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, ed Dawson, as usual, and today I've got a new episode for you. Yeah, I was recently on the Market Movers podcast with Chris Panettani of Linkify, who are a digital peer agency. I actually had Chris on the podcast a couple months ago. He was a really great guest and yeah, he please return the favor anyway on his podcast. Um, I really enjoyed the interview. I think chris got loads out of me. Um, lots of other people haven't managed to do when they interview me. He's just a really good podcast um host when it comes to interviewing other people. So, yeah, highly recommend his pod, his podcast. He's got done some great interviews with people in seo and online marketing and digital PR, all that kind of thing. So really do go and do highly recommend you go listen to him.

Speaker 1: 2:03

I'm still slightly on uh on a break, so this is just sort of um. I thought I'd get this episode out to you, though. So there are still some more best stuff to come, but I am building up some great ideas for future podcasts, so I will be back with more new ones in the future. But, like I say, I've just been so busy with life and there's still so much going on, um, although I'm starting to get a handle on it now, starting to get lots of things done, both professional work wise and also mentioned yet on the farm. This time of year we've got a lot of things to do. The weather turns good and we can actually get some things done, so we've been trying to get all those done.

Speaker 1: 2:35

We're having a real kind of heat wave in the uk at the moment. It's not rained for, I think, any almost the last month, which is really unusual, especially for our area of the uk, um, but it does mean that I'm managing to get things done that normally we'd have to wait until much later in the summer to get done. Um, so, yeah, that's really been taken for my time, um, but it's been great to hear from you. It's been great to hear from those of you who said they've been really enjoying the best of episodes. It's really good to put those back out again, because there is some really great stuff in the archive and rather than necessarily just going over some of those grounds again, it's better just to share them again and say, look, these are the ones I think are really the most valuable to listen to. These are the ones I think are really the most valuable to listen to.

Speaker 2: 3:17

So I hope you're enjoying them and anyway, without further ado, let's get into this interview of me on the Market Movers podcast. Seo veteran, successful affiliate entrepreneur and the creator of KeywordsPeopleUsecom Over the past two decades sorry, ed, I'm telling your age now. Ed has built and exited multiple high traffic sites, including the iconic broadbandcouk, and now shares his knowledge on his podcast. Seo is not that hard. Welcome to the show, ed.

Speaker 1: 3:47

Hi. Thanks very much, chris. It's great to be here.

Speaker 2: 3:50

Well, I normally start by saying do you want to give me a brief intro in how you got into this world? But it was supposed to be. We've got 20 years of history to cover. You could break it down as best you can yeah, yeah.

Speaker 1: 4:01

Well, like I say you, you've aged me a bit by saying I'm running this over 20 years and I wasn't like fresh out when I first got into sr. I'm basically I'm 49, but I'll admit my age, I'm 14, I'm almost 50. Um, I've been in the tech world since well well, I mean the early 90s. I mean it was when I did my degree. I did a computer science, software engineering degree, so proper techie and I sort of got into the workforce just as the dotcom boom was blowing up and then completely falling apart. I worked for the first few years on very large database systems, very boring stuff in the public sector, and I was like, right, this is great. But all the people here who'd been there for like more than a few years, they started to call themselves lifers and they were in the public sector for life and I just thought I was in my mid-20s and I thought I need to go and see some more of the real world.

Speaker 1: 4:53

I ended up leaving and ended up at a web agency, um, which worked with some fantastic clients like um cineworld, cinemas, bafta, tesco, interflora I was working on, like interflora's um first e-commerce sites. Um, yeah, really great cutting edge stuff to work at. And um at the time, um, it was, it was. It was good experience, but I still wanted to sort of do my own thing. Essentially, I wanted to get into business and we got an opportunity because we came across the domain name broadbandcouk, because the company that I was working for was called Broadband Communications because they'd named themselves before broadband became a thing, you know, internet access. It just meant it was just a broadband. We did a broadband of communications, including the web. People started ringing up wanting to get connected to broadband, the internet, in about 2004. We were scratching our heads, going well, this isn't what we are. We're getting more and more people and more people coming to the website and it was a case of right. We need to, you know, change the brand of the agency. We need to split this domain out and to do something with broadband.

Speaker 1: 6:04

This is where the whole SEO journey kind of started. I'd kind of been told you know, we have to include SEO for these big brands. But because there were such big brands, you know. But as now, if you're working for a big brand, seo kind of looks after itself a lot. I know there's a lot of tech seos out there and the, the enterprise seos go. Oh no, it's really difficult. It's really difficult, but you've got a massive advantage when you're a big brand, and it was even more so back then. But this was the first time we were really trying to build something from from scratch and that's where my journey into SEO started. That's also where the journey into the affiliate world started, because we've got this website.

Speaker 1: 6:41

We created a website all about broadband and it's like how do we monetize it? And that's when we discovered affiliate marketing. We'd never come across it before and that was again the early days of affiliate. It was the early days of price comparison. I can't claim I invented the price comparison side of broadband at codeuk, because that was actually my wife, um, who came up with the idea of like, why don't we like, put all the providers on and, you know, let people, um see what's available in their area and compare them by price and other things like that. So we were one of the earliest price comparison sites. I mean, you switch and money supermarket might be in there a little bit earlier, but back then it was still a very concept, yeah, and then over the years, we got to the point where the broadband site blew up so much that we sold the agency off, because agency work was very, very tricky. It's always very hard to scale an agency and we found that obviously the affiliate side could scale really well and yet we grew it.

