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 for 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. Hello and welcome back to SEO is not that hard. It's me here at Dawson hosting, as usual, and today this episode is a little different.

Speaker 1: 1:20

I'm joined by Richard Bartlett, who's the co-founder of Greenhearth Energy, a company which helps businesses finance solar installations here in the UK. But this isn't just a chat about renewables. Richard has a background in big finance tech startups, but when it came to launching Greenhearth, he bootstrapped it from scratch and turned to SEO and this very podcast actually to help shape his approach. Now, what's fascinating is how he didn't just use SEO to get traffic. He used it as a strategic tool to understand what potential customers were searching for, to find hidden content opportunities and even to guide product development and positioning. And he's now built a business doing meaningful work with millions of pounds in projects underway, and a lot of that journey started with listening to this show and using keywords people use, so this is a great example of SEO thinking being applied far beyond just ranking pages.

Speaker 1: 2:11

So whether you're building your own site, running an agency or thinking about starting something new, then I hope you'll find this one inspiring. Let's get into it, right. So, hi, richard, thanks for agreeing to come on. Let's start by if you just introduce yourself to the listeners, what your journey is and where you've come from.

Speaker 2: 2:28

Hi Ed. Well, look, it's great to be on. It's that weird thing I feel. I know you so well. I've listened to about 127 of the three podcasts, which is quite ridiculous. So you have this like dynamic where you know this first time we're really speaking. But you know, I've listened to so much of your, your chat, so so it's great to be here. But look, so, um, well, I'm.

Speaker 2: 2:46

I'm here because we set up a company called green half about a year ago and we've been, I was, we've been bootstrapping it, so it's really just been been my work.

Speaker 2: 2:55

I don't have much background in SEO, but I sort of came to, you know, I need a website, I need to think about how we're going to build it, and I came across the podcast and I've been listening to it and you know it's informed, the way that we've built the website Although I have to say at this stage like the website, is not very good.

Speaker 2: 3:21

So you know, no one should take the website as any kind of like validation, the quality of your advice. It's all down to the kind of my lack of time and time and ability, but I thought it would be, you know, be great to sort of, you know, speak a little bit about. You know what I've taken from the podcast, both in terms of designing the website, but also and something I completely didn't expect we've really kind of used your thinking and your approach to think about how we've developed the business and we've used it for market research and provide what we've done and our strategy with our customers, by sort of thinking about what we're learning from the information that your software has been throwing out to us that's.

Speaker 1: 3:50

I mean, that's fascinating. Well, first of all, thanks for listening to so many episodes um, and it's also really interesting to hear that it wasn't just the seo that as, uh, you found use from it, because I do try and put in things that go beyond seo a little bit because, like yourself, I appreciate, like I mean, you know, my journey through um into seo started from a business perspective as well, because there's got to be a point of seo. You know, everybody out there's trying to build something and it's part of that business process and, as part of building a business, you kind of see where the overlaps are between seo, customers, market research, conversion, optimization, all those kind of things that kind of become more strategic, as well as just the day-to-day things that you do. Now we first spoke, I mean, about about a year ago or so, when you know you um, uh, as people know, on the on the other side of this podcast, I invite people to have a call. You know, yeah, contact me to have a call.

Speaker 1: 4:45

We can talk about how you know the tools we do can help. And also, it's like you know, there's no commitment with that. You know, it's just like, see, I do these for free for people, um, and I think you're in the very early stages at that point and I think you had your first customer at that point, which you admitted at the time was a bit of a cheat, because it was someone that you knew previously, or a friend or a colleague or something. So obviously, between now and then, I know things have grown, because when we first spoke you were just using the tool on the on the free side, and then you know, because you're bootstrapping and obviously you've, you've grown, because I now know that you've obviously subscribed to our standard plan, so I can see that's going, so you, obviously the business is growing. So be really interesting to hear how, how, how you've found that that journey of growth over the past year or so and how SEO has played into that.

