Speaker 1: 0:52

Hi, ed Dawson here, and, as I'm a bit busy at the moment and need a break, welcome to another one of my best of SEO is not that hard podcasts. These are the episodes from the back catalog that I think have the greatest hits and ones that are still relevant and provide great value for you. So, without further ado, let's get into the episode. Hello and welcome to. Seo is not that hard. I'm Ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordsPeopleUsecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. I'm an affiliate marketer, seo, and I've been building and monetizing websites for over 20 years. I've built sites from the ground up, bought sites and sold sites in large exits. I'm here to share with you the SEO knowledge, hints and tips I've built up over the years. Today, I'm going to talk about farming lessons for SEO. Today, I'm going to talk about farming lessons for SEO.

Speaker 1: 1:41

What you may not know about me, as well as being an SEO affiliate marketer, owner of a software as a service business and all the online work that I've done for the past 20-30 years, is that I'm also, on the side, a farmer. Now, this is newer to me than the online stuff. About five years ago, me and my family, we bought a farm and that's because we're not interested in lamborghinis and all those kind of trappings or expensive watches and that kind of thing that you see lots of people talk about. What we're, we're interested in the passion as a. Our passion as a family is horses. Um, my wife and my daughters really into horses. They compete them and they show them. They do all sorts of things with horses. And if you have horses you either got to pay to have them live at someone else's farm or you buy your own farm, and it made much more sense in the long run for us to invest in a farm. So this meant that five years ago we bought a neglected, run down old farm that was in complete need of renovation and bringing back to life. So along the way I've learned a lot and there's actually lots of things with farming that actually tie in nicely and give lessons to SEO.

Speaker 1: 3:00

The first lesson long-term mindset is what you need with farming, the same as with SEO. You need patience. There are no quick fixes in farming, just like SEO, you need to plant seeds and wait for them to grow. And with farming it's quite literal you plant seeds, you wait for the crop to grow. Whatever that crop is. Our main crop on our farm is grass, because we're a grassland farm. It's all pasture. So when we bring in new areas into grass, we have to plant those seeds and then wait. Same with SEO. You have to plant your content and then wait. Same with SEO you have to plant your content. You have to build your content, plant it on your website and then wait for the traffic to grow.

Speaker 1: 3:43

So there's a real analogy there as in. You've got to have that kind of long term mindset. You've got to think long term. You can't achieve everything at once. Everything that you do achieve is going to take time to take effect. That's the number one first lesson.

Speaker 1: 3:55

The second lesson is always invest in the right tools for the job. When we first took on the farm, we had overflowing ditches, we had all sorts of problems and I went out there because when we first got it I had no. I had no equipment, no tools, and I went out with just a spade and me and started trying to dig things out. And when you're doing just a small job, say in a back garden, that that's the right tool for the job, but when you've got acres and acres of land, it is not the right tool for the job and you're going to get nowhere fast with it and all you're going to do is tie yourself out, not do a good job and not sort the problem. So that's when it became clear we needed to buy the right thing. So, in the case of a farm, that was diggers, that was tractors, that was mowers, that was rollers all the equipment you need for managing that land. But the same thing works with seo you need the right tools to be able to do your job. So that would be analytics tools, that would be keyword research tools, that would be having the right things to do the heavy lifting for you, so that you don't have to spend your time, like me, in a ditch with a spade trying to sort a problem out with the wrong tool, just wasting time making it back-breaking when using the right tools makes life easier, makes you more efficient and means that you get to where you want to be far quicker than any other way.

Speaker 1: 5:10

Lesson three is to outsource. Now, seo has a lot in common with farming when it comes to there's lots of jobs. There's lots of things that need to be done to build a website and to market a website, just like there's many things that you need to do to build and create a farm and keep it running, and there are some jobs that are just so specialist that it is not worth trying to do it yourself. So an example on the farm is hedge cutting. That's quite specialist. It requires specialist equipment and for the size of your farm most farms it doesn't justify having someone specialising in that or having that equipment that you only use for a week or so a year. That's when it makes sense to outsource those specialist jobs to people who is their sole expertise and their sole focus, because they'll do it quicker and cheaper and provide you a better result than if you try and do it yourself. So know when to outsource those real specialist jobs.

