Speaker 1: 0:54

Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm your host, ed Dawson, the founder of the SEO intelligence platform, keywordfupoleasercom, where we help you discover the questions people ask online and learn how to optimize your content to build traffic and authority. I've been in SEO and online marketing for over 20 years and I'm here to share the wealth of knowledge, hints and tips I've amassed over that time. Hi, ed here, welcome back to the SEO is not that hard podcast, and today I'm sharing the audio from a podcast I was on late last year with Trudy Rankin and that's the online business launchpad, and I chatted with Trudy about a whole bunch of SEO things, including how AI is affecting the world of SEO and where we think it's going to go next year, so, or this year now. So, yeah, without further ado, I will share the audio with you and, yeah, I hope you enjoy it.

Speaker 2: 1:45

If you've ever wondered how to build a seven-figure business through SEO, you're in for a treat. My guest today has cracked the code on driving millions of visitors to websites, generating millions in revenue and successfully selling his businesses for over a million dollars. Have you ever thought about how SEO has evolved, or if it's still even relevant in a world that's dominated by AI? Well, you're going to want to stick around for this one. Today, I'm talking with Ed Dawson, an SEO veteran who has been in the game since 2004. That is a long time Now. Ed's career started when he launched broadbandcouk, one of the UK's first broadband comparison sites, and since then, he's built and sold multiple content websites with hundreds of millions of unique visitors, and he continues to operate a seven-figure portfolio. We're going to dive into his journey, the key SEO strategies that still work today, and we're going to talk about how AI is impacting the future of search. Now, ed's wealth of experience, from SEO and affiliate marketing all the way through to building SaaS tools or software as a service tools, makes him the perfect person to give us insights on navigating the fast-changing digital landscape.

Speaker 2: 3:03

Welcome to the Online Business Logpad podcast. I'm Trudi Rankin and I bring you stories, tips and advice from online entrepreneurs who have overcome problems and challenges to get to success, because if they've done it, so can you. I've been running my own online business for over nine years now, overcoming my own challenges to achieve my goals, and, because of what I've learned, I've become passionate about helping business owners like you successfully tackle the bumps in the road that could stop you from hitting the goals that matter to you. I've used my experience and the experience of others to help hundreds of people grow the online side of their business, and one of my greatest joys is working with people who, because of life circumstances, really need a flexible work from home option that helps them pay the bills. My mission is simple I want to help you solve the challenges you face as an online business owner so that you can have more time and money for yourself and your family and more choices in how you live your life.

Speaker 2: 4:12

Welcome to the Online Business Launchpad Podcast. I'm your host, trudy Rankin, and today I have as my guest Ed Dawson, and Ed Dawson has been doing SEO for a long time 20 years and counting so I've asked Ed if he'd come on the podcast and just talk a little bit about SEO, where it's at today and what's happening in the world of SEO, because, as you're well aware, there's been a lot happening with Google's helpful content update and the advent of AI, and it would be good to hear what an expert has to say. So welcome to the podcast, ed Ed Helmsley-.

Speaker 1: 4:47

Thank you, trudy. Yeah, welcome Perth. It's brilliant to be here.

Speaker 2: 4:50

Trudy Linscott so before we get stuck into the details of SEO, could you just share with listeners who you are, where you've come from and what you do specifically?

Speaker 1: 4:59

Yep, yep. So I basically well, my background is computer science. I'm a developer originally, so I was starting in the late 90s, so I was really early there. In the early days of the internet 2004, I was working for a digital agency in London and I was head of the development team there, and it soon became apparent we were building websites for these big companies that they needed these websites to rank. So someone had to know about SEO and be the SEO expert. And I was told Ed, you're now the SEO expert even though I knew nothing.