Speaker 2: 5:39

Yeah, no, that makes sense. So I mean just to kind of give you a little bit of background. So my background I spent most of my career working in finance, working in big companies, big banks, sort of you know small cog in a massive machine. But then I suppose about eight years ago or so, I left that and I've basically been working in sort of startups and technology since then and the first six years I sold to a couple of other people. We had a really well-funded startup. I was the CFO, spent a little bit of time as the CEO, we raised many tens of millions of pounds and so I got a little bit exposed to kind of websites and growing the company then. But it was all from. You know, this is just something we need to do. You need to pay this in order to do it. It was all very expensive.

Speaker 2: 6:21

People threw lots of words at me and you know I read lots of big checks and I'm not really sure where that got us, but there were lots of people who told me it was all right.

Speaker 2: 6:32

And I stopped doing that about sort of I guess two, two and a half years ago and then sort of started looking at the solar market, played about looking at domestic solar market for a year, but then a year ago, just before I spoke to you, we sort of set up GreenHearth, which is really sort of focused on helping businesses find and arrange finance for commercial solar, and that was really the beginning of the business. And and this time, rather than sort of doing it with a bunch of people going out there and raising lots of money, I thought you know the interesting thing to do would be to try and like beatstrap it, build it ourselves. I think in the first year I mean apart from my time we spent about sort of 15 000 pounds on the business. So it's been really, you know, just software licenses yeah, compared to 10 million it's keyword people.

Speaker 2: 7:16

yes, yes, yeah, brilliant. But you know, we've been really really sort of like slow in building it up and just trying to do it all ourselves. So that's you know. That's when I sort of you know, came to the podcast. You know I literally, you know, just searching around on the podcast store on the Mac looking for SEO podcasts and I listened to a couple. And I think I back looking for for seo podcasts and and I listened to a couple and I think I fell across yours when you were sort of doing the kind of um 101 tips or something of. I think that was the point of your series that you were on.

Speaker 2: 7:44

I've sort of listened to one or two of those. It was short, it was succinct and it was full of kind of actionable, useful information for someone like myself who was just starting off and I thought thought this is fantastic and, to be honest, I haven't found anything else like it which was so sort of succinct. So then I kind of just like got into listening to them and went back to the beginning, found some really interesting ones and sort of site architecture, topical cluster design, things I'd never sort of come across before, and then sort of reached out to you and we had a great little chat. You advised me to build the website on WordPress, which I have to confess I haven't done. It was just too much. I didn't have time to learn it at the time. So I know that's going to be like some technical debt I'm going to have to solve at some point, but that was really sort of the intro into it and yeah, so that's, that's how it started and it's an interesting, like I say, because obviously bootstrapping is what I've always done.

Speaker 1: 8:45

So I'm, I'm, I've always been a bootstrapper, so it's interesting to see that that obviously you've. You had that, that investment side, when you did the kind of the startup route and the raising money, um, and obviously I'm presuming that didn't work out, otherwise you wouldn't be starting another business, um. So, and that's one of the that's one of the things I've always tried to do with. Seo is not that hard, because seo is not necessarily all that hard as long as you understand a few of the basics, which is the kind of the mantra that I always sign off with nowadays. So you know, when it comes to the lead generation on your site, is your website proving an important part of your lead generation?

Speaker 2: 9:27

It's growing, I would say. I mean, for us, we get generations from people who come to us directly. We get generation from we work on generation from installers, and we're still early days, so we get quite a lot of sort of referral. But of course people go to the website and they check the website app and I mean, I was always struck by I think you know you've always talked about, you know needing to take a take a long view of these things, build typical authority. There are no kind of like quick wins and sort of you know, intuitive, you know, the right thing for us. And so we started very much with. You know, let's build the website. So that was the first thing. So when I, when I started off listening to the podcast, that was really how to think I'm thinking about what your topical clusters are. You know that was really where I started. So I'm starting looking at the keywords and I'm looking at how you're clustering it together. I'm thinking, okay, this is how I'm going to kind of build the site. I'm going to build, you know, some guides. These are the kind of guides that I want to, that I want to build and what was really interesting about the topical clustering because we're financing commercial solar. So I'm typing in financing commercial solar and I think you commercial solar, how do you finance it?

