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, welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here, ed Dawson, hosting as usual, and in today's episode I'm coming back to the growth framework again. Go back a couple of weeks. You'll see the first episode I did on this. So this is a framework. That is what everything keywords people use is about. It's my framework I've used for many years for creating content and building websites and getting them ranked. And, yeah, I'm working on a sort of a document, a guide, that covers the whole range of how to use it and where it comes from. And then two weeks ago I shared, like a document outline, a google doc. There's a link to it in the show notes. If you want to see that doc, go to the show notes. Now updated it with the first section, which is the introduction to the growth framework, and this section is all about. You know, imagine you'd never listened to this podcast. Imagine you never didn't know who I was. Um, you might not know who I am if it's the first podcast you listen to, but imagine you know nothing about me. You know nothing about what the growth framework is and you don't know what it's going to do for you. So, obviously, this introduction is to introduce people to my story and why I developed this framework, how it works as an overview and the basics of it. Okay, so this is so you can kind of go from zero to having an understanding of what it is. I'm trying to get across what problem it solved for me and, you know, hopefully get people just up to date on where it is and hopefully give it some credibility as well, because the key things about all these things is, it's not just what you say, you've also got to prove what you said as well. So, um, so, yeah, so I've updated it as promised. I said is, again, this is all part of an accountability process where I'm sharing process as I go along, because if I say to you, everyone, everyone here listening that I am going to do something by a certain date, that makes me accountable for making sure I get it done by that date. So this is the the next step along, and I said I'd get it done for um this friday, today. So I am here it is. So I'm going to read through this introduction now, and I'd love it if you went and looked at your document and if you've got any feedback. You now have to read now, either listening to me or reading the document. Please do get in touch with me. There's details in that document how you can get in touch. Okay, so this is the introduction to the growth framework.

Speaker 1: 3:41

The defining moment April, the 24th 2012 was the date that things changed for me. On that day, google launched their penguin update that turned the world of SEO upside down. Prior to then, for most people, seo was all about buying links to gain and maintain rankings. I'd been no different and I'd use the same link buying tactics and thin content as everyone else to build my broadband price comparison site, broadbandcouk, into a thriving business that was providing for my family and my employees. Suddenly, everything had changed. I woke up that morning to find Google traffic wiped out down over 95% in an instant our business effectively gone with a snap of a finger. How was I going to keep a roof over my young family's head and meet payroll for my employees? It soon became clear that if we were to recover, we had to rapidly pivot our SEO strategy from thin search engine first content and buying links to instead creating engaging content written for real people and earning organic links. The good news is this strategy change did indeed work. Over time, we recovered our traffic and increased it by more than five times, all without buying a single link, and all by focusing on real people and engaging content. I developed the strategy into the growth framework and have since successfully used it to grow many more sites across a number of topics. In 2021, I sold broadbandcouk to one of our major competitors in a life-changing deal. That was only possible because of the solid, long-term foundations built by the growth framework. I still use this exact framework today, with a portfolio of sites across a range of competitive topics, and I want to share it with you. A bit more about the journey Hi, my name is Ed Dawson.

Speaker 1: 5:22

I studied computer science at university or college, as you say in the US in the mid-1990s. I've been involved with building websites since the late 1990s and with SEO in particular, since 2004. In 2004, I launched Broadbandcouk, which became one of the leading home broadband price comparison websites in the UK, with millions of visitors coming from organic search every year and generating many millions of dollars well, many millions of pounds as we operated in the UK, but that's the same as millions of dollars in commissions over the years. We had an incredible run with Google in the early 2000s by doing the kind of spammy SEO tactics that worked well back then Buying links of all kinds to content that was solely designed to convert people to affiliate sales. Back then, this is what you had to do to compete, because Google wasn't at all good at penalising this kind of behaviour. This started to turn in February when Google released the Panda update. This was the point. They got better at identifying poor quality, thin content. This started a slow decline in traffic, but not dramatic. But it was the foreshadowing of what was to come.

Speaker 1: 6:27

Then, as I mentioned earlier, came the penguin update. That hit many sites, including broadbandcouk, for manipulating search results by paying for links. Now, if you're new to SEO, you might not realize what a big part links from third-party websites to your website plays. I won't go into the full details of how it works, but the short and simplified version is that links from other sites to yours Google kind of treats like a vote for your site. The more links or votes, then, the better Google trusts you and it rewards you with better rankings. Google doesn't like sites that abuse this system by paying others to link them, and they're much rather you gain. Your site gains links without asking, known as organic links. If Google decides you're paying for links and they will penalize you and even make your site appear lower in the search results or maybe even not at all. In short, buying links can be very risky.