Speaker 1: 5:28

So I had to go on a sort of a journey of learning SEO and obviously, even now there's obviously there's no one true source of what, how SEO exactly works. It's still a learning process. It was even more so back then, especially because we had no Twitter, we had no Facebook, we had none of the sort of platforms and the sort of communities that we have now to learn from. Back then it was all very much forum based and there was a forum called seochatcom back in the day, which doesn't exist anymore or doesn't exist in any other form it used to, and so I got heavily involved there, got heavily involved into learning SEO, got completely fascinated by it because this was a new marketing area that, particularly back then, you actually had to be quite technical. It's less so now, but back then creating websites, we didn't have a lot of the tools and facilities that are available to people now. And, yeah, I just got so in depth with it and it led to me discovering the affiliate marketing world and marrying affiliate marketing seo, which led to me, very shortly after leaving that company, setting up on my own, developing my own sites and essentially building a portfolio of affiliate sites over the past 20 years.

Speaker 1: 6:33

Now, the one I was best known for in the uk was a site called broadbandcouk, which is one of the very first broadband price comparison websites, and we ran that very successfully till 2021 when we sold it to a competitor. We got approached during the pandemic and we sold that business out, which was fantastic for us personally and allowed us to take some money off the table and do some different things in life. But we still run a whole bunch of affiliate sites and we also have now branched out into software as a service, keyword research tools and other seo tools like that. So, yeah, that's like a very compressed version of where we've been. So I've seen seo, yeah, so many changes that 20-year period, so you mentioned just some of the more recent ones. But we've been through Penguin Panda, we've seen the landscape change and shift and change again over that period. So, yeah, quite a long journey, lots of ups and downs, but I'm still here to tell the tale.

Speaker 2: 7:29

I think that's fascinating because some of the things that you've done I'm really interested myself personally the whole concept of affiliate sites and using SEO to help drive traffic to them. And building SaaS tools or software as a service tools. Because of my background as a chief information officer, I always find the technology side of things really interesting. So just out of sheer curiosity, and then we will come back to SEO, what kind of SaaS tools have you been working on? Well?

Speaker 1: 7:55

we've built one called Keywords People Use, which basically the aim is to approach keyword research slightly differently Perceived wisdom for past. God knows how long is you go for volume and then chase volume, chase keywords, short-tail keywords, go for volume and do it that way, whereas I've always turned it on its head and said ignore volume, answer people's questions, find out what people are asking and then build your strategy around that. So it's a tool that helps people find questions that people are asking online rather than chasing volume essentially. So it's just to flip it on its head. It's following the process I've used for the past 20 years when building sites and trying to think how am I going to help someone, how am I going to get my audience? And it's going to be by understanding my audience's questions. So it's a tool based around that essentially.

Speaker 2: 8:45

It sounds interesting, and is it live?

Speaker 1: 8:48

Yeah, yeah, We've been live, for we launched in October 2022.

Speaker 2: 8:53

Oh, okay, so it's been around for a little while.

Speaker 1: 8:59

Yeah, yeah, yeah, I'd like to say we're less well known than some of the other big keyword research tools, but we've got quite a loyal audience and it's a product that we're iterating.

Speaker 1: 9:03

So it started out with just finding questions and then we added in functionalities help cluster questions, because obviously keyword clustering is quite an important thing to do to make sure you're answering the right group of subjects and topics and questions in this together rather than splitting it across too many pages. You want to give google the content it wants, so you use clustering for that, and then now we've just developed some functionality to link it to people's google search console. So, as well as helping people first discover what they need to write about, but then also had to optimize what they've produced once they've produced it, because obviously once you have content online and you get it connected to Google Search Console, you start to get data about how Google's actually perceiving those pieces of content, those pages, what queries you're ranking for, where you're not quite ranking high enough, where you might be missing mentions on the page. So we also crawl the pages and understand the content on the pages so that we can help people optimize. Basically.

Speaker 2: 9:56

That sounds really interesting and I'll put a link in the show notes If so. If people are interested, they can go and check it out. But it's a really good segue into one of the things that I really do want to talk about, and it's almost like the elephant in the room in some respects. And that is, given all of those updates, all of the Google updates, let's touch on those first. Have those updates affected the way people could or should be using SEO?