Speaker 2: 10:30

But what also kind of comes out of it is, you know, people are asking about accounting and people are asking about grants, so not things I would have necessarily thought of, but actually these are kind of the biggest clusters because sort of that's where, that's where there's no, no information. So that's where we sort of ended up drilling into and you know, so I, I then you know, in sort of writing some sections on, you know, accounting for commercial solar, pretty dull and pretty techie. Actually, those are the questions that people seem to want to answer and the point that you make. If you shoot for the obvious keywords not that any of these are high volume keywords, but if you shoot for the obvious it's really hard to go. But you start writing about accounting and grants and we see so much of our traffic coming in there because we're the only people who are writing around that, because it's you know around that you know where it's, uh, where, where it's, where it's properly, properly usable, and so I suppose that was like that was sort of the first phase of using the tool, when I was just, you know, using the credits, drilling in, you know, maybe using the uh, you know, the ar system to give me some faqs and just sort of help build out the templates and the and the content. Brief, but with that sort of insight on the kind of accounting and grants.

Speaker 2: 11:41

We then sort of started thinking about well, actually, you know, as we position the business, you know, maybe we need to kind of lean into that, because that's where there seems to be the, that seems to be where the shortage and shortage of information is. And so we started sort of of you know, tweaking our content and our optimization and how we sort of present the business, and we ended up sort of moving a little bit away from delivering the analysis to help companies decide whether or not solar is a good investment, to help them decide. You know, I've got a reef and I use this much power. How big a system do I need? Should it be kind of 50 kilowatts or 100 kilowatts or 150 kilowatts? I think?

Speaker 2: 12:22

Episode 77, engineering is marketing that was a kind of a key one for me, where you just talk about let's build the tools to get people interested, and so we thought, okay, well, let's do that, and so we actually then sort of went on a kind of a you know a two-month segue where we actually built out some software to help with solar optimization, to help with the analytics of a soft and of solar.

Speaker 2: 12:47

Now we haven't actually got those onto the website, if you like, so we're not sort of there in an seo sense, but actually software has become key to the way we present the company and the way that we talk to installers, the way that we talk to customers.

Speaker 2: 13:01

So you know, that sort of thinking and approach came out of the insights that we were getting from seo, the insights we're getting from the customer base using the tool. But we've applied it much more in our business. If I could and you know, we will apply it on the website eventually, but I've got to find a kind of a simplified version and then think about a way of doing it and I'm on to a WordPress site, as you originally advised. So there's some time to do that and you know, a small business, you can never do everything, as it were. But what was really interesting to me was how we were taking the lessons and the information that were coming out of the SEO and thinking about that in terms of the way that we actually sort of thought about our business strategy, thought about our customers and thought about the way we presented ourselves yeah, I mean that's that's, that's.

Speaker 1: 13:47

That's a really fascinating like journey you've been on that. I mean it's it's amazing to think that that that you keywords people use as much to help you. Not just you know, do the what, what are people asking, and then building the content around it, but also it's I think I I did a podcast on it a while ago it's like audience researchers, market research as well. So you've, just by finding, looking for questions, you're not just finding questions to answer, you're also finding questions that can lead the business into different directions. So, with this software that you've developed, is this something that helps you sell in the installation, so you can start it as a research phase, so you help them with their research as the viability of a project, and then that's the first step in, maybe towards an installation later. That that's exactly right.

Speaker 2: 14:37

I think lots of people, when they're talking to companies about installations, approach it very much as an engineering problem, sort of how many panels can you fit on the roof? Is the roof the right material? What's the right inverter to put with the panels? You know. So how are you going to attach the panels to the roof? Because you know if you're an installer, that's the thing that you do. But if you're a company, you know that's all kind of very interesting. But you kind of you know you just assume you're going to deal with someone who can handle all of that.

