Hey listener, Ed here. You're about to listen to a timeless handpick classic from the STO Is Not That Hard archive. Whether it's your first time hearing it or you need a refresher, you're going to get a lot out of this. Here it is. Hello and welcome to STO Is Not That Hard. I'm your host, Ed Dawson, the founder of KeywordPupleUsed.com, the solution to finding the questions people ask online. In today's episode, I'm going to cover the story of broadband.co.uk and how we created, ran and exited the site over the course of 18 years and the ups and downs along the way. So in the previous episode, I discussed how I got into SEO when I was working at a digital agency and was told it was now my job to be the SEO expert, so even though I didn't know much about SEO at the time, I had to learn quite quick. The next part in the journey was uh launching broadband at Codia UK and how we went on to build it into one of the leading broadband comparison sites in the UK. Well let's step back to the beginning. So the company I worked for at the time was called Broadband Communications. And um at the time broadband meant nothing. Then around about 2004, broadband came to be uh mean home internet uh delivered via broadband. So of course that meant with our site website being broadband.co.uk for the agency, people started contacting us asking to get broadband installed, which we obviously didn't do. Um this became more of a problem with more people contacting. So the decision was made to rebrand the agency. With this decision made, it now meant what do we do with the domain name broadband.co.uk, which obviously was now developed some value what with broadband becoming uh a new technology. Now Fiona, who was one of the directors at the time and is now actually my wife since 2007, um, had the idea of creating a comparison site to compare broadband providers side by side, which was quite a new idea at the time. Comparison sites are you know very common now, but back then it was quite a novel idea. Um, but we had then had a question of how to monetize it, and that was where we discovered affiliate marketing. We'd kind of been aware of affiliate marketing beforehand as the agency because we had clients who um had affiliates working for them, so we'd we knew it was a kind of a thing, but we we were it was still quite new to us, so um that became the plan a comparison site comparing broadband providers and then monetising with affiliate commissions. So we built what was in hindsight quite a basic website that did actually cover um the majority of the major broadband suppliers that were available at the time, and we managed to find an API that we could hook hook up to that gave us availability um area by area because at the time broadband wasn't necessarily available everywhere, um, so it was a nice little tool that just let you put your postcode in and you could check whether broadband was available in your area, so that was quite neat. But the rest of the content was was still quite basic. I mean, to be fair, broadband itself was quite basic that then, so there wasn't a lot to say. So we got this site built, and then there's obviously the case of how we're going to get traffic to it. Um now the previous site when it was an a web agency was just about the web agency, there was nothing about the technology broadband, so you know that it wasn't really getting any natural traffic. Um, now on the agency side, we'd done quite a lot of PPC, not something I'd done myself personally, but we've got like um paid marketing consultants um on one side of the agency, and so they they took it um and ran with running it as PPC, which obviously gathered traffic, um, but it was very hard, very, very hard to make it turn a profit. Um, you know, the the margin was very small and it needed a lot of money um relative to the size of the agency we were at the time to actually be able to um you know get the traffic and and make a profit. Um so actually what really happened was it just ended up making a slight loss all the time. So, with the fact that it was making this loss, most of the um people involved uh started to lose interest because obviously the um the website was owned by all the partners of the agency. Um whereas myself and Fiona we were looking at it and we could see that the um SEO traffic, organic traffic was starting to pick up slightly, and that that side was actually starting to generate sales by itself. So we could see that there was maybe an opportunity here to to ditch the PPC and concentrate purely on organic, and that then it might be able to turn a profit. So we approached the other partners and offered to buy the site out from them, um, and they were they were more than happy to do this, and uh so price was agreed and we bought it out, and at that point I actually decided to leave the agency myself and concentrate on broadband at Code.uk full-time. So yeah, we packed up the PPC and I concentrated purely on improving the on-page and off-page SEO, um, creating a lot of content, um, trying to improve the functionality of the site, make it um a lot more in-depth in what it covered, um, and yeah, really working on on building that traffic and turning it profitable, which it actually did. We you know, we turned the PPC off and immediately went profitable on a small scale. At the time, I wasn't really paying myself anything, um, a very minimal amount. I paid myself, and the the key thing we wanted to do was to pay back the debt that we had to take on to um buy the website out, and we did that within I think in about six to eight months. We actually we'd actually paid all the debt off, um, and were actually starting to um put money in the bank, so that was really, really good. So we were our actual play uh worked out and we we became purely construct SEO, um, and it got to the point within a couple of years where we could actually build a small team around it. So I had another developer come in to help, um, and you know, we could we could get our designers looking at it to get the better design, um, and yeah, you know, it was it we we built a nice little business out of this. Um, but obviously, when it came to SEO back in sort of the mid to late 2000s, um I'd say it was probably a little less cut and dried compared to now as to where the boundaries of white hat, grey hat, black hat were, especially when it came to link building. And you know, at the time we did lots of you know paid link buying um and uh link campaigns that