Improving by Removing (episode 100!)

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of keywordspeopleusecom, the place to find and organise the questions people ask online. I'm an SEO developer, affiliate marketer and entrepreneur. I've been building and monetising websites for over 20 years and I've bought and sold a few along the way. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. With you, the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years.

Hello and welcome to episode 100 of SEO is not that hard. Before I get into the main topic, I just wanted to say I am just so pleased to have reached 100 episodes. I didn't know that I'd ever get there when I started about eight months ago. So to have gone from, yeah, with my first podcast, which, if any of you have gone back and listened to it's probably terrible compared to how I'm doing now, and that's not to say I'm perfect. I've still got a lot to improve on and that's what I aim to do with the next 100 or more episodes is to try and keep improving, but I'm so pleased I've got here. Um, just a few facts. I mean, you know I've now been listening to in over 84 countries, which is amazing. Um, getting hundreds of listeners a week, sometimes more. Um, and you know, so many thousands of episodes have been downloaded and it's just been fantastic the feedback I've got from people. It's great to hear from people. I've met so many people that if I hadn't done this, I never would have done this. It's been all of you I've met or I've heard from or exchanged emails with. Thank you very much, love to have met you and I just hope to meet so many more people doing this. So, yeah, a bit of a milestone, but I'm not going to make a whole episode about it, like some people do, because I'm more about I want to provide value here. I want to every episode to have value, and that's my aim and I'm going to keep it up as long as I can.

Sorry, let's get on to today's subject, and that is improving by removing, and this is all about the fact that sometimes you make things better not by adding to them, but by taking away from them, and this is based on. Well, I think I've done this many times in the past, but particularly we've just done it very recently with Keywords People Use. Obviously, keywords People Use has changed quite a bit from when we started it, more than about 18 months ago now. Yeah, not quite two years. Yeah, I think we're about 18 months ago. We started that um and it's grown and we've added to it.

We've added features, and when we first started, all you could do was search and we put in a credit system. So every time you searched, you used one search credit. So, depending on what package you searched, you used one search credit. So depending on what package you're on depends on how many search credits you got a month. And then we added in some AI features and obviously AI features come with a cost, because we use large language models. We have compute power we've got to pay for. So we then added in AI credits so that people could use their AI credits to use the AI functionality. Like some of the topic cluster functionalities, some of the article writing, a whole bunch of things use AI embedded as part of them and we needed to account for that. So we had AI credits. So then people had got search credits for search and AI credits for AI features.

Then, more recently, we've added keyword clustering, which is a fantastic feature, but we then had to think of a way of how do we charge for that. And then we implemented clustering credits, because every time we do clustering we've got a lot of scraping of the search to do, there's a lot of proxies we've got to pay for. You know it's not a cheap thing to do. So we've been clustering credits. Now we've got search credits for search, ai credits for AI, clustering, credits for clustering, and we were then giving different account types, different numbers of each one, and then trying to explain to people how the credit system works.

And with two credits it was bad enough and with three it started to get really confusing with people how we explain different actions and what it's going to cost in terms of credits, and also the fact that some people were using more of one type of feature than another. So someone might be doing more search whereas some other people are doing more clustering, so they might use up all of one type of credit and still have other credits left available. They might use up all of one type of credit and still have other credits left available. And it got to me when trying to explain to people that I realized it wasn't their fault. They weren't getting this. It was confusing. We were confusing people with all the different types of credits. It was hard to explain to them about what credit they'd use for what type of action and if they were going to do a whole workflow through doing various different things, how they're going to use different types of credits all the way through, and it was just becoming suboptimal and hard to explain.

And when you know something is hard to explain and you can see people not understanding what you're trying to get across to them. Not because they've got a problem understanding, we've got a problem explaining it. We've made it too complicated. So what we've done is we've removed having three types of credits. We so what we've done is we've removed having three types of credits. We've simplified everything down to one credit type.

Now this has improved, we think, the whole situation, because now it doesn't matter what you prefer to use keywords people use for. If you're all about searches, you can use all your credits towards search. If you're much more into clustering, then you can focus all your credits toward clustering. So it means you're no longer going to be in a situation where you might use up your ability to do one particular thing and have loads of ability to do something else that you don't want to do or isn't useful to you that month. So this is hopefully now far easier to explain to people um what they can do with each package type, what they'll be able to do, how their credits will be used for them. There are still slight, you know, still slightly different. You know different actions take a different number of credits. So a search in general will take one credit, but there's a couple of searches where there's some ai in there so they use two credits but it's still just take one credit. But there's a couple of searches where there's some AI in there so they use two credits but it's still just the same credit pool. So that's easier. We haven't got to explain three different credit types now. Hopefully just one credit type is easier for people to understand.

So by removing complexity we've improved the product, or at least we like to think so. Time will tell. We only launched this just the other day, so it's quite new and you know you may not even have noticed it yet if you're a user of the product. But if you have a product of your own or a website of your own, is there something you can remove to actually improve the product for your customers, for your users? Because when you own a product. When you build a product, you know it inside out, you know it's.

You don't understand that complexity that other people see, because you've designed it, you've worked on it, you know exactly how it works, so everything seems intuitive to you. But when people come to something for the first time, especially if it's online and there's no one there to show them exactly what to do, then these things can be difficult. So try always to place yourself in the the footsteps of your users. Try and come at it from a with a blank, um, a blank mind. Essentially, you don't know what's happening. Is this as intuitive as it could possibly be? Is there something we can remove to improve the flow, to improve things for our users?

Now, what you did to improve have to be to improve things for our users. Now, what you did to improve have to be something as drastic and big as we did with the credit system changes, which was a hell of a lot of work. I know that the development team worked really hard on it and I'm really appreciative of all the work they put into that. And yeah, but it doesn't have to be something that big necessarily to improve your product. It could be something small.

I mean, I've seen plenty of um sign up forms for for products, for websites where um they seem to ask so many questions, too many questions. They're making it harder for people to sign up by asking lots of questions and you can improve by thinking do we need all this information? What can we remove? What do we not have to ask them Because you'll find A. It improves your conversion rate, it'll improve the experience for the people who are signing up and it will increase the number of people that sign up. And it's not to say that you can't get this information out of people later. So that's my thoughts on improving by removing Hope. It's given you something to think about and I look forward to seeing you on the next episode.

Before I go, I just wanted to let you know that if you'd like a personal demo of our tools at keywords people use that, you can book a free, no obligation one-on-one video call with me where I show you how we can help you level up your content by finding and answering the questions your audience actually have. You can also ask me any SEO questions you have. You just need to go to keywordspeopleusecom slash demo where you can pick a time and date that suits you for us to catch up Once again. That's keywordspeopleusecom slash demo and you can also find that link in the show notes of today's episode. Hope to chat with you soon.

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