Speaker 1: 10:24

I think what it's done is it's taken out the niche site industry, where people were building content just for search engines, and it's worked to certain degrees. There are still sites out there that probably should have been hit by what Google was trying to do, and there are sites that haven't been hit. That should that should be, but it's with. I just take it back to, I think, about 2011, 2012 time when Google did a similar thing called Panda. Back in the day, they had a Panda update and that was when they were trying to remove thin content from the internet, which a lot of affiliates were doing back then, just trying to suck in as much traffic, and it's basically the helpful content update and those other similar updates like it, I think, are trying to hit that same mark where people are not building sites because they love the subject. They're not building them because they've got a solid business model around them. They're not building them for the reasons Google wants people to build them. They're basically trying to game algorithms, but fundamentally, all SEO is about gaming algorithms. So it still works, but there are certain things you have to do differently and there are certain topic areas and there are certain types of sites that are clearly harder to do. So, like the pure display advertising sites are finding a much tougher time. Some people say affiliates are finding it a tougher time. Now, I've still got affiliate sites that are still ranking fine and some are doing better. Touch wood, because you never know what's coming around the corner. But so it's not to say that that certain things are completely dead, but certain things are just harder and about and and the barriers are slightly higher. There's some barriers to entry slightly higher.

Speaker 1: 12:10

The sort of the quality level you've got to reach is different, um, which is why, in many ways, you have to try and do things. Other people aren't not just jumping on the bandwagon, big example being the travel website, travel blogs. There were lots of travel bloggers. Everybody seemed to be going around the world, backpacking and building a website at the same time about what they're doing, but everyone really was generally creating the same kind of content and there's only so many positions and places on the, on those google search and there was.

Speaker 1: 12:39

It turned into lots of people creating content, but they'd never actually gone places. They were using um stock imagery, things like that, and and not really adding anything new. So, yeah it it's harder in some respects. But in other respects, if you're an e-commerce site, they seem to be getting away fine. If you are actually. So certain areas I think are now easier. Because it's open, they kill a lot of content. There's someone going to be ranking. It's not like people aren't searching on these terms anymore. It's just that Google are pointing them at different places and you've got to look at where they're being pointed at, what types of sites are working, and adjust your strategy around that.

Speaker 2: 13:17

Yeah, I think that's really interesting. And then I want to just extend that question a little bit, because very recently, as in like last week, I was having a conversation with somebody who basically said that they believe that Google search is dead because lots and lots of people are turning to AI to answer their questions. And I thought, no way, that's not right, it can't possibly be right. And then I found myself earlier this week doing exactly that. I completely skipped the Google search process and I went straight to ChatGPT to get a question answered that it would have taken me hours to get answered on Google. It took me like two minutes on ChatGPT and I got the answer that I wanted, the answers that I needed. Can you just comment on that as a potential threat to SEO?

Speaker 1: 14:11

David Pérez- yeah, I've had been having exactly the same thoughts myself recently because, again last week, I was doing some work. I was using some workflow automation software. It's like Zapier but it's called N8n, so it's a bit more technical than Zapier, but I was using that and I was wanting to get some processes built out. And rather than going to Google and saying, doing research on reading documents and how to set this up, I just went to chat GPT and said I'm using N8n, I want to connect to WordPress, how do I do it? And it just gives you the details, step by step, what to do For things like that. Yes, google search is an irrelevance now because you can achieve those how-tos and things like that much more quickly using ChatGPT. However, that doesn't mean you can do everything through ChatGPT, so there's going to be a change. A. If you're a website, say, like this NA10 service, which is a paid service, so I'm paying to use it. It's like a software as a service business, they need to create that content to put online for ChatGPT, to read, for ChatGPT, to then give the user the answers. So, again, when I was looking at doing the automation, the setup, this automation, I just went to chat gpt and said I know there's zapier, I know there's. If this, then that, is there anything else? Because I was looking for something that was had a bit more feature, a bit more functionality. That's where I learned about n8n. But chat gpt had learned about n8n from region and it ends website and people talking about n8n from reading and it ends a website and people talking about N8N online and obviously it read all this documentation. So you have to.