Speaker 1: 7:32

Then, over the next 20 years, we had our ups and downs. We can talk that at some point, if you want. We had, we got hit by penguin, we got hit by panda. We've had, you know, we've had all sorts of ups and downs, but we essentially built it, recovered it nicely. And, yeah, in middle of covid, one of our competitors, who are broadband genie, genie ventures, approached us. So, would we be interested in a sale? And we've been approached many times in the past and had lots of conversations with various people with various amounts of money. Um, some, some who, um, you know, sounded like they're going to have a lot but then turned out to didn't. Um, but it basically got to the point where we said look, we're always open to an offer, everything's always for sale. Um, and yeah, they, um, they made us what was a very fair and reasonable offer and contractuallyually you know, it's not something I can share the exact numbers but it was very significant. It was like a life changing amount of money.

Speaker 1: 8:24

So that was the point when I decided right, we're out of the broadband sphere because of no competes and stuff, for a while and I was 45 at the time Didn't want to retire. I'm too, you know, I've always got to be building things and that's when I thought, right, well, I've been doing seo for 20 years nearly without anyone really knowing I was doing seo. There's the odd person I knew, but I wasn't a public seo because it wasn't what we were trying to do, but it was a case of actually I want to try and share some of my knowledge now help other people, because the the trouble with seo is there's no hard and fast rule, because google and other search engines obviously obfuscate how it works, because if everyone knew exactly how it worked, then it'd be a massive bun fight and you know they have to make it tricky, they have to make it unclear and they have to change the rules all the time, sort of in competition against people who are trying to game them. So I just wanted to share what I'd learned with people over all those years. So one was the podcast.

Speaker 1: 9:24

Two was the tool that was basically saying this is what I've done for 20 years successfully and how I've done content, how we've built things up. And so here's the here's how I would do it. Here's some tools that can help and here's also a podcast that just me talking about all sorts of things seo wise. Um, it can be a bit random, it's not necessarily always that organized, but it's just me brain dumping through the podcast. Short 10 minute episodes. Um, always trying to be actionable, always try that someone can walk away. Learning something new is my aim anyway. That's what I hope awesome.

Speaker 2: 9:56

Um loads to dig into there. I want to just broadbandcouk is a fascinating story. Um just break down to me the that initial was that your agency. You used we a lot, so was. Was the agency yours or were you employed at the agency?

Speaker 1: 10:12

yeah, this is the complicated one because I was employed at the time. My wife was one of the partners of the agency. I was like I was on the senior team, um, and that's what. I met my wife at work, essentially in the old days before tinder and all that. I did it the old-fashioned way, actually met somebody, fell in love and all that business, and then um, so obviously when the um, when that company got split up, bullmaniccouk got split out.

Speaker 1: 10:36

That was when I was married then to Fiona and we essentially purchased it off the other two partners, because these things when you start things off, they don't always work out the right way. So there was a difference of opinion on what the best way to monetize it was, and one of the partners wanted to do ppc, which which we tried. We couldn't make it work, we're just getting a lot of debt. And then it just got to the point where there was a hot. It was very debt laden and I'd looked at it and thought, actually if we just went solely seo, focused, solely organic on this, we can probably turn it around. But the other, the other two partners, at that point they weren't interested.

Speaker 1: 11:18

They were more in focused on the agency side, and so we just made them an offer and we bought them out back then so that's why that's that's that's the very in in-depth, detailed one and then yeah, so then, so me and finna have owned, owned it ever since, outright, until we sold it so I mean it was it's.

Speaker 2: 11:35

It's a story of right place, right time, then, to be getting those inbound yeah inbound calls to the agency looking for, uh, a service that was essentially had the, the name of, of broadband in it, and you guys just were nothing to do with that. Um, but you noticed it and then you somebody asked was it you, maybe your wife? Somebody went and bought that domain. It was available and and you purchased.

Speaker 1: 11:59

Well, yeah, the domain was bought. I'm not even 100 sure because the, the, the original agency, had gone bust in 2001 and my wife and her two business parts at the time they they phoenix. They were employees, they phoenixed the agency back in 2001. The original people that set up the agency they left at that point. They'd set it up sometime around about 1994 I think, and they'd registered the domain then in 1994. You know a tenor but broadband meant nothing then. It wasn't a technology, it was just a word.

Speaker 2: 12:32

Okay, so the point that you, you and your wife decided to take this gamble, which was away from the agency, and to put your sole focus into broadbandcouk. Where? What did the broadband landscape look like at that point? Where were we in terms of? Was it starting to be adopted? Were people starting to use it in common parlance as a means of internet? Um, and then what did that? Um transition from ppc not working and organic being the the sole focus. What did that look like in terms of like time frame and then like seeing results?

Speaker 1: 13:07

yeah, well, the I think the technology, broadband itself was launched in the uk around early 2000, right around 2004. I really should know this, because we all I did was write about broadband for 20 years. But yeah, you forget these things, yeah, so. So basically, 2004 to 2008 was when we had the growth of broadband. So everyone was going from dial-up and and converting to broadband and you had like the first basic broadband connections that were like half, half a meg, you know, which would seem so incredibly slow now Half a meg.

