of them, and we're kind of working out a, whether they're worth having at all, whether.
They're.
Relevant. Yeah. Are they useful? Are they interesting? Um, and B whether or not more work needs to be done to them. So for example, a lot of the old, old blog posts are quite short. They're quite kind of thin on detail. So we're going through and just kind of like try and to be fair, it's been through a few different iterations, hasn't it? This content audit, we've kind of arrived at a process eventually for how we're kind of going through and saying, you know, is it optimised for the right keywords? Does it have enough content? Is it interesting enough? You know, what else can we talk about in it? Yeah. To start with, it was a little bit more kind of scattergun, I guess.
Well, yeah. One of the things that we started to do was we thought every single blog post that we've got, we'll repurpose it and, and rewrite it and expand it out.
Which sounds really good on.
Paper and turn it into something great. So that was close to. It's not massive, but four hundred ish blog posts. Uh, maybe three. Maybe no. Maybe closer to three hundred. Nod. Um, we thought every single one of them will keep. And we'll. But we'll improve them. And we quickly realised that that was going to be not only a huge task, but a pointless task as well, because some of them were, they were literally three, four hundred word rants.
Yeah. But I mean, it's interesting because I think one of the things I really struggled with is because for years it's been drilled into our heads that like content is good, more content is better. Yeah. And the idea of going through and deleting, I mean, how many did we delete? In the end, it was it was hundreds. Oh, yeah. Uh.
two hundred and over two hundred.
And that was honestly over two hundred. I honestly found that quite challenging because like I say, the content is a valuable resource. It's something that, you know, even if, you know, they were kind of out of date now, we'd still poured time and effort into them at the time.
Some of them considerable time and effort.
And it feels bad initially to say, oh, well, we just have to bin this, but I think it was the right decision, wasn't it, just to make it more manageable?
Well, the problem we had that we realised is that because like our podcast in some respects, but our blog post would talk about all kinds of subjects and what it maybe looked like to the outside world and specifically to Google's crawlers, is that it wasn't about anything in particular.
Yeah. Yeah.
And so what we've done is we've focused in on what it should be about, which is all things inbound marketing, digital marketing. And that's a huge subject anyway.
I was going to say, yeah, it's.
Where we're going to finish up is every, every single post in that blog will be of use and about some aspect of digital marketing. And that's where we're going to get to with it. We've still got, I think it's under one hundred now. I think we've got less than a hundred that that still are being worked on. I think where we'll, you know, hopefully by the end of January, we'll be just about there with it, because we're putting in putting in the effort to get it done. Well, some of us are.
But. Uh. No comment. Um, yeah. And I think it's quite interesting as well, like the, the process that we're going through, which would probably outline, right, just what exactly it is that we're doing for each blog post because we do, I mean, we, we're very organised with it now, like frighteningly organised. You have a special checklist and stuff. Do you?
Exactly. Yeah, exactly. Which, which I'm not going to bore people with just now. If you want to know what we're doing, if you want to talk about how we're doing our content audit and how we're hopefully improving content and the early signs from the data we're getting back from Google Search Console. Yeah. It seems to have turned from a downward trend to an upward trend, which is nice. I mean, it's, it's a, it's a long, slow, painful process. Um, our website, it's no secret. I mean, anyone with any analysis tools will be able to check that we, you know, we've gone from the dizzying heights, um, to a couple of years ago maybe of getting lots of traffic, albeit maybe a lot of irrelevant traffic amongst that to, you know, getting a significantly lower number of visits per day. But those visits still feed us. We still getting great enquiries as a result. What we're hoping is, and it isn't just a numbers game. I mean, we we want to make sure that the content is attracting the right people, uh, that we're ranking for the things we really want to rank for just exactly like we do for our customers. I mean, you know, no, no great shakes, no, no great surprises.
