The Digital Marketing Strategy You Need to Transform Your Business

Oh aimes good afternoon how we doing I'm very well thank you Matt and thank
you for having me on the show oh it's great to have you here appreciate you taking the time to talk to us in this in this very odd season that we're finding
ourselves in has it how's it going for you [Music] 's is a challenge through the fives
is definitely a challenge yet yeah absolutely the schooling is chaotic
not a lot else to say about it really you can only imagine and you can see I've had my hair cut and the children
help me cut that with with a razor at the weekend so yeah I look at me I look
a bit odd I feel a bit odd do you see my hair I do yeah look out spikey yeah I'd
be doing that all the time no I noticed actually when you came on your hair had been been done the fact you let your kids there's nothing short
of bravery let me tell you but my hair is just is just a mop at the moment it's
just very long and I'm just waiting for the hairdresser's to open again because
I'm gonna like I did in my early s I used to have shoulder length hair and a very long time ago and there was a
reason I could it was on skype with him and when he came on I've jumped back
because he his hair has gone wild oh well you didn't I was like ooh am I
on the right Paul Brown effect going on you know the Back to the Future Doc
Brown yeah great that's great so um let's not talk about
hair I mean we could talk about her for a long time but it's probably not the best use of our time how did you get started in digital
marketing let's maybe start there okay so it's it has been a bit of a journey
so I started well I left school with no qualifications whatsoever and got into
clothes protection in the army did go out in April and I started working
of the City of London in similar roles close protection so I ended up in this
peculiar situation when you said clothes protection you're talking about in my head I'm running
bodyguard type thing is that right yeah yeah that's correct yeah well like senior officers yeah generals
ambassadors Secretary General of NATO and Staller so on so to me okay yeah
yeah quite it sounds exciting it wasn't okay probably yes yeah it's
not that excited not well you don't really want something to happen if you know I mean yeah nothing ever did happen
so nothing too exciting I mean I think one of my friends had a bomb planted a
grease car at one stage but never happened to me so it wasn't exciting to
make that there you go definitely deal with it that's for sure yeah so I ended
up at the city working for a large corporate and I found myself in this
weird position where I would drop the guy at o'clock in the morning and he'd say to me I'll see you at o'clock
tonight but I couldn't actually physically go anywhere so I thought initially I was thinking wow this is a
fantastic job I don't do anything so I spent the first two weeks sort of wandering around London looking at
museums and soon got bored and I started
to think to myself I'm not sure I could continue doing this job on you know
because he was just so boring and so because there was no car it was just so
boring Wow he was even more boring than before so anyway I thought well maybe
this is an opportunity for maybe to educate myself as I left school with nothing so I was looking around the
normal sort of degree courses and what-have-you and one of my friends turn around said why don't you get one of
those laptop things that everyone's talking about so you have to remember this is way back I said this is a while ago get one of those laptop things like
so I bought myself a laptop and I remember opening on the first day think
you know my god what am I going to do with this I can't even type and that's where I
eventually I learned to tie stipe my first business which was called internet homes the equivalent of purple
bricks today the only problem was it was about years ahead of us today yeah yeah yeah
so we had dial-up the I don't know if any of you remember the image to do take
a lot more boring and being a bodyguard but it's kind of from there I saw I went
to get website of somebody and they said yeah that's a hundred thousand pounds a hundred grand thing a website yeah that
was a standard price then and I thought to myself you know what I'm in the wrong wrong job here I'm gonna become a web
developer so I spent three years doing websites for people and suddenly realize
that actually the price of these things has to come down yeah and I was still
doing the internet home's thing at the time and doing the marketing I managed to get that website into the top
websites in the world which is virtually impossible now yeah for such a small
business but really quite excited about the whole prospect of being in the top
websites in the world and from there I ended up cut a long story short
ended up working for luxury furniture companies along the kingsroad became a
liveryman Freeman at City of London giving talks to corporations of the city
and then I opened up what's called a third-party digital agency so companies
would go to a PR marketing agency that didn't have any PR you know any digital
staff at that time and so they would outsource that to me so the only problem
with that for me was I did I came out of that having still no credibility because
of course it wasn't me that was working for SEO or BP or whatever it was the actual agency themselves so I sold that
business about but six years ago the guy that I was
working for after years suddenly said I'm gonna retire and I said okay well
I'm going to do the digital marketing so I put myself on a masters at MMU in
digital communications and that's when it suddenly dawned on me that out of a
classroom and say people in there there was only one people one or two people who who actually knew anything at
all about digital marketing they were mainly senior marketers PR marketing
people who were who wanted to learn more about digital yeah so I I actually only
did my first year because I felt that it wasn't really what I signed up for I had
assumed that if you're a master in something you'd know the basics as well