nowadays would be considered really spammy, things like um forum um posts, um blog commenting, uh so we commented on blogs where the blog would give you a bat link and you could put the bat link in, um, and you know, literally out and out buying links on other you know, for many years. Well, Google had started to say this was not acceptable and they would penalise it, they they didn't really have the capability to do it. So everyone, all our competitors, pretty much were all buying links, and if you wanted to compete, you had to buy links. Now, obviously, Google, as we now know, advanced their capabilities quite a lot, and then uh you know, we started to see penalties in the you know, algorithmic penalties come in. We first got hit by panda in 2011, and that was where some of the content that we'd done that was quite thin, which worked to attract traffic, um, all of a sudden didn't. So we were getting hit by panda, and that was obviously not affecting the the thin content, um, it it was affecting other parts of the site as well. So we started to see a dip in traffic, and it wasn't terrible, but it was noticeable. But then the worst was to come when in uh April 2012 we got hit by penguin, and we went from ranking number one for the term broadband in the UK to I think we showed up at position 900 and something, and we literally lost 99% of our Google traffic overnight. Now, we were lucky for a couple of reasons, but at the time Bing still drove a bit more traffic than it possibly does now in Yahoo. We were also getting a reasonable amount of direct type-in traffic. Um so you know it we lost, I say 99% of Google, which translated to about 70% overall of our traffic, but you know, that was that was huge, um, and it put us in a really, really awkward position. Um, luckily, we'd built up reserves so cash flow while it was negative, we could we had some runway to keep going for a bit, but we had to immediately completely reconsider our entire strategy. We had to completely think about what we did for content and also what to do about link building, all these toxic links we'd now got and been penalised for, and yeah, it was a case of you know, I really didn't know what to do. It was it was it was such a big problem, and I just felt completely stuck. Now, this was the point that our knight in shining armor appeared. Um, a guy called Carl Hendy, who was um an SEO freelancer at the time. I'd met um at some SEO meetups I've been to a few years earlier, and we'd just kept in touch. Um, he'd been working for um an SEO agency called AIMA, and at this point he was working for himself, and he just got in touch to say, I noticed that uh your website's been hit, and I was like, Yeah, big time. Um, I have no idea what we're gonna do. And he just said, Well, maybe I can help, and we had a chat, he suggested some ideas, and in the end, we just you know hired him to completely look at the problem for us, and he um came up with a complete new um strategy and page designs for our content um to help with the issues we'd have with panda, and he also helped with the disavow process um to sort of get rid of all the toxic links we'd got and all the um all the reconsideration requests that we put into um Google to get that penguin penalty lifted. Now it took some time, um you know these things don't get fixed overnight, but it actually worked. You know, Carl's recommendations and his help basically pulled us out of that hole, and it took a few months. Um, but we started. I remember the first thing that started to come back was the review pages where we had pages where we reviewed broadband providers and let other people um put in their their reviews, and that was one of the first areas that we redesigned based on his recommendations, and that started to pull in traffic again, um, and then over time, more and more areas of the site that we worked on started to pull in more and more traffic, and it got to the point where um when we regained our rankings, we actually we get gained more rankings, our actual traffic went up by a factor over the next couple of years by a factor of about five or six. So his advice and what we learned from him was absolutely phenomenal. So, all I can say is thank you, Carl, you are amazing. So, with the content strategy working and fixed and um panda not being an issue, and we obviously, as I mentioned, we got did all the reconsideration requests for Penguin, we did a lot, a lot of outreach asking people to remove toxic links where we could, um, and then obviously to survive the ones that weren't available. Then you know, we just looked at this and we're like, we are never ever ever gonna do that kind of link buying again, it's just not worth the hassle. Um, we need something that is a lot more sustainable, um, and this is where we went, which we just made the decision, we were just gonna rely completely on natural links from now on. Um, I know there's a lot of people in the SEO world that say you know, if you don't buy links, then you're not competing. If you don't buy links, then you're never gonna rank. Um it's just not true. I mean, it it can work, buying links can work, buying links can help you rank, but it comes with risks, and you need to appreciate those risks. And you know, we'd built something up to a proper business. We had employees that relied on us, you know, we got mortgages, things like that. You know, we got commitments, we we couldn't just risk that on chasing short-term gains, so we decided that's it, we're gonna go on the completely natural route, and we're just gonna make sure that we build a site that naturally attracts links, and that's what we've done, and that's what we did ever since uh 2012. And you can go look at that backlink history if you can you can use any of the tools, the backlink checker tools, you can see the kind of links that um it's built up, that site has built up over time, and they're all completely natural. It means it's whenever you know Google says it's gonna crack down on on links or core updates where they're cracking down on links, those kind of things. We've come through them without having to worry quite so much. I mean, I wouldn't say we never worried at a core update, everyone always worries that there's something in a core update that's gonna get you, but at least we knew that links was one thing we didn't have to worry about. And um, yeah, I think we're living proof that you know that that can work, and we've done that with all our