Speaker 2: 15:03

You know what you really want to understand is the economics of the system. How much is it going to cost me, how much is it going to finance? Are my savings going to be greater or less than the cost of financing? And so that's the bit we sort of focus on. And so in the software that we've developed, we've got some optimization software which sort of says okay, you've got this power consumption a year, a month, during the day, the hours of the day, you can put a system on your roof that will generate this much power on these days, at this hour. We mesh the two together and then we sort of scale it up and down to see, okay, what's the optimum size system for you.

Speaker 2: 15:39

Because as your system gets bigger, you can offset more of your energy use. You create a bigger environmental effect, but you're also generating power at times that you don't need. You generate power at times that you don't need it. You sell it back to the grid. You maybe get three to six pence per kilowatt hour. If you're using the power yourself, you're maybe saving yourself 24 pence a kilowatt hour. So basically, you want to optimize your energies. Just going to the grid it's not saving money.

Speaker 2: 16:08

So we find a way of working out what the best size is for the for the system, and that just helps. That helps companies sort of take a decision. They can say, yes, this makes economic sense to me. Yes, I can see that you know, for me, 125 kilowatt peak system is the right size, um, and then I can go on and worry about the engineering and the installation thing. So that's you know. So it's a, it's a useful piece of software, but it fits right into that sort of engineering as marketing type of theme that you articulated. Now we don't have it on the website yet, but it's central to the way that we sell ourselves.

Speaker 1: 16:40

Yeah, that's awesome. I can see how where you can work out the right way to pitch it for people and the right way to get that as a lead generator. That's the engineering of yeah, that's the engineering is marketing principle a. You can create some fantastic, fantastic content of it, but can also be a fantastic lead generator. And that's like. You know what we do at broadband uk, what we've done other sites, what we do, keywords people use, the fact. You know that that people can try it before they buy it and see that that's another. That's the same engineering as marketing, marketing principle.

Speaker 1: 17:09

Um, I don aside and this has nothing to do with SEO but I'm very interested in renewable technology and stuff. I've got a heat pump at home here and we've got solar for doing our hot water. We're in a conservation area, which is an issue for us getting solar panels yet, but you were talking about the rate they get for selling it to the grid. So do you do, um, battery systems as well, because I imagine some places are generating power when they're shut, but if they had batteries, they could be, they could be safe. Does that work into your, your systems yet?

Speaker 2: 17:43

yeah, no, we we do and we and we can help people finance batteries and we analyze systems with batteries.

Speaker 2: 17:48

I mean, what I have to say is that actually, for commercial companies, they generally use most of the power during the day and during the week and generally we find that batteries, although they've got much cheaper and there are some really interesting things you're beginning to do with batteries they're not quite as economic as panels.

Speaker 2: 18:05

For most businesses, the only reason to put a battery on be if you've got some non-economic reason for it, so you need an uninterrupted power supply, or you know you've got, you know, a wedding venue where you need to be certain you've got power in the evening, so you want to manage a power cut, so you can. You can say well, I'll have a generator, I'll have a battery, and if I have a battery I can use it the rest of the, the rest of the. But generally, if you're just thinking about batteries, it's diluted to the economics compared with the pure panels. But that will change. I think it'll change, probably in 12 to 18 months, given the way the prices of batteries are coming down. But at the moment the economics aren't quite there for batteries, at least in most of the schemes that we see.

Speaker 1: 18:52

Yeah, I mean I've been trying to work out whether to get a battery for home to sort of buy cheap electricity at night and then use it on the heat pump in the day. Yeah, the price hasn't. The price point of the batteries is getting cheaper all the time, but it's not got quite to the point where it's like it feels like it's worth doing yet.

Speaker 2: 19:11

But that's a total aside.