Speaker 2: 13:38

Yeah, exactly.

Speaker 1: 13:40

It was amazing at the time and it was always on. It didn't interrupt. What's not the old days where someone would pick the phone up in the house and disconnect you and all?

Speaker 2: 13:47

that Get off the phone. Exactly, yeah, if you can remember that far back.

Speaker 1: 13:51

So it was a very big. There was a massive growth curve and me and Fiona thought, well, there's this growth curve coming, there's going to be a lot of people coming, it's going to be this huge demand curve and we thought it maybe had four or five years before it reached a peak and then everyone had it and it wouldn't be so profitable anymore. So that was our first thought. So we'll get on there and we'll be there as an educational site in first place where people are asking questions. So we focused on content around the questions people have and then we um over time.

Speaker 1: 14:21

After a short period, sort of the, maybe 2008, we added in a broadband speed test because there were lots of people wanted to test their speed. That was a lot of time. When am I getting what I'm paying for? Um was a thing and you know the quality of different broadband providers wasn't necessarily so great um and we kept the, the guides, up to date as the technology moved on, because the first, first types of broadband adsl hardly anyone uses anymore.

Speaker 1: 14:45

You know now it's all fiber to the cabinet or direct fiber or using um. You know 4, 5g it's becoming more of a thing. Satellite broadband, you know, with starlink, things like it's all moving on. So the technology has moved on, but every but it's still just called broadband. So that's that's another thing where we got really lucky, because we thought it'll be fiber optic in a few years and everyone will just be searching for fiber optic and then we won't have that. We've got it. We'll have to reposition all the content around a new term and that's going to be problematic. We might not do so well, well, but we were just. Yeah, we were lucky. I completely admit. There was luck in terms of being in the right place at the right time, in terms of the domain, the technology, and also lucky that the term continued to be broadband.

Speaker 2: 15:30

Well, I mean, there's definitely an element of luck, but you know, you certainly capitalise on the opportunity. You mentioned then a broadband speed test. I mean that's genius, that's a tool. So I assume you, you guys, built that or had that like custom, custom built, um, which is awesome, and you also talked briefly earlier about being possibly one of the the first people, especially in the uk, to do these um comparative guides, uh, which again is genius. And now, I suppose, is just the essence of the affiliate model. So how did you go about implementing that and when did you start to see that worked? And then, was that the sort of the basis of sustained income over that period?

Speaker 1: 16:13

Yeah, I mean what we did. What we wanted to do was, rather than just being a site about broadband, we really wanted it to be something useful for people. And the key thing was and it's still the same today. But back then, you know, broadband was being rolled out. It wasn't available universally everywhere at once. So the key thing was we thought we need to make it so that people can put in a postcode and we'll tell them if broadband is available in their area. If it is, what providers are available in that area. So even now, you know, virgin media fiber isn't available everywhere. You have to go to these, um, you have to go somewhere. Put in a postcode, find out what's available to you in that area. And it was that key, like that was the key thing really, because we were marrying up a database. We built a database of all the broadband providers, all the deals that were available, where they were available, and then we had that checker so that we could say with clarity whether, yeah, this provider is available in your area. And part of that was literally going out and finding a source of that data. And we were lucky at the time there was a guy called Sam Crawford who was just a broadband enthusiast, a real techie, and he'd literally done all the hard work, got all that data together and made it available for free on an API and so we just hooked into that. So that did that part. But we obviously then married it with our database of all the deals on the side that we kept up to date. That made the tool something really powerful.

Speaker 1: 17:33

At a later date, someone with some commercial now has found sam and said sam, we should build a business on this. And now they're a massive business and they do. Um, they do stuff all around the world. Um, sam's like a multi-millionaire now. Um, from from someone that came along and said we can monetize this and we ended up having to pay them, which was fine because we were kept trying to pay him at the start because we didn't want him to stop the service and he would never take any money. But someone came along and said no, you can monetize this. And they now do work with offcom. They do stuff with telecoms regulators all around the world with. They have these boxes that they put in properties to sort of gauge how well different providers are doing, and yeah, and regulators use it. So, yeah, but it was marion. It's taking two data sets, mashing them and then making it available for people. That was the key thing. That was the core of its success.

Speaker 2: 18:21

Essentially, yeah, I mean that's just fantastic and I think to be a truly successful affiliate model, that marrying of pure value. And you can see that just in a couple of things, like, if I'm going to want to know, is broadband in my area? And I find you organically, I search and it says that it is available and there's two or three providers and then I can go into a guide, I can look at the difference between the providers and then I can make a decision and buy right there. It's an affiliate transaction but it's off the back of pure value, isn't it? On the fact that that information has been that I needed. It has been provided. And then you also talked about speed tests, which I assume you also had that affiliate journey If somebody did a speed test and found out that their speed could be higher if they looked at possibly an alternative provider.

Speaker 1: 19:12

Exactly. Yeah, yeah, yeah, it was very much the case of yeah, we would let them them do a speed test, but we'd really encourage them to give us a postcode as well, because then we could compare what the speed you were getting against what other providers were in your area. So we could then, and we could then also benchmark you against other users in your area. And we built up, we would record them all so we could say, right, you're doing performing well, poor, awful, here are other providers in your area that could actually, you know, increase your speed, and we do that. So we take them down a journey, basically, and try and offer them alternatives.