as the strategic but in reality all you're doing is applying masters level thinking to a topic which in this case
just happens to be digital communications yeah so I'm kind of feeling a little bit left my eyes I've
seen this a lot and over the years where people who who will try and teach something come in to teach something
they usually have zero experience in the real world in the topic in which they're
teaching which I've always found quite extraordinary yeah it happens a lot with
lecturing for example as you know I'm a mental now and there are quite senior
lecturers who actually come to me for training because it's everything I do is
practical it's it's actual hands-on which that's really what differentiates
me between a lot of senior marketers what you have to think is when I was you
know dropping that guy off at o'clock in the morning and picking him up at o'clock at night I had a big chunk of
time where I could sit down I could read all the books whereas a lot of digital
marketers do not have that time so what's happened is you you found
yourself you know I mean what five six years ago you could do any you could do it like a degree or
something in digital communications and so you had to learn it yourself so what
I've actually learned from that exercise was there's three groups of people in digital marketing there's people who
want to learn and train or retrain school leavers etc then you've got this middle bracket of people who are
self-taught and quite often can't even give you a simple optimization lesson
and how do you believe it some dark spooky art but nobody else can help with
right it does happen it happens a lot notice I mean it's just a digital thing isn't it let's use language that people
don't know and will keep them or keep them yeah yeah I mean there's a saying isn't there most industries if you only
have to know % more than anyone else in the room to be an expert it's very true
of some of the businesses I go into the last group of people are these people
that I found on my masters who generally speaking have no practical experience and so they spend a lot of time in
meetings again that's where the mentoring on why I painted by default
becoming a mentor was because I had a lot of senior people who were asking me
is my you know my team doing this right and so that's when I started coming up
with my own methodology etc ya know it's fascinating and a very similar story in
summary so I mean I wasn't a bodyguard but I find it fascinating some of the
crossover like with the commerce for
example one of the things I've noticed with agencies a lot of people who do agencies or who will say that they're an e-commerce agency and offer the website
always amazed me how many of them don't actually own their own e-commerce website or run their own e-commerce
because they've got the technology right at their fingertips right and so if you're commerce is as good as they say
it is and they're trying to get me to buy their system they would be using it and I always struggled with the fact
that they they weren't doing it and and the advice that they would give you or talk to you about was all head knowledge
and it wasn't it wasn't like they'd been the trenches the point where I started
using this phrase called experience based design in other words it was I need somebody out there who's got
experience in all of this that can help pose rather than someone that's just telling me from head knowledge or a book I can read the book I need to know how
it works here and here and now you know so I get that I totally get that it always amazes
me and the amount of people that are teaching stuff it on the agency front
that's quite an interesting point because what you usually find with agencies is the agency is usually good
at one specific channel so it's usually the owner of the business who is maybe
good at AdWords started their own ad word business and that means somebody said to him oh do you do SEO and he's
gone oh yeah of course we do yeah I swear that in how hard can it be and before you know it but of course
that person doesn't actually know the person that he's employing actually knows what they're doing and so it's a
bit hit-and-miss and I've seen and firsthand a lot of
horror stories which yeah I've been
quite scary for me things like you know a global retailer not mentioning names
and that hundred thousand pounds a
year for optimization and when I got in there the first thing I did was I looked at the search console to find that they
didn't even have the site Maps site maps hadn't been updated for four years which
is you know it's it's very very basic stuff so andr grand a year on this thing
and they is two years that was
pounds a year couldn't believe it and to find that the site maps are out a date they had products up on there that they
don't even sell anymore they discontinued a lot of the the products
that were actually listed in the site map so you know it's just an example
where you know it comes down to education and
again that's that's why I think the mentoring and more senior people you
know they they've got no one to ask the questions yeah they've got no one to they can't really go to their digital
marketing manager for example and ask them because they don't want to lose face that they don't know it they can't
talk to their fellow directors so who do they talk to they have to talk to somebody who's at the similar level of
experience who can say you know this is how it is and I'm generally speaking
that person because I'm at the coalface doing it own affiliate ecommerce website
by doing my testing on for example so yeah at the coalface that's where it's
now and it's actually one of the reasons we we sort of I thought well let's do
some stuff with you because I for me I always work with people that are on the front line in the coalface because you
know I I don't want to work with people where it's all theory based I I want to hear the stories I want to know how when
I'm in the trenches you've been there or you're with me too I mean it's that kind of so who are your um he you're talking