Speaker 1: 19:12

Let's do this. We can talk about it later on. I want to go back to SEO now. Obviously, your business sounds very clearly like one where volume of people coming isn't anywhere near as important as the kind of the quality of people that you get along, Because I talk a lot about in many podcasts where I say don't concentrate on volume, because volume just is a vanity metric for most people, Unless you're selling display advertising when volume is everything and that's a completely different discussion to have. But for most people, with most businesses, with most sites, you just want the only customers you really care about. The only businesses you really care about are the ones that will turn into customers. It's nice to have more, obviously, but it's obviously about finding those core terms that will actually convert people. So how are you finding that sort of volume versus conversion metric?

Speaker 2: 20:03

Yeah, no, that's exactly right. I mean we must be a kind of a classic sort of. You know, we're a niche subject to the niche in a niche area, so it's always small volume. And actually when I was first listening to the podcast and I think, if I recall, it's something we actually spoke about when we sort of had that first conversation a year ago it was just, you know, because you always think volume is important, when you come to this, fresh volume is always up there in your mind. When you come to this, fresh volume is always up there in your mind and trying to sort of like move away from volume to quality.

Speaker 2: 20:32

You know, I think it's been a big part of the journey for the last year. I mean just to put that in context, the UK has got about 250,000 hectares of south-facing commercial rooms and if they were all covered in solar panels where in fact about half of them were covered in solar panels that would be enough to kind of power about 50% of the UK's energy requirement. So it's a huge resource there and there's a huge opportunity there, which is why we're trying to build the business, because with the right financing, companies can get sort of a 10% to 20% reduction in that path for the cost of financing. But it's still pretty niche. So I had a look at the figures that the Department of Energy and Net Zero sort of published this morning, actually in preparation for this call, and there's about kind of 40,000 commercial solar installations in the last year and that's maybe undertaken by there's a lot of registered installers. So you know, there's maybe 2000 installers out there but probably 90% of those commercial installations are being done by 100 different installers around the country. So our total market, even if you assume two or three people from each company are looking at the web or involved in the purchase decision, you're maybe only 150,000 searches, 200,000 searches a year, as it were. So 12,500 searches a month is your, is your total market sign. So you're, you know we're fishing in a really small market, it seems. You know it, it seems to me. So that's where sort of trying to, you know, trying to find the kind of the quality, has been key and you know I've actually found. I mean the thing that sort of switched us across from just using the credits to actually sort of getting a subscription was the development of the optimization tools and the link into console, because that's been fascinating for us to see.

Speaker 2: 22:26

Okay, these are the questions that are being asked. This is where we're ending up and that's really allowing us to sort of, you know, refine that whole understanding of what the customers want. And so, you know, for us again it's taken us back to those sort of really detailed questions. Is that, you know, if someone's wanting to know what the sort of capital allowances are in relation to a solar system, you kind of know at that point they're thinking seriously about it and they're thinking about how's that going to work. You know what does it mean for my account? You know over what period am I going to be depreciating. You know technical accounting stuff, or you know, can I use it against my annual investment allowance?

Speaker 2: 23:04

Asking those questions, they're clearly seriously thinking about it and those are the kind of customers we want to capture. And they're clearly seriously thinking about it. And those are the kind of customers we want to capture. And so, using that optimization tool to sort of pick up those kinds of queries and then think about how we build out content to capture those very small numbers of queries, but then to sort of position ourselves as being authoritative in that area, and that's really a way that we've thought about it and you know again, as I said at the beginning, I mean you know we've probably thought about it more than we've actually done it. So you know, when you look at the website and the way we think, not just about the website but the way we think about business.

Speaker 1: 23:45

That's really interesting how you say how it's iterative, and that's what I was trying to say to people. First of all, you're never going to get everything done on day one. If you aim for perfection, you're never, ever going to launch anything. You know, and I've worked with some people in the past who were total perfectionists and when they did produce something, it would be of incredible quality, but it would be so late to the party that you know it's better to go with something that's much more rough and ready, but it's at least in the right direction. And then, yes, iterate and change. And because your direction might change based upon the things that you learn, like you've said earlier about how you know you found how that software piece came in that you wouldn't have imagined from the start, but that only becomes because it's iterative.