Speaker 1: 19:45

You know it's a numbers game, the more you know you're just pouring people in at the top of the funnel and you're hoping that a certain number will convert at the bottom. But you've got to give them value. You've got to give them something that is hard to replicate elsewhere. That's why I mean there's been a lot of the affiliate model is dead noise going on since Helpful Content Update, when we had lots of people to adjust.

Speaker 1: 20:07

You know, ranking basic top 10 lists of things which are out of date immediately. They're not really adding any extra value and you know, there's just so easy to compete against because everyone can write a top 10 list on these things, whereas if you do something that is hard to replicate not impossible, because you've got to be able to build it, if you can build it it can be replicated. It's just how many people are going to have the time, the skill and the energy to do it. So you've got to be hard to replicate and you've got and you've got to do something that isn't just especially nowadays replicated in a large language model. You can't, because you can go to an llm and say give me the top 10, whatever, and it'll come, it'll give you recommendations. But if you go to an llm and say you know what broadband suppliers are available in this postcode, the LLM doesn't know, it can't answer that it might be able to in the future, I don't know.

Speaker 1: 21:02

But it would have to ingest that data, it would have to have it up to date and, you know, google never managed it in 20 years to get that level of data. So I mean, if you look at other websites that do similar things money, supermarket, compare the market, do it with insurance, you know, and services, where you know, on the back end as well, like you know, like I say, credit reference, all those kind of things do that sort of aggregation comparison. That affiliate model is still thriving.

Speaker 2: 21:34

I mean absolutely fascinating. I'm intrigued to know, were the affiliate programs for the providers like? I mean, it's it's just so common now to you know want to um promote an offer and find a relevant affiliate program were they? Were they all set up? Did you have to have like um conversations with people in order to start an affiliate program for you? How did that look in the in the early days?

Speaker 1: 22:00

to be fair, they were all there. The affiliate window was still there, trade Doubler was around. They were early days, but they'd basically gone out. Very luckily for us, it was just for the fleet and got most of these people on board. There was the odd one that was doing their own affiliate model and some that weren't doing it, but they all soon got into it and you know um it. That, to be fair, was actually no problem.

Speaker 1: 22:24

It was a discovery journey for us because we didn't even hey, we didn't understand, we didn't know there were things such as affiliates. Back then we didn't know there were networks. Our original thought was we'd get the providers to all come along and they'd enter their, enter all their data, all about all the deals for us. And we built all this system for the providers to log in and give us all the details and that's. And then we started to approach the I think first one or two who then said oh no, just go and talk to affiliate window or go and talk to trade doubler. And that's where we discovered we were going to have to do the hard work of putting all those deals in. The other providers were not going to do it for us. Um, so yeah, so. So this is one of the things where we should have researched a little bit before we built something.

Speaker 2: 23:01

But you know, we survived yeah, and and was throughout the journey of broadband at coda uk. Was it always that model of organic and affiliate or did you ever go back to ppc? Did you ever do ads? Did you build email lists? How did that look?

Speaker 1: 23:21

We tried lots of things. We would every so often go back and try PPC. The trouble we had with PPC was that all the actual broadband providers themselves were very invested in PPC and they obviously had a greater lifetime value so they could outbid us as affiliates. There are some affiliates that do it really well, like the big ones. The money supermarkets, the confusedcoms are way bigger than us, you know, in resource wise, um. But you know we, we could never make those numbers work. We, um experimented with retargeting. That didn't work. We, we, we did. We bought email lists would work to a certain extent. But you know it's broadband, something that people buy maybe once or twice in a decade that it's earned so much.

Speaker 1: 24:12

It was hard to justify the effort of creating lots of emails, because we were solely targeted on broadband, like we didn. Like a money supermarket which has got a whole range of products they can keep cross-promoting to people. So we didn't have that. We tried, but I've just got to admit and say you know, it never really moved the needle. The only thing that moved the needle was organic basically.

Speaker 2: 24:32

Okay, well, I don't want to spend this whole podcast on broadband, but I've still got so much I want to ask, and it's uh, I've got plenty of time, just okay. Um, just a few more things then. Um, I want to get to the exit and the timing as well. That'll be my last point. Um, I'm also interested in you. You talked about being hit, so, penguin panda, I, were you hit on both. What did recovery look like? Um, and maybe hypothetically, would you make an? Well, actually, I suppose not hypothetically. I'm sure you still track traffic and stuff like since, since, uh, it's now not your website, has it been hit since the sale and how and how are you seeing them perform?

Speaker 1: 25:12

uh, you know now it's not in your, under your um watchful eye okay, yeah, yeah, well, so, going back to panda and penguin, um, so I'm sure most of your listeners remember well we'll have at least heard of them. I know there's plenty of people in seo probably what, even if it's probably still at school when, um, when panda and penguin hit. But yeah, these were basically the first really major updates that had sort of sent major shockwaves through the seo world and they were like, I think, what was it? Panda was 2011, 2012 times, penguin was 2013 time, wasn't it? So panda was basically all about eliminate, trying to eliminate, low quality content. It was the first time they tried to really hit. Like you know, hit hit what they called low quality content and that started. That started to affect us. We start to. It was a slower slide with that Because, yeah, I'll admit, you know, back then, some of our content wasn't great and was thin.