about your mentoring type thing who are your customers who do you who do you generally work with well over the last
sort of three years I've trained about sort two or three hundred businesses on
a place to face in the Buckinghamshire area and previous to that I was doing of
the City of London corporations that type of thing so I worked in a very
broad number of sectors I've worked for one-man-band accountancy businesses due
to HP Microsoft Platinum partners like ocsl through two global retailers in
pretty much every industry there isn't really an industry out there that haven't really been involved in at some
stage and you know the what this all comes down to ultimately is having a
strategy which a lot of people say they've got strategy and they don't and that
strategy comes down to data and the data in this case for everything you do
online relies on your keyword research get the keyword research wrong you
screwed right from the start is very very difficult to to come back from
guessing something so for example one of the ways I want one of my contracts was
they gave me minutes to sit in front of the board and tell them exactly what
I was going to do for them while I was there an hour and a half and at the end of it I said there's anyone have any
questions and whoever it was one of the
directors there turn around and said well the thing is we can't argue with the data when can you start
and and that's ultimately what it's about you know the data in this case is the key words and phrases that people
are actually typing into the search and then you base everything online around
that so it's all about opportunity so we're not just doing keyword research
for our keyword planner but we're also doing that throughout what was called
the predictive search terms so now more and more people are starting to ask questions so we have these Alexa things
in the house that people are talking to so you know how do you do this what is this we're all looking as marketers to
try and get this position so if you type in something like how do I fix a washer on a tap usually in a square box
quite near the top and that's position considered position and it's quite
difficult to get there and it's quite difficult to replace somebody who is actually there already
if I convert your original point you talked about yeah people say they have a strategy but not everyone does and your
strategy needs to be based on data and the data is what people are typing the keywords and the questions that people
are typing into Google absolutely and how is this
I mean we've we've put the title of your methodology on the on the on the on the board on the board you know on the on
the Facebook live and it'll go on the date you know the yeah the logic digital marketing methodology is is this what is
is this theory or that no it's not a theory is this this this revelation this
understanding that strategy has to be based on data real hard core data is that what your methodology is based on
well first of all if you consider that I've been doing digital marketing
training for a number of years but
probably last year about % of my business is actually training digital marketing agency staff and when I asked
them you know what is the strategy everyone said I you know loved a little bit and said yeah of course we've got
strategy but why I found is each department actually yes each department
has a strategy but they don't have an integrated strategy so quite often there's massive holes in the strategy in
the first place when you say that they've not got an integrated strategy what does that mean I'll say for example
the econ team will be working alone the ad word team will be doing keyword research and doing the ad words alone
the SEO team will be working alone and they'll be doing their own keyword research what I've tried to do is I've
tried to give structure to that where everything is to do the logic
methodology is about the structure of getting the site correct in the first place so the it covers three main points
which is optimization and hate advertising and then your ongoing content strategy once you've actually
got the founders optimization yeah you're awesome
out of SEO to say that again sorry his optimization is part partly SEO
yeah it's includes other things so Google looks over different
touchpoints we need to make sure that our trust points and that's part of the optimization process and what find is a
lot of the larger businesses fail to actually do the very basic stuff
and they throw a lot of money at the wall you know well at the wall as well
you know if you've got if you've got a pile of mud and throw them at the wall and some of its gonna stay yeah and so
that's the methodology that a lot of them Oh monie out it some of it works oh so the how this point was optimized
which was around around ace SEO these two hundred touch points at Googlers talk about well yeah second point of
view and the second one is the paid advertising so I think in a lot of cases
people over overcomplicated overcomplicate the ads and now you're
starting to see people trying to automate which I can't quite get my head round the paid advertising because again
it's all it all comes down to the research you can't automate the research
well well not really in it takes an element of it's a bit like you use a
phrase like cloud it's a bit like the problem with with Google so the search engine results page at the top if you
put in cloud is that cloud in the sky or is that cloud computing and so you've
got this sort of disconnect if you like so so you really need a human to look at
it to actually look at what the keywords and phrases are and think about their
business and how that would fit in with their business and whether that's a positive word or a negative word so
positive is what we want to keep obviously in use a negative keyword means something we don't want to keep
there's nothing to do with that business bar we've got to keep all the data yeah
so we've got optimized we've got paid media what was the third thing you mentioned the third one is the content