Rather, I think it's important from a brand point of view, isn't it as well. Like when people land on your content, whatever the search term they use to arrive there, you want what they see to give them a really good impression of your brand. It's not just content isn't just for kind of ranking in Google. And I think that's the thing with some of the shorter blog posts, wasn't it? It's like you land on it and then by the end of the, you know, reading it, you'd think, well, did that add value? Is that kind of cast us in a good light? And I think it's also about considering that because that's I think that's one of the things that in general at the moment, I've been thinking about a lot because there's the whole buzz about, um, AI content that's going on at the moment, for example.
Which we're going to talk about next.
It's almost like we planned this. But, you know, it's this whole idea that you kind of write content and people have been kind of parroting this thing of like, oh, you write content for humans, not robots for a while. But people have still been mainly publishing content to rank in Google. And I don't think many people have been paying attention to what happens after you rank in Google, which is that people land on it and read it, and if it's not good, it doesn't really matter how well it ranks, it's not actually going to do you any favors.
No, one hundred percent. Um, and I think that's something, again, you know, in this, this, uh, checklist, if you like, you know, we've got to be very honest with ourselves. Is this content adding anything to the debate on this particular subject? Is it adding any value? Is it providing something that's educational? And, and importantly, maybe it's difficult when, when we're reworking some of the existing posts. But going forward, my focus is going to be on creating educational content, but also absolutely making sure that it's entertaining as well because it is a subject which some aspects of digital marketing can be quite dry. You're talking about data, you're talking about keywords. It sounds like gobbledygook sort of thing. But in actual fact, what we do is quite exciting because we help businesses grow. We help, we've helped, you know, we've grown our own business using it. We help other businesses grow using it. Um, and it is quite kind of quite exciting. There's no reason why digital marketing content, uh, in the form of the podcast and blogs and everything else can't be and shouldn't be. Um, entertaining.
No. And that probably applies to a lot of the people listening as well. Like I've seen this really strange thing, you know, over the last few years, especially where I'll be talking to people who run B2B businesses who, you know, are in kind of ostensibly dry and dull industries, they'll get very excited and very enthusiastic about what they're doing. But then when you go and look at their website, it's all the same kind of dry, stale, boring content. And I think there is, you're right. Like there is a real need for people to kind of have let some of that enthusiasm that they have, some of the interest they have kind of seep into what they write and not just kind of churn out corporate rubbish Really?
Yeah for sure. Okay, so that's one of the things that we're looking at. Um, second thing that we're looking at because it's interesting is um well everybody's talking. Well I thought everybody was talking about it till I asked for a show of hands in the scrum yesterday morning. And I was quite surprised that the number of people that went, uh, what? Uh, ChatGPT.
Yeah. I mean.
I started playing with that.
Devs, the developers less likely to know about it than people who are kind of immersed in marketing. But yeah.
So what we're doing with it is at the moment we are, um, setting time aside within the team, like so individual people are, are being asked to set some of their time aside to go and look at play with, figure out how this AI phenomenon, ChatGPT can actually help us do our work more effectively. Um, the most obvious way that people think they're going to use it is writing their content. Um, so basically open, uh, ChatGPT sign up for a free account, Open ChatGPT and say, um, write me a two thousand word article on the subject of, uh, industrial adhesives used in the, um, mezzanine floor industry. Sure. Just think of something completely random and the chances are it will produce content. Now, Alex, tell us why that might be problematic.
You see me trying to leap in here? Yeah. Don't do that. But there's two things here. The first thing is it's very easy for third parties to detect that it was written by AI. So there are all including including Google. So there are already a load of free AI content checkers online where you can take the output from these AI writing tools. And you can copy and paste them in there. And it will tell you what percentage of the content was written by an AI. And it is frighteningly accurate. Like I was playing with it yesterday. I got it to write a thousand words. It said zero percent written by humans. I took two hundred words off the introduction, typed two hundred of my own words. It said twenty percent. Written by humans. It is like down to the percentage point. And if these third party tools can tell, Google can definitely tell. So when Google have been rolling out this whole helpful content update, they've been talking a lot about AI content and how they specifically do not want it and consider it spam. I think probably chances are that most of what was hidden behind that helpful content update was tools geared towards sniffing out and kind of blacklisting that AI content, or at least kind of demoting it in search. So I definitely wouldn't just kind of go in there and say, take me two thousand words on X, Y, and Z, copy and paste it, put it on your blog. That is not a sensible thing to do. I'd also say as well, like having spent some time with it, if you actually sit down and read its output, it's fine. But if you tell it to type two thousand words about something, they're not going to be two thousand words of brilliant content that's going to make people think, wow, these guys are amazing. It's just kind of generic waffle. It's correct. And it's, it makes sense, but it's not kind of adding anything new or saying anything scintillating about your brand, really.