Speaker 1: 15:46

In many respects, your website for some companies will become how you teach ChatGPT. Your content is there for ChatGPT as well as people who do go through Google. There's still people that use the yellow pages old school yellow pages to find people. So it's not that Google is an SEO is going to be completely dead, but its use case will change. I still find that Google is incredibly important, for if I'm looking for a product or a service or a hotel or a flat, if I'm trying to buy something, then Google is still really important and I think it's going to be a while before chat GPT gets to the point where you can speak to it about you're trying to buy something, because the large language models only update their knowledge base every so often. So if it's anything where it's up to the minute, up to date, where things change or there's products and services, google's still the place.

Speaker 1: 16:39

I'm not saying it won't be displaced at some point. It may well be, but right now it's still the place. And I'm not saying it won't be displaced at some point. It may well be, but right now it's still there. But you still need that web presence to teach the large language models so it becomes more hybrid. So you've got to think of your content, of who you're trying to educate here. It could be real. It could be real people, it could be search engines, it could be the large language models themselves.

Speaker 2: 17:02

So do you think that if you're creating a site a?

Speaker 1: 17:03

website that you have to choose between those things. No, because the large language models are trained to read the same content as humans are. They're trained to read and understand human content. So as long as you're writing for a human still, then the large language models will understand it and Google will probably shift its understanding more in that large language way they are putting their AI overviews on. They do have Gemini, their own large language models. They're starting to feed that into search and, to be fair, those large language models understand content better than the traditional search engine process did. That we would have talked about maybe three, three, four years ago. So I think, if anything, it's going to be. If you can write good content, it's going to be even better for you, because you should then start to surface not just in Google but across ChatGPT, claude and any other kind of language, language models and AI that is coming down the track.

Speaker 2: 17:56

It's interesting because I do have a couple of other sites and one of the sites is freelancewritersonlinecom and basically we help people who are writers find repaid writing work. And one of the things that that's, as I said, elephant in the room is that whole AI thing and how it's actually affecting at the moment. It's affecting people's ability, writer's ability to find work, because people are going oh I don't need you, I can just go and blah, blah, blah, use AI. But that's an interesting point that you have to train the AI to be able to, for it to function effectively. And it's been interesting. I've been noticing on all of the writing job boards or all the lots of jobs, because we post jobs up on our website and there are a lot of AI training type jobs that are popping up everywhere out of the woodwork and it's just interesting to me that's the case. So I think you're right.

Speaker 2: 18:58

It's about, it's just about thinking about it in a slightly different way. There's different use cases and people shouldn't, if you're a writer, don't give up there. There is actually some hope there that your writing is still valued and necessary and needed. So if somebody I'm just thinking out loud here now so if you are, if you have a website, you are a small business owner and you're either you wanting to promote your organization. So it's what I think I heard you say is that you need to think about whether or not you're actually trying to sell something or whether you're trying to inform someone. And if you're informing someone about something, you need all of that really great writing for the large language models, and if you're trying to sell something, you still need the good writing, but you're more likely to be picked up by the search engines. Did I understand you correctly?

Speaker 1: 19:53

Yeah, that's what I'm saying. So I think it's basically if you're trying to purchase something, so say you are looking for a decorator, okay, you'd less chat GPT at the moment isn't the best place to go. So I'm looking for a decorator in whatever your local area is. Who are the people? What are their rates? What their food? That's the wrong place. You'll do a google search for that same. If you want to buy a product, say you've got some. You want a new dishwasher and you want to find where to buy it online, what the cheapest prices are, what the reviews are you that ChatGPT? Because their knowledge is so out of date. Essentially, I think the latest one is sometime in 2023, but the latest models are updated too. So that's where you have to go and do online research with Google. That's where you need to go and look at websites, because prices change, models change. That kind of anything that's fast moving is really still. Basically, you'll go to google.