strategy so wanted yeah internal and external content strategy so once you've
mean by internal a so sorry to keep asking question I just want to make sure everyone really understands what's going on because this is where it gets
fascinating for me so what do you mean by internal and external strategy okay so you have to have an internal linking
strategy so if you're talking about think about optimization the seven points of optimization that I personally
look at so first of all I look at the URL as it comes in a permalink and a
slug second thing is the title on the page it also comes in a nest in a
kinesio title which is shown in the tab at the top so to characters in
length then you've got content on the page so this is the actual text you see yeah so I aim on a primary page so a
primary pages anything comes off a main menu I ain't for at least words to
then a meta description characters then meta keywords so I
usually put to so there's a bit of controversy amongst all this stuff and
one of them there's going to be a few people say well but Google doesn't look at that you know ultimately well they
don't look at keywords do they but do they well well the thing is they account for something like % of the traffic
what are you doing is a you're probably eliminating fruit yourself automatically from the other % who could potentially
still be using it so again seconds it takes you to put those keywords and you
just have as well do it yeah so a lot of people will say I don't bother with that yeah I do if you're using content
management system there's a space for it and fill every space so one of the spaces that's really really important
that people really just get completely wrong it's a Meta Description one
hundred and fifty two hundred and sixty characters and that shows up in the snippet so a snippet shows up in the
search engine results page and so it's really really important that we fill that out and what we're trying to do
okay so - so just to clarify this is the snippet which shows up on the search engine results page so if i go to google
and type in flamethrower yeah there's and they bring up the results i see the title en and
underneath that i see usually like two or three line description that's what you're talking about there that's the
see talking about the slug yeah and you're talking about the title you can see and
then you can see the Meta Description yeah and they are ultimately they are your adverts of the world and a lot of
people don't even consider them ya know it's Google looking at them but your potential customers are looking at those
three things and so you have to make sure that for both Google and your customer and it's yes we think
specifically you see so the slow core the URL the web address you see the
title which is the basically that's the link text isn't it's normally blue and underlined yeah that should title and
that's the first thing that people see I think I think for me when I look down the Google rankings the Google search
results the first thing I see is the title yeah and there's a lot of people make mistakes around the titles even so
we did a mistake I mean I'm gonna be you know one of the things that we talk to you about you pulled us up on here was
actually across most of the websites that we had for our company and I now understand why it was like this because
the the SEO plugin for our system defaults to putting your company name
first in the title so it would say for example George beauty company Jersey huge company slash Dermalogica skin
smoothing cream or whatever it was and you're like why would you do that why would you put your company name in the
the most important text first why why would you do that and so that's one of the big things that's changed for us
isn't it yeah so when I went to see the marketing director at Johnson & Johnson
I said to them you know you know what's the strategy at the time and they said oh we're doing a brand stretch I said
that's fine but in this space you've only got to characters so if I was
for example looking for baby lotion if I wanted a Johnson John's product I'd go
to the Johnson Johnson website and type in baby lotion I could go to Google or search engine type in Johnson Johnson
baby lotion yeah but % of the population you're just gonna type in baby lotion yeah so by using Johnson &
Johnson in that to characters you've lost half the half the text yep
yeah you selling the baby lotion or yeah answering a question or you know people
are looking for you know a service a product or to answer the question basically and so
that's what you need to give them so if you can give them exact match searches in your titles it's more likely people
are going to click on though this not in the snippet yeah totally no I know that's one of the big changes
that we made so ok so they were saying you said there were seven things that you looked at you mentioned the URL
slash slug yeah - was the title if I take up my notes correctly here James no.was the content yeah number four
was the Meta Description yeah five was meta keywords what yaks and seven six is images so every page on
your website should have an image and you'll need to use what's called the alternative text the alt text yep and
that will then the search engines cannot actually see an image so you need to
tell it what that is a picture of if that makes sense need to use the third thing to describe image so for those who
are visually impaired and they have you know page readers it actually makes sense to them yeah and the other the
other benefit for you is obviously it will come up in an image search from the search engine results page as well yeah
the last thing is an internal linking strategy so you were asking me what they
what is an internal and external strategy yeah the internal linking
strategy what you actually want is a crawler a robot so the search engines
have small programs called crawlers robots is their job to basically go into
your website click the information send it back to the search engine they're going to apply this mathematical code
this algorithm that is an unknown and