Speaker 1: 24:27

And also, yeah, yeah, the Google Search Console data is just. It's a fascinating amount of data that you can get out of that. And in Google Search Console itself, yeah, that's why frustration's always been well one that it only gives you 1,000 query lines, which might not matter for many businesses, you know, um, but with us, with our sites, a thousand wasn't enough, but also the fact it's so unintuitive to use google for such a big company. You probably invest a lot of money in in design and all those kind of things and testing. I've never, ever liked any of their interfaces of any software they've ever done.

Speaker 1: 25:00

I still get completely lost in um, the google, um, um, uh, google business tools, like for email, open domains it's like it's such an awful interface and Google Search Console to be very slightly better than that, but not much, which is why we wanted to yeah, we built that piece to A, get the data out and then also to interrogate it, and that fact of crawling the site and comparing the data on site to the google um search console data yeah, we, we've, we've found it well, we've, we found it. So, incredibly, we build these tools based off the things that I've wanted for years. After to work the process that I was doing for so many years.

Speaker 1: 25:41

A lot for a google search console wasn't around when we first started, neither was people so ask, there was a whole bunch of these things, you know, but as they've come along, it's just trying to put that same process in that we always went to with, yeah, originally back with broadbandcouk and then with other sites, obviously in the future we've done since then and, yeah, that iterative part of the process is the real key thing, so it's really cool to hear that that's been useful to you as well. Um, so, so and with your um, with your, with your customers. I mean, obviously, like you're, I imagine, quite hot a customer is one to you, is is worth quite a lot, I imagine your, your average kind of deal size yeah.

Speaker 2: 26:19

No, it's a reasonably expensive. It's not huge, but I mean it's probably somewhere in the, somewhere in the sort of like two to four thousand pounds per customer for us. So if we're then arranging a sort of financing for them and we're doing the analysis and we charge a little bit for doing the analysis and we charge a little bit for raising the finance, so reasonably expensive but not the most valuable sort of customers, that it tends to be sort of one-offs and it's not sort of big lifetime planning to build out from that Interesting.

Speaker 2: 26:47

How many have you done?

Speaker 1: 26:48

so far.

Speaker 2: 26:50

Well, we're working, I guess, on about we've worked on about 35 projects at the moment and you know we've probably been really marketing hard for about sort of six months, maybe seven months or so. So I think when I was speaking to you sort of as we were building out the website, we built the website and then we started sort of kicking off on LinkedIn, and a lot of these projects take sort of a while to come through. So we've probably got sort of four or five now in execution. We've got two that have been completed. I hope we'll have another three or four sort of completed in the next couple of months and by that time we will have arranged maybe sort of seven or eight million pounds worth of worth of schemes. So it's, you know it's beginning to get, it's beginning to get meaningful and you know we're we're at the point now where we're seeing sort of one or two new opportunities a week and you know which is which is good for building and I mean, again, you know what it's like when you're bootstrapping.

Speaker 2: 27:39

You want to, you want to grow quickly, but you also need to kind of grow at a rate that you can control and manage and you can and and you can sort of handle, and so you know, it's always a continuous balance between, you know, working on the projects, delivering the ones that you've, uh, that you've got, sort of building new content, developing the developing the website, improving things.

Speaker 2: 27:58

So you know, but that's the, that's the fun thing about bootstrapping, you know you, you sort of you know, get to dive into the detail across these things and sort of, you know, have the opportunity to learn and to test. I mean, it's so different from. You know, as we alluded to, the first business, I sort of you know, worked on in the entrepreneurial sort of way. You know we spent lots of money and you know we went the other way. You know we built. You know we were perfectionists. I mean we spent maybe 18 months or two years building stuff before we showed it to a customer and then you know, found that it didn't have quite the demand that we were hoping for. And you know you're then running around trying to really, you know, as soon as we could, let's get out, let's start talking to customers, let's learn from that, iterate, develop and develop and evolve.