Speaker 1: 20:43

Now if you are looking to become an x topic expert in your area, this is where you'll write expertise commentary or expertise content, because obviously the large language models they rely on reading and then they condense that and take the average of it. They don't create their own new knowledge. They don't create new learning. They don't create new knowledge. They all they can do is suck in and summarize existing knowledge. So you need to be creating stuff that's new. You need to be using your expertise. That's the one thing that large language model can't do it. It's got no expertise of its own to draw upon, whereas humans have, and that's the important, key difference, and that's the kind of thing you need to be thinking about when it comes to what content you can write and what you can set yourself for paths. So it works even at the low level.

Speaker 1: 21:29

If you're like a, you might be a small local company with a small local service. There's nothing wrong with putting your knowledge and expertise online for people to see, because a that's the kind of thing that might draw in people doing broader searches. But really you want the people who are local to you to find your site and then, once they find your site, you want them to trust. You Then becomes a conversion piece conversion sort of optimization process, as well as SEO. They feed into each other, and that's when creating that sort of expertise content and showing people that you're experts, showing people what you can do, giving them tips on how to do things. They want to try it themselves.

Speaker 1: 22:04

You, because you might think that's going to cannibalize your the work that you can do for people. But no, if you set yourself up as the expert, demonstrate your expertise, you'll find people will then actually are more likely to want to work with you than if you just had the very basic. I'm a plumber, here's my phone number. If you just had the very basic, I'm a plumber. Here's my phone number. Call me and that's it. Take that across any industry, any sort of professional trade, whatever, if you show and demonstrate your expertise, you're going to be in a much better position for the search engines and in a much better position to actually convert people when they get to your site.

Speaker 2: 22:39

It's an interesting conundrum, so I'm going to pose a question that you may not be able to answer, because there may not be an answer, and that is is that let's say you are an expert and you need Google search or search engines to be able to get people in for your business locally or whatever, and you basically post your stuff up there with all these expert tips and things and then eventually these large language models get updated and they basically you're going to be able to quickly post your stuff up there with all these expert tips and things, and then eventually these large language models get updated and they basically inhumans.

Speaker 2: 23:10

Inhumans is probably not the right word, it's basically they're sucking in all of your expertise, all of your tips, and then when people go into use the AI, they can see your tips, but you don't get credited for the work that you've done. Is there, would you have any ideas about how you might be able to balance that out or figure out a way to make sure that both of those things work or, if for your, in your favor? Or is it just one of those things where it's like, hey, the world's changing, suck it up, eventually, it'll get better? Just one of those things where it's like, hey, the world's changing, suck it up, eventually, it'll get better?

Speaker 1: 23:43

Partly. The world's changing, so could I. I think if you look at, say, on Google AI overviews, they're starting to put in links to sites they're referencing. Google's entire business model revolves around advertising, so if they, if they can't put links somewhere in, then Google will get eaten by its own AI. A lot of the world will still use Google because ChatGPT you have to pay for it, let's think about it and not everybody wants to pay for it, not everyone will pay for it. So that's one barrier. So Google is interested to start referencing and I've noticed it, I've had it reference sites of my own. I've gone through and thinking, oh, it's linked to me, it's linked to one of my sites there. When it comes to ChatGPT, I have noticed they are starting to occasionally creep in more reference links.

Speaker 1: 24:28

I think there is a debate out there, because I think this is a problem that the say ChatGPT and other companies like OpenAI are realizing that essentially, if they lose their source material, then their business ends too. So there'll come a crunch point, I think. And if they don't start referencing out, then, yeah, there could be legislative Open like Google. The DOJ in America are threatened to break them up because of these monopolistic practices. I'm sure I wouldn't be surprised if OpenAI get that kind of sort of scrutinization, especially as it disrupts so many different processes. It's one of those things where I don't know. There's no clear answer, but I've got a feeling that there will be more referencing.