they change it slightly all the time and then they're going to apply that that
method of early algorithm to the content they found for your website which will
give you a listing in the search engine results page in the form of a snippet and so what we need to do is we need an
internal strategy for the robot so the robot or the crawlers going to come into
your site what you want to do is try and keep it on your site as long as possible so therefore you need some anchor text and
it needs to be the correct Hanks anchor text yeah so we don't want to see anything like read more or click here
because it doesn't mean anything so if you're if you're going to talk about cat food ideally that's the anchor text and
you send it to a page within your site about cat food okay so both okay so both
the link that you use on the page the link text yeah that link needs to
describe where are you ideas going to ideally and the odor that goes to needs
to match that link and both of those need to be optimized based on the data
you have put it in and yeah we're talking about these robots and these spiders they come to your website
they're going to hit this internal link they're going to see cat food they're going to go to a page there's optimized
for cat food and the search engine to go awesome so then they're going to index that page for cat food is all about relevancy and
so what's going to happen is the crawlers going to hit the anchor text gone to the next page start reading it
find more anchor text and then link in so that's part of your internal linking
strategy okay so you have it so that let's say I've got a page talking about
more stay with our example say I've got a page talking about pet food right organic pet food let's be niche organic
pet food that comes in biodegradable packaging and you know make it as an issue as we like and so I'm talking on
that page and I talked about our organic vegan cat food and then that links to a
page about my organic vegan cafe but on the primary page though the one that's
talking about pet food do I just link to the cat food one or can I link to say the dog food one as well can I have
quite a lot of different internal links or does that screw it up as long as you've got some form of internal linking
strategy of course the first thing you do before probably you even do a website
is the structure of the website needs to be correct so you go you go you do
keyword research but while I was trying to gap there was this three this three
bits of of content strategy okay so I mean so you've got the internal linking strategy
yeah and then which is generally speaking you could refer to them as secondary pages like blog posts and
that's a via and then you've got the external strategy so all this depends on
your domain Authority like all your influence school so how much trust do
you have and how many people are competing with you against you for a
particular word or phrase and so that is the only thing that's going to determine
exactly what key phrase you're going to go for and whether it's an intern or external so you you end up with doing
SEO level one then you do SEO level two but you've got to leave it to settle as
you need all these stuff about to weeks for it to settle yeah then you do
optimization level to where you're trying to match whoever's at the top yes in between one you don't want to do is
just sit there and do nothing that's where the AdWords strategy comes in and then once you've got to that point the
only thing that is gonna make one link if you like one slug I'd wanna talk
about a snippet go above another snippet for a certain keyword is your ongoing
content strategy and that's why the methodology is based around optimization
paid advertising the content strategy once you've sorted that out that's when
you can start looking at things like your email marketing for your open rates
so you know what the phrases are people are actually typing in and what they
might open open the email if you've got the right title in it so that that type
of thing is where where I'm coming from and then obviously you bring in your social media if you've done the keyword
research correctly then again you've gotta find you that you know the exact
phrases and so that's what's important okay so I think I've got it and I'm
getting there in my head anyway at least at least with the whole thing so so we're going to optimize the site
whilst that settling over a period of weeks we're going to do the paid media yeah and then we're going to come back
after about weeks and we're going to start to think about you know the second level what you call the second level of
search engine optimization so we want to see what the results are from what we did first and then see make a decision
from that point on have I got that right yeah so so what will happen is for example you might find a certain keyword
comes into the search say position and then the next thing you know it'll
disappear for two weeks and then it'll come back at and they'll might go to
and then it'll disappear for another two weeks so what a lot of
digital marketers tend to do is they start panicking because it's disappeared they're thinking oh my god I must have done it wrong they start changing again
and so is this a turning circle instead of just leaving it believing and what
you've you've initially done yeah they're changing it too quickly and the search engines and then you don't know
always their product yeah so you say you would you do the optimization you would leave it for
months and see yeah so twelve months twelve weeks and see where the dust settles after about twelve weeks and
then you can start to make some decisions about what you need to change and develop yeah but the key word or
phrase into the search whoever's come at the top clearly has the algorithm right because they're at
the top and then what we can do is right-click view the source code and see how many times they've got an image or
how many times have they got the key word or phrase in their content or their
text or the title or wherever it is and so we're trying to do is match them because they've clearly got it right