Speaker 1: 7:17

As I said, our rankings almost all disappeared overnight. We lost 95% of the traffic we were getting from Google, which back then accounted for about 70% of our traffic. The rest came from Bing, other small search engines and direct visitors. Essentially, we'd lost about two thirds of the business overnight, which wasn't financially viable in the long term. We had some financial reserves, but it would be a matter of months before we ran out of cash.

Speaker 1: 7:40

We had to do something fast. It was clear to me then that trying to dig our way out of the hole using the same old trick of low quality content backed up with paid for links wasn't going to work, as that's what caused the mess we were in. Also, we didn't have the budget now to pay for links, even if that was what we wanted to do, so we decided we'd have to try the complete opposite Build quality content that was good enough to earn organic links. This pivot meant that, instead of trying to hack the Google algorithm for short-term gains, we'd now be trying to work with the algorithm for long-term, sustainable gains. My motive was really to never end up in the situation that we'd lose all our rankings overnight again, because the risks were just too great. Better to build something that would gain and build rankings over time, with much less likelihood of being penalized in the future.

Speaker 1: 8:29

The key change we implemented was to approach creating our content in a different way, by putting our audience first, with the following philosophy People search online for answers to their questions, so let's focus on building helpful content that does that for them. From this starting point, we got to work redesigning the Broadband at Coda UK website, rewriting the existing content and creating new content that met this brief. At the same time, we also spent time getting all the paid links we bought removed from other sites and disavowing those we couldn't get removed in Google Webmaster Tools, which is now known as Google Search Console. This combined effort of cleaning up the mess we'd made with links and then massively improving our content started to turn things around for us. Within a year, we'd built back organic traffic to where it was before Penguin hit. Three years later, and traffic had grown over 500% all without buying a single link and just by focusing on engaging content that answered the questions people had about broadband. Even better is that this growth was sustainable for the long term. We went through dozens of Google updates with few or no issues. We created new sites over the following years, all with the same strategy and framework, all which saw the same sustainable, natural, organic growth. We finally sold broadbandcouk in 2021 for a life-changing value, an event that wouldn't have been possible without the strategy and framework we developed after the Penguin events of 2012,.

Speaker 1: 9:46

Building keywords, peopleusecom. After selling broadband at Codeuk, many people were approaching me to help them with their SEO help and advice. I wanted to help people, but I'm just one person and there are only so many hours in the day and I also didn't want or need a job. I needed a scalable solution so I could help as many people as possible, so I decided, with my team, to build a set of tools that would help people follow the same philosophies around building content and ranking that would help them help themselves. This is why we built KeywordsPeopleUsecom, which grew out of proprietary tools and methods we'd used in-house or which automated processes we'd previously done manually. Throughout this guide to the growth framework, I'll share examples of how we and others use KeywordsPeopleUsecom to help them with their implementation. However, you can still follow this process without using KeywordsPeopleUse by just doing things manually. It'll just take you longer to collate, sort and analyze data, how the growth framework developed.

Speaker 1: 10:43

A few things in life emerge fully formed, and the growth framework itself is no different. It's grown and been refined over the past 12 or more years into something that is now proven, reliable and repeatable, but it still centers around that single philosophy that I developed that people search online for answers to their questions, so let's focus on building content that does that for them. If we build content that answers questions, then everything we want to achieve will flow from there. We'll provide a great, helpful experience for those consuming our content. As we build a set of content, we'll start to build topical authority. Other sites will start to organically link to us, our search visibility will rise, as will organic traffic. This means we don't do a few things that many of the SEOs will advise or which their advice could lead to, so we won't spend time worrying about keyword volume. We won't spend time trying to game the system with small hacks. We won't take risks that could open us up to penalties. As it stands today, it's something I'm happy to share, knowing it could help you to help yourself build content that will stand the test of time and provide a great return on the investment of creating it.