Speaker 1: 28:41

That's very interesting. It's great to see that it's gone from, like, say, from when I first spoke to you, like you, you had one, you had one customer.

Speaker 2: 28:49

He yeah, he did, he didn't really count um, I think for the business that we was our first customers owned by my wife, so it's kind of us.

Speaker 1: 28:56

Yeah, that's it yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, there's a bit of a conflict of interest, I suppose, in terms of, yeah, it's not completely. Uh, yeah, you had to persuade us quite hard, I imagine. So, yeah, to see the numbers you're getting up to in that bootstrapped way is absolutely fantastic, because I've actually done a bit of angel investing in the past and I spoke to a lot of companies that were raising money and I was only ever at like angel sort of seed level and there's so few of them that I've spoke to that are still around. You know, I only ever invested in one and that one actually is still going and actually got bought out by another company. So my investment is still there. It might still go to zero, but they did actually raise $3 million on another round at the start of this year, but my investment in that is so, so small. So, but that's one where it's like, if that comes off, that would be like a nice bit to put in the pension at some point in the future.

Speaker 2: 29:55

I think I mean one of the observations I made about the whole keywords people use sort of ecosystem is, I think it's so valuable for startups. You know, I know you've built it for seo customers. But you know, I think there's a whole you know line there for, you know, for startups, you know, because this whole, if you're a startup, you've got no money, you can't afford to do market research and things. You know, in that first company I worked on, you know we spent, you know hundreds of thousands of pounds on market research but I don't think we got information back that was any more insightful than you know what's coming out of your keyword clustering exercise. And you can, you can build build up from that.

Speaker 2: 30:35

And so you know, we've, we've used this as a, you know, as a tool to, you know, to help shape that whole customer research, customer optimization process. And so you know, I, you know, I know, I know it's, you know, in some ways it's probably a sort of a smaller market than than the seo market, especially kind of, you know, given that fantastic customer base that you have. You know, the use of the tool in the startup world, um, I think is a really interesting opportunity and you know, you know I'm sure you could be a fantastic mentor to uh, uh to startups, not so much with the investment but just sort of getting them to use the tool and uh and to help people sort of grow businesses and think about it, cause you know when you're starting a business that product market fit key question and you know what is sort of you know keywords people use under the machine to understand product market fit.

Speaker 1: 31:25

That's.

Speaker 1: 31:25

That's's. That's some incredible feedback. You're making me think I've got work to do now to to go and sort of pitch a whole new um, a whole new market. Haven't I already there? But yeah, that is.

Speaker 1: 31:36

I mean, I said we've, we've used it in the same way. You know, so I can. It's fantastic to hear how you've used it and in ways that we didn't. Fantastic to hear how you've used it and in ways that we didn't necessarily expect people to use it in the first place. Um, and it's, it's fascinating to see how it's driven, your journey and, and a journey that's working out for you as well. I mean, um, and I said I've, I've watched you on linkedin. I've, you know, seen you out there speaking to people. I've seen it growing and um, yeah, it's just fantastic.

Speaker 1: 32:06

And also, I totally, totally buy into the whole solar thing, um, and the renewables, um, because I know some people don't like net zero and I have arguments with people in the pub about, about the economics of it. Um, I've heard there's what I did actually convince one of my neighbors who said we should, we should all be running hydrogen boilers, and and I said to I sat down with him and he's actually a really clever engineer guy and I said I said, look, if we do it all as hydrogen, we've got to use electricity to convert it to hydrogen. There's an energy loss there, so you're down to 80 efficiency. Then you've got to pipe it. There's an inefficiency there and then you've got it, you've got to burn it in a boiler. And there'll be you'll. That way you won't get past 100, you know you don't get this efficiency loss there in burning it.