yeah there's a reason why they're number one so yeah absolutely you become almost
like a detective don't you sort of you you start to learn to look at these things go why are you number what why
are you there or why you number two why you number three and you start to work your backwards with what you know oh okay you've got this
and this for me that is exactly it and it's for me this is just a massive game
of chess it's not you know somebody's at the top of the search while it's not why am I
not at the top how am I going to get how am I going to get there and so there's no point in you know you need that
strategy you need to understand what's going on and make small adjustments and
leave them long enough that they're actually going to take shape usually if that makes sense totally totally makes
sense yeah so there's a couple of phrases you've mentioned a lot let's
pick up on some of those things one is this word research right here um and I
think just to tie this in a little bit with e-commerce one of the things that I found over the years is if I have an
e-commerce website and I pick up my phone because its nearest thing to me so I've got a website selling phones right
you know and I just put that on as a normal product on the website and that's
that's a product page is a typical e-commerce product page but one of the things that I've noticed is you get
better search engine results if I've got that picture of a phone but I've also
got a bit of content on that page about the phone like how to use it through video on there this may be optimized a
little bit for YouTube and it and that page links through to say three or four articles on my blog about you know how
to choose the best mobile phone cover how to choose the best mobile phone insurance is that is that can I just say
everything you've said there is basically everything that I look at in those points of optimization so your
link building you've got an internal strategy yeah you've you've actually added an image yeah you've named the
image you've got the Meta Description in place and you've chosen the correct title first line the first paragraph in
the content you've got the keyword or phrase in there you've got the keyword or phrase in the URL you know what
you're actually doing is focusing the page around one key word or phrase
so a lot of people think you can optimize for multiple so initially what you need to do is
optimize for one keyword only but then what you do is when you do the keyword research you you have work or clusters
and a cluster is an Excel spreadsheet that refers to a certain keyword so for
example hoody you might have hoodie female for example hoodie male yeah yeah
and so everything in that cluster so you'd end up with like a big red dress green dress orange dress if you're
talking about the green dress you know all the associated keywords are in there you can actually use those phrases in
the content on your optimized page yeahbsolutely to words on a primary page or on
a product page you can actually start to use these phrases and that's where you're going to get multiple listings
and so I always recommend initially optimize one keyword for one URL okay
that's the top tip one key phrase for one one keyword research that's for one
keyword for one URL yeah but this idea of and this is something I think you
know when you're I talk about this all the time with people wanna set up an e-commerce business it's not just about
going buying a product and putting some brief description on your website about it it's the internal link in then that
goes on to that product page to optimize well for it so that people find you using your your SEO and so linking
products to blog posts or these what you called secondary pages in it so a blog post will be a classic example yes one
way of having good internal linking yeah I mean one of the ways if you look at
primary pages for example you look a site like John Lewis whoever a lot of the e-commerce websites now have these
mega menus and what they're actually doing is one they're making those product pages now or category pages if
you like depend on how you've got your website set up they are now become primary pages and so Google will
prioritize them as being primary pages and so that's where these mega menus come in and
obviously the customer will be able to find the product faster yes and that's
why you see so many e-commerce websites now with those mega menus and well
desktops they don't click on most well yeah it's a real fascinating conundrum
it's been a you're talking about this yesterday and yeah so that all makes
sense to me so this keyword research how would I how would I go about doing it was it let's say I I go as this is great
James Irvin partially got an idea of what you're talking about but how do I where do I even start work where do I even go ting okay so there's a couple of
ways to do it so most people most digital agencies will actually do it through keyword planner which is part
the AdWords system personally speaking I found I didn't get the results I wanted
from from that because I want more they predictive of those terms so on a daily
basis you've got fifteen percent of new keywords and phrases being entered every
day into the search that's why I want to know what they are especially now if we're talking about
covert nineteen coronavirus and just did a bit of research there you shared this now before we came on air so this seems
like a good place to talk about to talk
about that so let's bring that out what what did you mean when you said that when you when you with the research this
is just a great example of what you're talking about yeah so the first thing we do when we're saying up a website we
need to make sure that we're obviously optimizing for the correct keywords and phrases so what we're gonna do is number one
keyword research absolutely crucial to your business so there's a couple of
tools that I use one of them is a Chrome extension called keyword everywhere
which is a fantastic extension for doing things keyword research on the fly okay really