other sites we've launched since. We've always relied on natural linking, we've never gone out there to buy links because the risk just isn't worth it, and it actually makes you build better sites if you decide you know I've if I'm gonna only get links naturally, I've really got to work at this, we've really got to make sure that we put out it's good, otherwise, people won't link to it. So, with our Pandora and Penguin issue sorted, our link building being all natural, um, you know, we just continue to own and operate the site for the next uh few years, and over time we generated millions in sales for the broadband providers and we made millions in commissions, so you know we were very, very happy with it, but there was still a nagging doubt. Um, you know, you've been hit once, um, means all your eggs are in one basket, as it was, you know. And I was also had the nagging doubt, you know, was I a one-trick pony? Was you know what someone might say is well, with a domain name like that, then obviously you're gonna be able to do really well. So we started in I think it was 2016 to divert diversify into other uh affiliate sites, um, not based on premium domain names, um, not based on any dodgy link buying, um, but just seeing if we could repeat the formula of excellent content, excellent experiences, um, but in other niches, and um yeah, it worked, like I say, it was maybe a little bit slower necessarily than if we just you know if we tried to do anything a bit more dodgy, but again, we wanted this to be something defensible and long term, um, and with that diversification, obviously also improved our income, but it also meant that all our eggs were no longer in one basket, so again, it helps you sleep easier at night. And I know some people say you should only concentrate on one thing and just go for the one thing and don't try and diversify. Um, but maybe those people who are given that advice are the people that did that and have never had any issues. Um, trust me, if once you've had issues, it's once bitten twice shy, you want to make sure that you've got a backup that there's something there, if something goes wrong with your main income, that you've got another income on the side. So, anyway, but this this fact that we're diversified also meant that we didn't rely on broadband at credit UK anymore, which meant that actually we didn't need to hold on to it to keep our income. We could actually, if we wanted to, sell the asset, which is something that we discussed now and again, but we never actually put it on the market because we had no real need to. Now, fast forward to 2021, we actually um got approached via our old friend Cole Hendy, who helped us out in the first place. Um, he um made an intro to a company called Gini Ventures. Now we knew Genie Ventures uh a little bit because they ran another um broadband comparison website in the UK, and they're very familiar with our sector uh and everything that we're doing, so they actually turned out to be um a really good potential um sale partner, and after lots of discussions and lots and lots of legals, um we actually eventually sold them in an all-cash deal in uh summer 2021, just over two years ago. Uh I can't reserve real the exact details due to confidentiality agreements that come along with these things, um, but you know, we we definitely got a deal that we were happy with um and allowed us to take a good chunk of money off the table while still having our other sites um providing us with a nice stable income. Um, so you know, I mean, all success to the guys at um Broadband Genie and Genie Ventures. You know, they're still operating the site, it still looks very similar to what it did when we owned it. Um they've you know they've I'm sure they've done some tweaks. I'm not completely sure uh on all the different things they've done, but yeah, that they seem happy. Um, and you know, it's still ranking really well. Um, you know, it still ranks really well on loads of competitive terms, so it's great to see that. Um, and it was great to to have that exit and um you know make room for other ventures. So, what do we do post exit? Well, like I say, we still operate our other affiliate sites, and you know, we've grown those, uh worked on those and added um some extra sites since then. Um I've also allowed us to spend more time uh renovating the farm that we bought. We bought that previous, it wasn't we didn't buy the farm because of the sale, but yeah, we were halfway through renovating uh this farm, and it allowed me for time to uh work on managing that and and getting that done. There's probably stuff I'll talk about more of that in the future. Um, but the main thing that we've we've done since then is we've um uh launched keywordspeople to use.com, who obviously sponsors this podcast because that's our business, and um it was really given us the time and the space to build that based upon the systems and processes we set up to build and rank content with broadband code.uk and our future sites. Now I'm not gonna go into full details about what keywords people use does right now, um, because this isn't an advert for it, um, and it's too there's too much in there to to sort of get in in this episode. I want this episode to be about the broadband code.uk story. Um, but obviously this is where it ends because if it wasn't for Broadbonnet UK being sold, then we wouldn't have been in the position to have the time and energy to launch keywords people use. So it's just worth mentioning at the end here. Hopefully that's given you uh a good flavour of where we came from, the story of um how we accidentally really ended up starting a comparison website, working out how to monetize it, how to make it profitable, taking it on by ourselves, um how we got out of the problems caused by Google to us, um, and the help that we got from that, and and how we then turned that around, diversified, and then ultimately exited um the business, and how it's given us a runway for future things. Thanks for listening, I really appreciate it. Please subscribe, share, it really helps. SGO is not that hard, it's brought to you by keywordspeopleuse.com, the solution to find the questions people ask online. See why thousands of people use us every day, try it today for free at keywordspeopleuse.com. If you want to get in touch or 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 keywordspeopleuse.com. Bye for now and see you in the next episode of SGO Is Not That Hard.