It's interesting that in the social media, there are plenty of people out there who say, I've built this website. It's got nothing but AI content in it, and it's making me one hundred thousand dollars a month. And if you give me twenty quid, I'll show you how. Yeah, there's plenty of that going on at the moment. And, you know, maybe we should experiment with it. We've got some domains that are like where we are. It's like a playground for us where we can go and try stuff. So we could get AI to write one hundred blog posts on a particular subject, stick them out there and see if they start ranking just to test this theory. But I certainly wouldn't do it with our main website, and I wouldn't encourage anybody else to do it.
It's this whole problem with seeing websites as a, as a kind of as a product, as a disposable thing. Right. Because it's like I used to know a guy who literally every Christmas he would set up an e-commerce website selling Christmas tat. He would use Black hat SEO to get it to the top of the search. He'd sell a load of Christmas product, and then at the end of the season, he'd pack the whole thing up and bin it, and it didn't matter to him that he was always going to get penalised. And I think if you treat your website like that, the AI content thing is kind of the next incarnation of that, right? You can, of course, you can pack thousands of, of articles on a website and for a little bit, it'll probably perform really well, but it's just the longevity. And what I would hate to see is people who have invested years in building a fantastic website for their brand, tank it permanently because they jumped on this brand new shiny thing that was going to supercharge their work. Because I don't really think that's the the application for it personally.
Mhm. Okay. Um, I think what I might do, actually, I might do a little screen grab video of some of the basic things you can do with ChatGPT.
Does do.
It on LinkedIn or something. Just, just to make people aware of it. Um, it's not something that we're frightened of. I mean, I imagine there are some people who are going to be thinking, this is going to put us out of work, you know? No, I think I think there will be.
Yes.
People who think that. And there will be there.
Will be people that it's true for.
You.
Yeah.
But you know what? It got really interesting. And, and the devs kind of like their eyes widened when I showed them. But, you know, I asked, I asked it to create some CSS cascading style sheets to make for a certain web page effect. And it wrote it like, here you are. So I asked it to write me a JavaScript to do a specific type of calculation, mortgage calculations, and bang it did it. I asked it to create some regular expressions so that it makes searching for data specific data in the search console easier. And boom, it did it. And I think that's the stuff that people don't realise it does. And you know, the interesting one, um, you know, some people know I'm a retired firefighter. So at drill night last night, uh, one of the guys there, uh, Scott is, um, he works on gas turbines, you know, like rb211 and the stuff they're using for power generation offshore. And one of the things he does is, uh, borescope, um, inspections. So they're looking for the turbine blades to see if there's any cracks, any damage, that sort of thing. So I was telling him about it. So I said, right. So I asked it to explain how to do a borescope examination. Inspection rather on a on a gas turbine engine. And it started rattling this stuff up. And I said to him, how accurate is it? And he just he was just grinning. He was just like, this is unbelievable. That's exactly what I do. This is this is how I do my job. And it is quite incredible.
Yeah. And I was playing with it yesterday as well. And there are definitely some interesting things around kind of like planning for content and stuff like that that it's really good at as well. Like if you ask it to provide you with, I don't know, twenty blog posts on a topic, it will go away and do that. And some of them are really interesting. So yeah, like you say, there's definitely some really interesting applications for it out there.
I would encourage people to play with it and just ask it questions. Yeah, try and trip it up. I mean, you can trip it up. Yeah. And it will give you some information which is just wrong, wrong.