Speaker 1: 6:06

And the second thing is, know when to outsource real routine jobs, stuff where it doesn't suit you to spend your time doing it. So those are. Those are jobs that are manual, that can't be automated, that need to be done regularly. So with our farm we have the mucking out of the horses, which needs to be done every day and it's a task that's time-consuming but it's not overly specialist. It's an expensive thing to outsource. So it makes more sense for us to employ someone to come in and do that on a regular basis to free up our time to do other things. And in seo it could be employing a va to do those kind of manual tasks that you're doing regularly in your business but aren't complicated or specialist enough that it really deserves your time to be doing it. It's just the thing you can create a standard operating procedure for someone else to do. So that's the two types of outsourcing the real specialist stuff and the real routine stuff.

Speaker 1: 7:01

Fourth, we have automate wherever you can. Now an example we have from the farm was when we first took the farm on to get water to all the fields for the animals. It needed to be done manually. We needed to literally fill buckets with water, fill boughs with water and take them and keep troughs filled up, which was, you know, that was a real annoying task. That had to be every day. That was really time consuming, so we automated it. What we did is we tapped a spring on the farm, we laid several kilometers of pipes and piped up water troughs all over the farm so that now water automatically gets spread all the way around the farm. All the animals can always get water and we don't have to now move water around all day long. And that automation it took a bit of time to put in place and there was an investment to put in place, but it now means we're completely freed up from doing that and we can.

Speaker 1: 7:53

We can spend time on other tasks. The same with SEO and websites. Wherever you can automate, do so, whether it's automating uptime monitoring, making sure that your website's up, you can automate that. You can automate email responses, so if someone signs up with a lead magnet and then you might put them on an auto-response sequence, emails them with tips of how to use your website or how to use your tool Anywhere where you can do it. If you find yourself doing repetitive tasks. If it's something that can be automated, then get it automated, because it will free up time for you to do much more valuable things in the future, at the same time as keeping everything operating smoothly.

Speaker 1: 8:31

Fifth, we have regular maintenance beats clearing up long-term neglect. So when we took our farm on, as I said, it had been neglected for some years, so it meant that we had to do a lot of work to clear up that neglect and that is bringing the hedgerows back into a well-cared-for condition. That was looking after farm tracks, fixing those up. That was things like stable blocks and barns which were essentially almost falling down because they'd not been maintained. It's the same with a website. You can put a website up, but if you don't maintain that content, don't keep it up to date, don't keep it fresh, don't keep adding new content, don't look after a website, then over time it will decay, its traffic will decay and the longer you leave something, the much more work it becomes to recover it towards the end, to the point where, if you're not careful, you'll destroy all value. So that's why regular maintenance and regular maintaining sites is so much better than trying to deal with long-term neglect.

Speaker 1: 9:33

The sixth lesson is look for mentors. So you really need to find someone who you can get mentorship from, whether that's direct mentorship where you talk to them, or mentorship where you just, you know, take it as a third party listening, say, listening to podcasts and things like that. But it's really, really valuable to get the experience and knowledge of people who've been there and done that, and with our farm, we found it invaluable the advice and support that we've been given by our neighbouring farmers. You know, we came into farming knowing very little about actually what to do. And having those, those, those neighbours, who've been able to mentor us and help us make decisions and help us learn how to actually do the job of looking after a farm and keeping a farm, has been absolutely invaluable, and without them we would have made so many mistakes. They're great for you know sometimes just how, what to do how to look after pasture, how to deal with weeds, how to look after fencing, how to look after hedging, how to look after animals, and also for making sure we don't make mistakes and go down the wrong place, for giving us contacts if we needed specialist jobs doing who are the contacts, who are the best people to talk to for this? And that's why having mentors in whatever sphere of work you're doing, is absolutely invaluable.

Speaker 1: 10:49

And the seventh and final essay is that hard work pays off. But you've got to do the hard work, and that is you know these things, while maybe not difficult individually, you can't just put minimum effort in and expect maximum reward. You've really got to dedicate yourself to the task in hand and get on and do it. It's the same with a farm. It's the same with a website. If you just chuck up one website, quickly leave it and forget about it, then it's the same with a website. If you just chuck up one website quickly, leave it and forget about it, then it's not going to bring you the rewards you want. And it's the same with farming. You can't just go and do it half-heartedly. You've got to put the time, the effort in, directed in the right places to get those results. The same with SEO, the same with websites Do the hard work to get the results you need.

Speaker 1: 11:37

Thanks for listening. I really appreciate it. Please subscribe and share. It really helps. Seo is not that hard. It's brought to you by KeywordsPeopleToUsecom, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day. Try it today for free at KeywordsPeopleToUsecom. If you want to get in touch, have any questions, I'd love to hear from you. I'm at Channel 5 on Twitter or you can email me at podcast at keywordspeoplesusecom. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SEO is Not that Hard.