Speaker 1: 26:07

Essentially, you know, we'd not paid as much attention to it as we could have done and we started to see a slide and we were sort of scratching our heads a bit, trying to work out what to do about that when Penguin came, were sort of scratching heads a bit, trying to work out what to do about that when penguin came and you know, back at that time we would rank number one for the term broadband. We would be ranking, you know one, two or three, for broadband speed test and for all the, all the high traffic terms we were, we were the number one, two or three. We were up there, um, and then you wake up one morning and we would just weren't ranking for anything. I think we were ranking. I found us ranking at like 939 for the term broadband and our traffic just well, I mean google at that time was about 75 of our traffic just gone. Okay, all that was keeping us afloat was bing and direct type in traffic wow, what?

Speaker 2: 26:58

what did? Did those numbers look like just out of interest in terms of, like, daily sessions? Let's say what was it at and what did it drop to overnight?

Speaker 1: 27:06

Yeah, I mean around about that time. We were probably around about. I'd have to think back then about 2,000, 3,000 sessions a day and you know you dropped it down to like 200 or 300.

Speaker 2: 27:18

You know maybe a bit floating around.

Speaker 1: 27:24

But it was just gone and it was our own fault, okay, because we'd done like a lot of people did, starting in 2004. If you start in 2004,. We just built links everywhere of all sorts of you know, blog comment links, footer links, text, that text, ad links, um, which was like a broken network where you could just go along, say I want this term, and they just you paid so much and they plastered them all sorts, all sorts of sites. We had like an awful backlink profile, as you would see it nowadays, but it was all fine. You know, google used to say it's all against the rules and did do for sort of eight years but never did and it just dropped.

Speaker 1: 28:04

Um, what are we going to do? And you know, there's a lot of, probably a lot of sleepless nights, a lot of stress and pressure and anxiety. Luckily, it's long enough ago that I don't remember that much of it, but what I do remember is Carl Hendy. Uh, if you know, if you could come across Carl Hendy, he owns auditscom now. Um, he was working at IEMA at the time here, an agency in London, and I've met him at a few sort of SEO events. We got friendly, you know. Um, I got an email from, from Carl, saying I see that your site's like dropped off a cliff. Yeah and um, he said, do you mind if I have a cliff? And I'm like, yeah and um, he said, do you mind if I have a look? And I said yeah, yeah, have a look. And you know, obviously he wanted some money and we were happy to pay it.

Speaker 1: 28:48

We're happy to pay him because he was really. But I knew he was. You know I'd spoken to some people and you know other people. I approached their agencies and they were just. I wasn't confident that these people knew what on earth they were doing.

Speaker 1: 28:57

But Carl came along, said this is what I think the problem is, let's look at it. And he put a plan together, did an audit for us, helped us with getting all the links disavowed, links removal, helped us redesign the site, sorted out the Panda issues, sorted out the Penguin issues and after a few months we started to recover sections. So the first bit that came back was our reviews section where users could post reviews of broadband suppliers. But that was all redesigned with Carl's wireframes and he said this will sort you out. And that came back and we started getting traffic on that. And then the speed test came back and it all started coming back. And it didn't just come back, it came back to a level that was way above where we were. So back to a level that was way above where we were. So after about two years we were up about 200 and then we peaked at probably five times the traffic that we were beforehand and you know I to this day, I will always give carl the credit for that. And if anyone needs a top-notch seo consultant, you know, go and talk to carl um and he and he doesn't blow his own trumpet enough. That's one thing. You know he doesn't like public speaking. He's actually on a podcast today, so he does the occasional podcast now. He lives in Australia now but he's brilliant. So he's the guy if you've ever got a problem but he helps sort us out and, you know, learned so much from him. And yeah, that got us back into a position.

Speaker 1: 30:17

And that's when I changed our complete approach to link building, which was I'm going all organic. Now I'm not ever buying a link, ever again. Now I know you guys do. You've had you on my podcast where we talked all about PR, digital PR, link building. That's great, that's the right kind of link building. But yeah, ever since that day we were like, nope, it's all content-led. Now we're going to. It's all content led. Now you know, we're going to produce the best content, the best tools and that is what will drive us, even if it takes longer. I'm just not going through that Penguin style thing again.

Speaker 1: 30:47

So that was our sort of road to Damascus, I suppose, moment where we changed how we did stuff. We came out of the sort of black and gray side and we just went completely, just went completely. And I can't, I can't do that again. Um, yeah, and we've had, you know, over the next few years, you know you have traffic fluctuations, ups and downs, updates come and go, but you know we never, ever after that point, had any serious issues. Um, and yeah, that was that was, that was absolutely great. Um, and you came back to asking about the exit. Yeah, so what was that? What was that just?

Speaker 2: 31:22

yeah, so I mean that I mean to carl and, um, yeah, what, what another fortunate part of the journey for for the business to for him to have just spotted that and then implement, um, yeah. And then obviously you went uh, really, really, um, strong content, focus, which is great. Um, and then you got approached for an exit, which you said had happened multiple times before. But for whatever reason, I don't know if this was the final alignment of the stars for you, but you decided at that point that you would, that the price was right and that you would exit. I think this was. What year was this?

Speaker 1: 32:00

It was 2021. Yeah, 2021. 2021. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. So I mean, well, what we got to was obviously one one.