Absolutely incorrect. But then again, that's the thing, isn't it? I think like you were saying earlier, I think it's one of those things that will kind of improve the efficiency of the way we work and kind of help you think of new ideas and that sort of thing. Not necessarily something to depend on as a remove roadblocks.
Yeah. Yeah. And if you're a dev and you're trying to write some code, you know, like set it the challenge and see if the code it writes is any good and things like that, things just to speed up productivity and help. It's not going to, um, it's not something that worries me.
No. And I think it is quite exciting, you know, if you can find good ways of leveraging it, then yeah.
And it's free at the moment. ChatGPT. But obviously it won't be at some point when they realise what they've got. Obviously they're investing heavily at the moment, and then they'll be looking for monthly recurring revenue after.
They.
Will. Yeah. Um, speaking of monthly recurring revenue, um, we continue to work with a lot of our customers on a return basis. I'm thinking we'll probably do more of that. We've got certain some customers who've had, um, a pause, a break in their retainer and, and, you know, they've now come back to us to say, right, can we have a conversation about kicking things off again so that we can, uh, you know, restart their, um, Growth, digital marketing assisted growth. Um, looking forward to that. Um, project work mixed in with that. Um, I don't really know if there's much to say about that, but we're going to be doing, you know, I think this year, like last year, a combination of one off project type work and ongoing returned work, generally speaking, with digital marketing, whether you're doing it yourself or engaging with an agency or whether you've hired a hired your own team, that's where you see the best results. When you just consistently doing stuff, analysing what you've done, figuring out what's working, do more of that.
Etc. it's a consistency thing, isn't it really? Because the worst thing you can do in life. Yeah, kind of a burst of work and then leave it for six months because where you end up at the end of that six months is never where you could have been if you'd been plowing ahead for six months. So yeah.
I think from our point of view, we're going to focus more on making sure that we are taking on the right customers, the right clients. I don't think we did. I don't think in twenty twenty, twenty twenty two, we took on any customers and then realised later that this isn't real. We're not really the right guys for them, you know, and we had to kind of sort of.
Well, we're getting better, I think, aren't we? I think starting the work.
And I think whatever line of work you're in, whatever your business is, um, it makes perfect sense to really spend some time figuring out who your ideal customers are and get more of them.
Well, it's like that eighty over twenty rule, isn't it? At the end of the day, the people actually adding value to the business and helping you grow are going to be a small minority of your leads or customers.
That's for sure. Uh, as an agency, um, again, we're not, we're not going to mention names or anything, but we're having some interesting conversations as a business, as an agency. Um, we're talking to another agency who are a bit bigger than us who, um, are interested in collaborating, working together, maybe forming some sort of joint venture. That could be quite exciting. I think they would bring things to our table that would be great for our customers. We can certainly take things to their table that would be good for their customers. Yeah. Um, their team and our team I think would would dovetail rather rather well. Yeah. Um, there's definitely, it's not a case of like, they already do what we do and we do what they do and we're just going to be bigger. It's actually, there's a, there's a, there's a potential synergy there.
I think it's one of the really interesting things about digital marketing, isn't it? Because it is a massive industry. There are many, many things that you could do to kind of grow your digital presence and reach more people. And I think it's although like there are full services agencies out there, we are a full service agency. There's still places where we're less strong, places where we kind of can't necessarily offer the level of service we'd like to. And I think that's the thing, isn't it? It's like it's just kind of building that ability and.
Yeah, yeah. That's right. So I'm quite excited about that. Uh, it was see what comes of that. Um, Uh. I also am quite excited about the potential for, um, joining, um, a network, an agency network. It's a global network. We've had some conversations with them again, without naming names. Um, that is quite appealing as well. Yeah. I quite like the idea of that. I mean, it's all, it's all kind of in our industry, there's lots of kind of roll ups and joinings and, and strategic relationships, etc. I think, well, just before Christmas, there was a local agency, Web Integrations, which were acquired by integrated with joined forces with another agency who are primarily, um, PR, I think, I think PR aspire is it PR, right? You know, and when you looked at that from the outside looking in, it just just made perfect sense. I mean, you know, it's just, it just seemed like a good coming together. I mean, I know it can go horribly wrong as well. Um, you know, if anybody wants to come on the podcast and tell us how they joined forces with another business. And it couldn't have, couldn't have been, couldn't have gone worse. Be all ears. It'd be nice to have you on to chat about that.