Speaker 1: 25:10

But even if there isn't, fundamentally, at the end of the day, if you're providing a service, selling a product at some point, even if people can learn from it, from ChatGPT, if it's something that they eventually want to get help with and need a professional to come and help them with, then when they start coming to find you, that's they've still got to come to like more of a traditional search engine to find you, to find that service, which is where you need that content as well, because it just means that, okay, you might get less traffic overall. You might look at your stats and say, well, I'm only getting half the traffic I used to get. But if your sales are the same, if you say, or even higher, doesn't matter, does it like? So I don't care what traffic levels I get on a website. I look at how many sales I make on a day or over a month or over a time period.

Speaker 1: 25:54

That's the important thing, the only visitors I really want are the ones that are going to buy. Everyone else is nice to have and they're welcome to come, but I don't really. I don't. It's a vanity metric to have lots and lots of traffic. It's the sales that matter at the end of the day.

Speaker 2: 26:07

Yes, unless, of course, you have a content site that's monetized through ads.

Speaker 1: 26:13

Yeah, the display, yeah, the entropy matters. Well, I said that, as we said earlier, that's the one where Google seems to be. That's the one where Google seems to be. That display advertising thing is just, it's the hot, that's the one where I've seen people hit so hard and it's because, yeah, that is that's the riskiest model. It's not one I will get into now. If I was starting a business right now and saying, right, I'm going to go all out on display advertising, I'll be thinking, yeah, it's risky at the moment. Two, three years ago everyone was going nuts for it, but now you just don't see that kind of talk anymore. But people who are selling products, or like affiliates, where it's your, you are, you're not fulfilling the product, but you are selling the product. You're trying to find those buyers. You find those people who are buying intent to send to the merchants that that models and those models still work.

Speaker 2: 27:00

I think that's really fascinating. It's been great talking with you and I've got lots of questions about SEO, and only time is going to bring those answers. But if people were interested in talking to you further or wanted to get to know a little bit more about what it is you do, where would they go to find you?

Speaker 1: 27:22

Well, you can find me on LinkedIn. I'm under Ed Dawson. Bizarrely, I spell Ed with two Ds, so it's E-D-D Dawson, so there's three Ds in there. I've got a website, eddawsoncom, but I did buy all the different versions. So however many Ds you put in, you'll get me. It's eddawsoncom. Or if they want to see the, the sas platform, the keyword tool, that's keywords people, usecom. But if you google ed dorsen and just look for the bald guy in a hoodie and then you'll find me well, that's fantastic.

Speaker 2: 27:50

No, it's been really fascinating talking with you and, uh, like I said, I'll put all of the links in the show notes so that people can find you. They can also check out your sas tool, and I'm going to have a look at it myself. It sounds really interesting. So thanks so much for being here.

Speaker 1: 28:03

Well, thanks for having me. It's been wonderful. Thank you Anytime.

Speaker 2: 28:06

Well, that wraps up today's episode with Ed Dawson. I hope you found his insights as fascinating as I did, and if you want to learn more about what Ed is up to or check out his SEO tools, you can find him at eddawsoncom and that's Ed with two D's EdDawsoncom or on LinkedIn. So just look for Ed with two D's there. And if you're curious about his keyword research tool, head over to KeywordsPeopleUsecom. I had a look at it and it's very interesting. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to dis. Now, if you enjoyed this episode, please make sure to subscribe and leave a review. It really helps others find the podcast. And, of course, don't hesitate to share this episode with anyone who's trying to grow their online business. Thanks again for tuning in and I'll see you in the next episode.

Speaker 1: 29:08

Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me. This is where I get to remind you where you can connect with me and my SEO tools and services. You can find links to all the links I mention here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

Speaker 1: 29:24

You can record a voice question to get answered on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform Keywords People Use at keywordspeopleusecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people are asking online, poster those questions and keywords into related groups so you know what content you need to build topical authority and finally, connect your Google Search Console account for your sites so we can crawl and understand your actual content, find what keywords you rank for and then help you optimize and continually refine your content Targeted, personalized advice to keep your traffic growing. If you're interested in learning more about me personally or looking for dedicated consulting advice, then visit wwweddawsoncom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is not that hard.