Speaker 1: 32:08

One aspect of having had the issues with penguin back in 2013 was, as well as sorting out broadband at couk, it was a case of right. We needed some diversification. You know, we've been lucky once, so let's see if we can do this again. It's like it's in other niches, okay, telecoms, energy, that kind of thing to try and to try and de-risk. So, yeah, if you lose one, hopefully we'll have some of this. And you know, all great content, tool-based data, but, you know, based on data and amalgamating different data sets, building that kind of site, and we got some of the sites up. So then it became broad. Okay, well, now less than half of our income, because we had other sites that were also providing us income. So it meant that when, um, it came to 2021 and Genie Ventures approached us, it wasn't an all or nothing decision, it wasn't a we have to. If we sell it now, well, what's the income going to be?

Speaker 1: 33:08

Because however much money you get, you know when it's hard to retire in your 40s you know, even if you get, you know, tens and tens of millions, you know you need a huge amount of money to to maintain a lifestyle and just quit um at that point. So it was the case of okay, we've got, we've got other income, we can take this money and we don't have to live off it. That was, that was one key thing. And the second key thing was it was a good offer. It was a fair offer. Um, we were happy, you know, with the multiple. It was based on um and also we knew the guys who um were going to take it on because they were niche, they were, they had broadband gene, they could understand they were the right kind of buyer, you see, so it I.

Speaker 1: 34:03

I didn't want to just to abandon my staff to people who didn't know what they were doing. Um, so there was. There's an element of that too as well. So I thought there was the right buyer for us, the right way for our staff. These, you know, and also the offer was was good, it was all up front. There was no, there was no um. You know earn outs and I know plenty of people had sold businesses with earn outs and they never get the earn outs. Um, because people either are incompetent who buy it and they never get into position to pay their net, or the units are so hard to get that the design never to get. So it was all. It was nice and simple.

Speaker 1: 34:37

It was the middle of covid which did that come and did that play a part of thinking? You know, it was a time of uncertainty. Maybe this just gives us a large element of uncertainty, because we knew at some point we'd thought for the past 20 years we're going to sell it. You know we want to be able to sell it at some point. When's the right point going to? You never know when the right point is going to be um, but it was just it, just yeah. So the stars aligned, it just seemed like the right thing to do and, you know, it was straightforward enough, even though the the, the legal document that we went through, was was was like war and peace, it's like that thick um and took a lot of going through. But yeah, no, it all worked out and yeah, and and it it just completed no problems and it all handed over fine. Yeah, and it's all been fine Since then.

Speaker 1: 35:23

How they've done, I don't know, because you know, as soon as it was gone, we lost visibility of all metrics, all sales data, all those kind of things. You know, and I keep an eye on some of the things, some of the rankings they've got, and they've had their ups and downs. You know, like, say, you have your core updates, I I don't know exactly how they've done or how they haven't done. They have what they have done, um, because if you go to the site now, it's nothing like when I run it, because they decided um, obviously, after, after about three years, they ran them separately and then last year I noticed that they'd actually merged them together. So they've now got more of the broadband genie, um platform and branding, but they've put it on the broadbandcouk domain name, so they kind of merged the sites together and the stuff on there.

Speaker 1: 36:12

That's still content. I've. I wrote years ago but it's all been, you know, redesigned and and put in and they've got plenty of other content on there as well. So, um, but I mean they're still operating fine and you know, I still see that you know the company on LinkedIn. I've not spoken to the guys that bought it off us for for quite a while, um, because but I'm assuming they're all still happy.

Speaker 1: 36:32

I'm still happy so yeah, but it's one of those things like but you can't have to when you, when you sell something, you can't have too many what-ifs, because you just drive yourself crazy. Um, so you just have to say right, that's a decision we made, we move on that's brilliant.

Speaker 2: 36:46

So good custodians for your, for your, for your baby, uh, the right price, the right time, a perfect wrap-up, I think, to an awesome story, ed. Uh, okay, let's, uh, let's, leave broadband behind us for now. Then, uh, you mentioned that you had a couple of other sites on the go at the time. Uh, are they still?

Speaker 2: 37:02

going um, are you currently working actively on on anything else and do you think that the model that you were so successful with with broadband is still a viable model for people looking to start a business now, or would you advise against that?

Speaker 1: 37:20

right, okay, quite a few questions there. Yeah, so we've still got the sites. Um, and you know, my tactics always been with sites. I'm, I'm a builder, I like building things, I like starting things. If I have one problem it is finishing things, probably sometimes taken to the natural conclusion, but I've built like in real life, like I'll build things, like you know I'll, you know I'll, I'll, I'll, I'll, always built this house. You know renovated houses and stuff, you know, and we live on a farm. We bought a farm a few years ago and that's always work there.

Speaker 1: 37:48

It was building. What he's doing there, you know we've got, we've got horses and there's always something he's building for them. I build stuff. It's the same with the web. I will just build, build, build. We'll start and launch things and we'll see if they work. So we built lots of sites that didn't work. You know I'm my hit rate is probably about 20 to 30 percent. We build something. Probably 20 30 percent of them work and start to, you know, generate income for us. So I'm a bit more scattergun approach, throw stuff at the wall, see what sticks. But I always try and use the same, similar principle it's got to be date, you know, it's got to be around some kind of data. It would be called programmatic. You know, nowadays people call it programmatic.