Speaker 1: 11:50

Okay, that took a bit of reading. Uh, that's obviously about 10 minutes worth of um audio there of me reading straight from the document, so a bit different how you probably normally hear me sound because I don't generally script um these podcasts. So, hopefully, if I've achieved what I want to achieve, that could mean that if you were coming and sort of picking up this guide to the growth framework from scratch without knowing who I was, who keywords people use was, who brought it, what brought it could, was or anything I'd previously done was, at the end of that, know a little bit about who I was, the history of what I'd done in SEO, the issue that we had with Penguin that we then solved in the long run by developing this framework, and why we built Keywords People Use to help implement this framework. Although it isn't a mandatory requirement, you can follow this framework and the principles in this framework without requiring the tools. It's just those tools will help you. Also, I'm hoping I've pitched it at the right level.

Speaker 1: 12:52

I know there was a bit in there where I discussed about the value of what links are, and that's because I get a very wide audience and the same at Keywords People we use. We get a wide audience of people with varying, different levels of SEO knowledge. Some people come into our kind of like, you know, become part of our audience and they have very, very basic SEO knowledge. Some people come in with an incredible amount of knowledge. I was just talking to a guy today Demo in Keywords People Use who's been in SEO for 15 years and done some incredible things, including in the gaming space, which is notoriously difficult, the gambling space notoriously difficult to work in and yet they were really interested in Keywords People Use and the process that we're using keywords people use, which essentially is this growth framework as well, um, and to how they could implement it. So I mean, that's that's.

Speaker 1: 13:47

That's a complete polar opposite to some people who literally are very new to this and they're just trying to. You know, you might be a small business owner, set up your first website and you're trying to work out how to engage in your audience and gain traffic and help them. So that's why I've had to sort of try and keep the level quite simple in terms of the explanation and also because you know when it comes into this framework, you don't need a huge amount of SEO technical knowledge, because this framework is really around, about a strategy of content production and creation. It's not a technical seo guide. That's completely different. I know we talk a lot of technical seo in this podcast. That's fine. That's what. That's what this podcast is for to be all about seo, including the technical side, whereas the growth framework is very much a content creation framework with an emphasis on being powerful for seo, obviously, but that's not uniquely what it's about.

Speaker 1: 14:43

So there'll be people who come into this and be interested in this, who are content creators more than they are seo, so it doesn't need to be in depth on the seo side. Hopefully that makes sense. So hopefully I've hitched the um, kind of reasoning and the explanations at the right level so that people who know stuff those understand what links are for can kind of reasoning and the explanations at the right level so that people who know stuff understand what links are for can kind of skip that section. I think when I format the document I will highlight that as a separate section, almost like an aside section, so it's the people that have a higher level don't need to read that, but it's there for those people who who need to understand the importance of what does and doesn't work and how certain things work. So I'd really love feedback on this.

Speaker 1: 15:24

It was great hearing the feedback the first time around. Please do get in touch. If you've had feedback before, please give me feedback again. If you've not done any feedback again, please, please, give me some feedback, because it's really useful to make sure I'm pitching this right, to make sure it makes sense. If there's stuff you know that doesn't make sense or is badly worded or you think is rambling or anything that's just wrong, I'd love to hear that, as well as if you think there's anything missing. But yeah, look forward to hearing your feedback. As I say, the document you can get it. There's a link to a google doc that you can see this in in the show notes. So please do go there and take a look.

Speaker 1: 15:58

And yeah, and in terms of the accountability, I am going to make sure that by um friday, february the 12th it'll be the week later than that, so in two weeks will be the 19th, so by the 19th of february I will let's have a look. We'll be into the framework itself then. So I'm going to try and get the framework outline and the gather section. So the framework outline will be basically just to quickly go over what all the different parts are of growth. So the gather refine, optimize, watch, tune and hone and I'll get that framework outline done and then the gather section as well done. So I'll try and get both those sections done for a couple of weeks time and also I'll incorporate any feedback I get from people as well in this. So please do provide that to me. Yeah, so until next time, keep optimizing, stay curious and remember SEO is not that hard when you understand the basics. Thanks for listening. It means a lot to me.

Speaker 1: 17:02

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 mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, the Ed is spelled with two Ds. You can find me on LinkedIn and Blue Sky. Just search for Ed Dawson on both.

Speaker 1: 17:17

You can record a voice question to get answers on the podcast. The link is in the show notes. You can try our SEO intelligence platform Keywords People Use at keywordspeoplyusecom, 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.