really healthy word everywhere and it it was free up until about three months
but even now it's something like $a I mean it's it's lasted about five or six
months already so it's it's not expensive so that's an easy tool to use
why found was when I was working for the global retailers we were dealing with
hundreds of thousands of keywords and products so what I ended up doing was trying to design and build my own
keyword research tool so along with the logic methodology
I've actually got a keyword strategy tool which I called keyword strategy tool and what this does is it will
actually look at and take all the data from the paid advertising so keyword
planner but it will also do all the predictive terms and what we can do is actually update the API so we get the
very latest information so if for example somebody yesterday typed in a new phrase then we can find out what
that phrase is so on every keyword or phrase we need to know what that what
the Associated data is so the first one is well it's three of them the first one
is the search volume how many people are searching per month the second thing is
how much is it going to cost me per click if I did paid advertising and the
third one is the competition level so how many people are competing with me against that particular phrase so to
give you the example I did a little bit of research on Kovach and coronavirus
so Cova has nine thousand two hundred searches a month the cost per click is
zero because there's nobody bidding against it which is a lot of people would think that was an opportunity I
was bidding against - they're bidding against it and the competition level is
zero so therefore it's gonna be a really cheap cost per click so if you were doing something to do with go big
maybe business recovery how do you get out of it and all that type of thing
a good idea to start bidding on that and making sure your advert is good on
coronavirus there was million searches a cost minute that so compare
that with covert nineteen covert nineteen had nine thousand did you say i was two hundred and this way i got two
point four million this one's million yeah woman geez yep that's a big difference
yeah the cost per click is one pence so even though coronavirus there are people
bidding on it it's still very very very low so gained opportunity for somebody
if they do know paid advertising campaign and then we have the competition level for that is which
is basically three percent so it's quite lonely yeah very very low so you should
be able to optimize for that quite quite quickly if you go to google and start to
type in corona virus or Kovach and you've actually got for example the the
Chrome extension I was talking about keyword everywhere it will actually put the values next to it and these values
are what we decide we're going to optimize a particular page for so this
keyword strategy tool that I've come up with where it's unique in a lot of ways
so it's not done by a developer it was meant as a tool for me to you so ten
thousand keywords for example was taking me five days hours a day to sort
through and it's a difficult cost for businesses to justify so what I did was
I thought right I build my own tool and I managed to get that down to sort of
three days at the time which I thought was really quite good and I entered it
into the bb marketing show at the excel last year and we weren't best marketing management tool some I said yeah thank
you so yeah that was a bit of a shocker but I suddenly realized that we're onto something here because with
the keyword strategy tool we actually provide you with a strategy so there
isn't anything out there that does that so that's why you win that award I was
going to say because there's a lot of SEO yeah software pieces of software out there the hundreds of the flipping
things yeah so what what was it about the one that you had what did what have
you done which is made it unique I suppose okay so the first thing is you
get a strategy with it and so I actually when you subscribe or whatever to the tool then ultimately you get bited onto
a session where I should show you how to use the tool and what the strategy is
and I record it and I send it to everyone so they will copy of it and at
that stage they some of them some people say okay I get it I do it myself some people say oh can you help me with it
and that's where I got a lot of my work but the tool itself is unique in the
fact that a lot of agencies will actually throw data away that they don't
think they need and what we do is we have a list of positive and negative
keywords and what we can do is we can filter out the keywords we don't want so
if you're an accountant and you're in Newcastle one in Milton Keynes one in
say Bournemouth the initial keyword list is going to be exactly the same what
makes your business different is the keywords that you don't want so
therefore we then have a negative list so if you are an accountant in Milton Keynes the negative keywords would be
Newcastle and Bournemouth because you don't operate in those areas but instead
of throwing them away we keep them and so what you can do is you can export the positive list and the
negative list you can also filter through questions so you can use the where when why how for your Q&A so what
people are asking about your products and services so once you've actually downloaded that
you can actually then put the data the positive data want to keep into a search which will
then deliver all the data back to you over the last months so this allows
you to see month on month search volumes competition and obviously the
pay-per-click obviously the keyword see from there that gives you the data sheet
that you can then apply the methodology so in order to get all that data it's
not well I put it this way we take you weeks to put all that data together whereas this tool does that in seconds
for you so you can now do that keyword research of five days hours we've now
got it down to two hours for the same amount of work well and is that one leg
when is that what do you think gave me the award well at the time I only had three days I've since managed to get it