Um, but I think that's the perfect example, right? It's like a web dev agency doesn't have any PR knowledge or capabilities, but you can't really build and promote websites in this day and age without those capabilities. That makes perfect sense to join up with somebody who can do the, the PR bit and help you grow your digital footprint. Yeah.
Mhm. Okay. Um, we are keen, um, to have people on the podcast who've got interesting stories to tell. We do get lots of pitches from like professional podcast guests, which is fine. I mean, we've had some, we've approached some people, um, who are well known, like we had Marcus Sheridan on from, uh, they ask you answer. Great book. Um, you know, we've had people like that. Uh, we had Bob on Bob Keeler talking about business storytelling. We approached Bob and he very kindly came on the podcast. So we've had some great guests on, um, we do get approached by the companies who specialise in, um, helping people guest on podcasts. And some of them do sound really interesting, but I'm actually more interested.
Into an advertising platform. Do we really?
That's right. And to be fair, we've managed to steer them away from that. But I think there are so many people out there that have got really interesting stories to tell who are maybe not professional podcast guests. We'd love to hear from you. We'd love you to come on the show. We don't bite. Um, I think you'd find it. It's basically think of it as like, like getting together, having an interesting conversation that just happens to be recorded and, um.
The huge microphone in front of you with.
A huge microphone in front of you. That's right. Yeah. But, you know, anyone listens to this podcast, they know what our style is. It's very, it's a very relaxed, laid back style. Um, anyway, like I say, we're keen, we're keen to have you on. You might work at another agency, you might work in a related industry, you might just have some experiences that you're comfortable to share with people as we, as we march into twenty twenty three and what could only be described as very interesting times. I think it's fair to say, um, anything else you want to chat about as we, um, know, think about this, you know, start of the year.
Pretty much everything really from my end.
Everything. Like there won't be any more episodes of the podcast. We've kind of covered everything. That's it. The end.
The end of the beginning of the year.
The end of the beginning. What's that? Is that from a film or something? The end of the beginning, I don't know. No, I don't know. Anyway, I'm waffling now. Uh, if you want to come on the show, we'd love to hear from you. Um, we're going to be upping our podcast output. Uh, so they might like this one be a little bit shorter than we've been used to. We've averaged sort of forty, fifty minutes. Yeah. I think we're not necessarily looking to average any particular time, but I think maybe we held back a little bit thinking, oh, we can't talk about that because we might only have like fifteen, twenty minutes to talk about it this year. If it's a fifteen twenty minute podcast, that's what it'll be.
And that's something would be really interesting to hear from the people listening as well. That's right. How long do you actually like these to be? Because yeah, I.
Mean, I do when I look at it when I'm looking at podcasts specifically, I'm going to listen to a podcast. When I'm going out for a jog or something.
You want it to be a nice kind of.
I mean, there's one, one of the, uh, digital agency podcast for digital agencies, which this one isn't ours isn't. Um, but they're quite often like twenty minutes, I think. Oh, right. Okay. I need to create a playlist because that's just not, you know, when I go for a jog, it's slightly longer than that. And I don't know, sometimes I dismiss podcasts if they're really short. Yeah. Which is nonsense.
Doesn't necessarily mean low value.
It really doesn't. No. But you know, and equally, you know, you speak to people who like, if they saw a podcast that was more than ten or fifteen minutes long that, oh, I couldn't possibly listen to that. I've got time sort of thing.
Some people like to listen to someone like the drive to the shops.
Stuff like that. Right? Yeah. Anyway, um, enough waffling. Thanks for listening. Uh, if you want to come on the show, come on the show and, uh, look out for more episodes, maybe a bit shorter in, in terms of the length of time they're on, but more of them throughout twenty twenty three. Definitely good.