Speaker 1: 38:23

I like stuff that's programmatic, but to me it's just database driven it's taking data and then letting the website build itself from that, okay, so, yeah, so so we still do that. We obviously built keywords people use, use and all the tools around that, and we've got some other tools in the pipeline that we're working on and we're going to launch um and we're also now um heavily researching in ai and we've got loads of great ideas for how to do stuff with ai. Uh, none that I want to say. Yeah, we're definitely going to do this, because we've got about three strong ideas or what that we're sort of researching how to do them, but it's all about monetizing them. But with the AI thing, we're trying not to just take an idea and bolt AI on, which is a lot of people seem to be doing, like you know, ai being a buzzword. Actually, we're actually trying to find things that you could only do with AI or are only scalable with AI, rather than just taking an existing tool and then bolting some ai on the side, which we did a little bit with keywords people use. We bolted some ai stuff on the side of it which you know, in all honesty, are not the core parts of that product and the bits that were kind of slowly deprecated off the side because they weren't really doing what you wanted to do, just got a bit caught up in the hype, um. But yes, we're doing a lot of research about fundamentally how to build ai agents at the very core level, not just using um, because we do use like no code stuff like nan I know you like you, use nan as well and you can do some fantastic stuff with it and it's great on a personal level. But we're obviously trying to look at building some tools that we can scale up, that other people can use. So, because there's going to be lots of people out there who are less techie, who aren't going to be the ones that will build their no code version. There are there are things like this plenty of small businesses out there, like plumbers, like florists, like hairdressers, like pubs, that where they you could incorporate ai into their workflows in a way that would help them and help improve their productivity and help improve their businesses. But they don't want to be setting up any end workflows. They want they want to buy an off-the-shelf service that will do the thing for them. So we're look, we're trying to find opportunities like that and I think there's a lot of opportunity there.

Speaker 1: 40:27

Um, when it comes back to the affiliate world and whether people can, whether affiliate still works, yes, affiliate will still strongly work, but you've got to have a good product in front of it. Affiliate like display, like the sort of display advertising model of you know, I will I'll write a blog about xyz put display ads on. That's pretty much dead now and I can't say you know, and ai overviews is killing that. But on the affiliate side, there is still monetization opportunities. If you build something that cannot be replicated in an AI overview, that is based on data that is not easily available, that you've got to pull together or find sources and aggregate data sets together. It's with these things. If you can combine multiple things together, that's the opportunity to build something new. So you don't have to reinvent the wheel completely. You just have to bring some sources together that aren't in one place already and then go from there. So's definitely it's still an option, but this, like with all things, it's always challenging to build anything new and to get traction.

Speaker 2: 41:24

That's probably the harder bit so we um with keywords people use, then obviously that's the idea of that. Is is for content, um and so. So you still think that content can can drive drive traffic and affiliate sales if it's being monetized with affiliate. But you think it needs to be in some form of aggregation of data that's been put together in a useful way that is behind that content. Is that what you're saying?

Speaker 1: 41:54

Yeah, well, it depends what your ultimate outcome is. Okay. So if you want to be an affiliate yes, you've got it you've got to aggregate people to detect it, so that you aggregate data so you can send people to the next destination. Right, that's what. That's your job as an affiliate. Okay, so you've got to educate, aggregate and then forward them onto the right place. But if you are a but not everyone wants to be an affiliate you know you might be the merchant and you want to get people directly. Okay, so you're, you want, you're looking for customers.

Speaker 1: 42:22

Okay, so this seo is still going to work in the ai world because, fundamentally, people want to. If people want to purchase something, they can't purchase it off the ai. You know the ai isn't going to fulfill them a product. You know. That's why there's always going to be e-commerce. There's always going to be um, you know, service providers of various things. Okay, where there is a product to be bought.

Speaker 1: 42:44

Okay, so in that case, you're going to care less about the volume of traffic. You're going to care more about the quality of traffic. Okay, because fundamentally, the people that matter to you most of your customers. There's no point having a,000 people come to your e-commerce site and only three of them buy. Ok, you'd much rather have 500 people come and they all buy. That's you've got a better site and a better strategy for that, ok. So that's that's going to be the importance in quality.

Speaker 1: 43:11

So you've still got to have that content. You've still got to demonstrate to the LLMs, to the search engines. Got to demonstrate to this, the llms, to the search engines. You've got to be the thing that's popping as the place that they will refer when people are getting to the purchasing decision point. And to do that, you still have to have all the content. You might find that content is taken by the llm or the ai overview and served up, but it's referencing you and you will eventually be the place where people come to. So it's going to be more important about attracting the quality of people less than the numbers of people. So that that's something that's not going to change and that's why it's important to build that topical authority. It's a term I'm not. Topical authority can be. Some people like the term, some people hate it. There's arguments about whether what it is or what it isn't. But fundamentally, if you build enough of a corpus of content around a topic and specialize around that topic, you will start to get noticed by the search engines eventually and you will get noticed by the people which will drive the links, which will drive all the other things which will drive you up the rankings you you like. So if you haven't got content, no matter how much of anything else you throw at it, you won't rank. You still need something for people to land on and you have to work at what that is.