Speaker 1: 32:50

so I said, right, or we can use that same electricity down a wire. Okay, you get a little bit of loss on the national grid, but it's nothing like the same, as you know, sending a liquid or a gas down and then you get 300 efficiency on your heat pump. You cannot beat physics and he was like, actually you can't If you understand some of those physics so I'm totally into the whole thing.

Speaker 2: 33:16

You know, I'm sure you know the way you really get business to work. You generate the environment where it's an economic investment to make. It's really hard as a business Most businesses there's never huge sums of money flying around. They don't have one round to spend on solar and if they've got that kind of money, they need to invest it in their business or grow their working capital. And make a net saving from your savings is key, and when you can do that then you can really unlock the opportunity and the great thing with businesses if you're putting the solar panels on roofs, you're not having to pay, putting in ground mounds, you're not covering farmland and you're generating the power where you're using the power and that's taking pressure off the grid. You're using it in a very constrained environment and so making that work, I think is a huge opportunity and we're super excited by that.

Speaker 2: 34:16

I think over the last 12 to 18 months, the economics really got to the point where, for the right size system and with the right financing, you can deliver those kinds of benefits. And you know that's the message that we're trying to get out. Or whether we're stallers or businesses, then that's the, you know that's, that's what we're doing and we're really excited about it. But, like all these things, you've got to kind of communicate it Exactly.

Speaker 1: 34:40

Yeah, yeah, well, I mean website SEO, getting on podcasts, speaking everywhere, just letting people know I'm just annoyed that I haven't got a commercial roof space, that I can be getting on with this, because if you have got commercial roof space that is facing even slightly in the right direction, I imagine, why are you not putting solar panels on there, financing it and saving money? And when the finance is paid off off, you've still got all the kit. They still got a lifespan in it. You know, I just can't see why. Why people do it. So if you are listening and you are in that situation or you know someone in that situation, then get in touch with richard, and richard I think, yeah, just how do people get in touch with if they are interested in, well, in exploring?

Speaker 2: 35:26

this. I mean they can go to our website. You know, as long as they remember it's our website. It's not nearly as good as it should be, richard at greenhalfenergy, but all our contact details are on the website. But please reach out. I mean we'll do the engineering, the optimization, study and stuff. We'll do that all for free for you to have a look at and then, if you want to sort of go forward and take it forward, help through that process. But you know that initial study and analysis is all complimentary Again, something we've taken out of your.

Speaker 1: 35:58

Yeah, no obligation.

Speaker 1: 36:00

Yeah, no obligation. Yeah, that was brilliant. Well, thanks for coming on. It's been brilliant to hear your journey, hear about your business, and obviously it's quite good for me that you've enjoyed using keywords people use and find it useful. So thanks so much for coming on. Fantastic Thanks for inviting me Anytime. That was such a fantastic chat. Big thanks again to Richard for coming on and sharing his journey so openly with us.

Speaker 1: 36:21

I think what really stood out for me was how he used SEO, not just as a way to get traffic, but as a way to think about customers, about market positioning and even about what kind of product to build. And it's a reminder, really, that when you pay attention to what people are actually searching for, it doesn't just help you rank, it helps you build something people genuinely want. If you're listening to this and you've been on the fence about diving into SEO or using tools like Key, like keywords people use and hopefully this gives you a bit of inspiration to get started or to go deeper, and if you know someone with a business that could make better use of their commercial roof space, definitely send them richard's way. Um, richard also very kindly created a pdf of his favorite episodes that he's listened to, of all the episodes he's listened to of this podcast, and he's put them into different groups. So the ones that helped him with building the website, the ones that helped him with business strategy, the ones that helped him with optimization and the ones that he found that were just for fun, the ones he found the most interesting. Um, and I will put a link to that in the show notes and I'll also stick it on linkedin as well. So, yeah, thanks, richard, for sharing that with us. So, as always, you know, I hoped you enjoyed the episode. Please leave a quick review or share it with someone who might find it useful. It really helps spread the word and, um, yeah, 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: 37:39

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, 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: 37:54

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 keywordspeoplesusecom, 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 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.