Speaker 1: 44:15

And and going back to Broadband, at KUK, that was all about answering people's questions about broadband 20 years ago and the key thing is to discover what the questions people are asking and you need help to do that. Back in the day, it was all off our own head, off the questions people were asking us, and as more and more sources of that data started to appear, that's when we started to scrape it and use it and have that sort of drive what content we built. But it's interesting you say about it's all about content that keywords people use. I was in. I did a podcast interview the other day with one of our customers who's had a fantastic journey of growth from a startup that they started last year, and then I got him on to talk about the journey and how it's used keepers people use and I thought it would all be all about the content, but actually he said it's driven their strategy as much as it's driven their content because they discovered the big questions people were asking. They weren't the ones they thought they were. They discovered that there's whole areas around they do solar financing. They found whole areas around the solar financing that that they didn't realize people needed help with and they developed products around that, yeah, that are now helping them grow the business.

Speaker 1: 45:22

So he was saying we've actually yeah, he was saying we should sell this to startups as a market research thing and this guy he'd had funding before. He was bootstrapping now but previously, previous life, he'd got like I think it was several million pounds worth of funding to create, um, uh, fintech products and they'd spent hundreds of thousands on market research. That proved to be wrong to burn all the money and the company went bust and he said what you got people use for, you know, just, you know like 30 a month if giving him better market research than he'd had of paying hundreds of thousands to market research company. So I'm not saying we could do that for everybody, but it was an interest. It was a really interesting take to see how he was using that question data not just to drive his content, also to drive his strategy and the clues in the name as well.

Speaker 1: 46:09

Keywords people use it's keywords people are using, which is if they're searching.

Speaker 2: 46:13

If they're asking, then they are taking questions from your either existing or potential customers.

Speaker 1: 46:17

So yeah, exactly.

Speaker 2: 46:20

Okay, ed, as we approach the end of the podcast, fascinating to talk to you. Really some really insightful stuff. We're super excited about AI as well. For us, I think, a really interesting part of the future of AI is going to be less about the hype around the tools themselves, like N8n is great, but Manus I just got early access to Manus recently which is one of these deep search tools and they're coming out left, right and center and I think the technology is changing so quickly.

Speaker 2: 46:52

For us, what we're interested in is not necessarily how to build these things, um, but how to come up with ideas of what you should build and you touched on that a little bit as well with, like, plumbers or other businesses, like everybody knows that they or thinks they should be using ai um, but less about like, okay, you can do this in crazy you you know multi agent workflow in N8N that does this, this and that, but actually what can you actually do with AI that's going to benefit your business, either make you more money, save you more time. So I think it's a really interesting space and I'll be really interested to see those three big ideas that you that you touched on and we'll definitely have you back on as well, just as we wrap up.

Speaker 1: 47:34

Then, future of of ai google uh, any tidbits I would say I think google's going to be around a lot longer than some people are predicting. Okay, I would take it back to if you remember, those of us old enough from the yellow pages where, back in the day before google, you wanted a service provider. You went to the yellow pages which had all your local businesses in and the optimization for that was to call yourselves Aardvark plumbers, because you had AA and it was alphabetical order. That only recently stopped being produced as a print version, about four or five years ago, and it still exists online. But it took a long time for people to stop using Yellow Pages. Even when Google was there, there was something far superior. I think you're going to find that there was good. There's.

Speaker 1: 48:21

A whole load of the population are going to be using google for a long time because they don't want to switch. They don't understand how to switch. They don't want to pay for a different service. Now google may look different, but I think google's dominance is so ingrained, like the other pages was. I think it's going to take longer than people think for it to move on. But that's not to say that you shouldn't get into the AI stuff. I use ChatGPT all the time, claude, all the time you know, if you're a power user, it's incredibly valuable. You'll see that, but many consumers you'll still see on Google for a long time. So I think that the death of Google is, at this point, premature.

Speaker 2: 48:55

I agree, and I think especially for local businesses. Like you're a data man, you've talked about data a number of times in this podcast. The data that they have behind their maps is, you know, it's going to be very difficult for anyone to replicate that and I think they're just sitting on so much data. But yeah, we'll see. I still use Google if I want to find certain things. I think search habits have changed. As opposed to there'll be a mass exodus from any given platform, I just think there'll be a like, a multiple approach to different platforms and people will search with for what suits that particular search need. But it is very, it is moving very, very quickly. It's like you wake up in the morning and you're like, oh, these new things come out. That just blows what came out yesterday out of the water and it's almost impossible to keep up with, but it is exciting.

Speaker 1: 49:45

Yeah, yeah, definitely, definitely. We live in interesting times, that's for sure.

Speaker 2: 49:49

Yeah, ed, it's been amazing to have you on. If people want to connect with you, obviously you've got keywordspeopleusecom if they want to look at that, but where can they find you, your podcast or YouTube?

Speaker 1: 50:03

yeah, podcast, just search for SEO, it's not that hard. Look for the bald guy. And then yeah, so that's the podcast. Find me on LinkedIn Ed Dawson. Ed is with 2D, so it's E-D-D Dawson, but just yeah, more active days, if you want to connect is with two d's, so it's edd awesome, but just yeah awesome ed thank you so much for for coming on thanks for listening.

Speaker 1: 50:29

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 mentioned here in the show notes. Just remember, with all these places where I use my name, that ed is spelled with two d's. You can find me on linkedin and blue sky. Just search for ed dawson on both. 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 keywords people usecom, where we can help you discover the questions and keywords people asking online, plus those questions of keywords into Thank you, refine your content and targeted, personalised 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.