from three days down to two hours so for the same amount of work so that's that's
massive you know and it'll give you every possible keyword and so that's
that's the beauty of it and like I say you shoot it from once you've got that
data sheet that's where you can choose because what you're doing is you're
clustering all the data so you back to the red dress green dress yeah so by
having these clusters if you're talking about certain topic or a product or a
service well you may be looking for a question that somebody's asking about certain product then you're going to
find it in one of these clusters and next to it you'll see all the relevant data and so from that you can also start
to see opportunities so how many people are competing against this keyword how
many searches but then how much competition is there how many people are bidding against you on the paid
advertising so you could actually say I only want to bid on say under pence
or you could say Oh anyone a bid on things under one pence or the marketing
budget is really low so when you go to the second phase of the strata
gee you do you paid advertising what we're doing is we did the keyword research we know the exact phrase
matches we also did the negative list so by offsetting the positive against the
negative the conversion rates are higher quicker and that's yes Thanks so this is
just to clarify okay that's fine you talk about a lot which is great and I
and having been on some of the calls I just I just remember the questions that were going through my head at the time
yeah so um you're taking the same keyword data which you're using for the
whole what you call the optimized which was part one of your methodology yeah and in that research you are going to
find exact keywords and phrases that people are typing into so I'm not just
gonna say Google for now you have people going to Google they're typing in keywords and phrases the research brings
out those key words and phrases which you can optimize for yeah but whilst you're waiting the twelve weeks to see
the impact of that optimization you're going to go over to Google Adwords and
you're gonna run keyword campaigns or you're gonna run Google ad campaign shall I say yeah one of the ads that
you're gonna run is around that exact phrase that people are typing into Google right and what you can do and
with Google AdWords as you can say to Google AdWords I this has to be an exact
match in other words if someone types in half this question I don't want you to show my ad I just wanted you to show
this ad for your exact match right yeah so you have innate that a phrase yeah a
broad match so generally speaking when you put it in automatically or put it to
a broad match which means you spend more money yeah I do many things so go back
to your original thing if you with cloud for example it could match you for cloud computing it could match you for clay on
the sky yeah whereas actually you wanna if you use exact matches you know you're only going to show up on that exact
phrase yeah and you know that's a good phrase because you've done the research you've
seen the volume and you've seen the opportunities around it yes so everything is in that datasheet and it's
also in the datasheet when it comes to the content strategy because you've now identified all the questions people are
asking so back to that hoodies one of the silly questions I hope that we came
up with was how do I keep the inside of my hoodie fluffy he's a stupid question
if people are typing it in so if you can imagine we do a blog post on that
yeah then we do our internal linking strategy to how a hoodie page and then
what we'll do is we go and again with content people they make a big mistake
generally speaking they just put it live and that's it you've got to use your search console so you go to Google
search console and use the inspector any content on your page make sure you use
the Google console inspector just put in the URL what you're actually doing is
asking the crawler to actually come back and read that content otherwise it could sit there for six
months and you think it's been read and it's not it's not even listed so okay so
let me just clarify yeah so we've done phase one optimize we've done phase two
which is the paid google adwords and we've got the google adwords not on a
broad match but an exact match and we view both that positive and negative data to really hone that in so we're
only paying for the ads that we know are going to work and our conversion rates are higher and a cost per click is a lot lower to make understand pain as much
more effect yep so on that I did one of our best campaigns six empty apartments
in Germany ran it for eleven days I don't usually recommend a global
campaign in this case it was such a unique product I didn't do it for that
we have twelve clicks pence five of the six apartments had gone total cost
of the campaign was four pounds seven pounds and that's because we know the
exact phrases we know we've kept all of our negative data we live in a
data-driven world all these people who are thrown data away you know you've got to use it in the right way so that's
part of the methodology so a great example of optimizing well and
it costing very little money then to get the results yeah and the third thing you said was going back to the third part of
the methodology which is on your content you would then use the the research from
the keywords to create your secondary paste so blog posts and things like that
and you use the example of you know I've got a website which sells hoodies the read shows one of the questions that
people are asking is what keeps a hoodie fluffy on the inside so you have to create a page around that an internet
link which would help you with your SEO right yeah and that that's the three things
then the fourth thing that you talked about which is not necessarily a part of your methodology but one of the things
that's worth clarifying here you know once you have made any changes to your website around this concept around this
idea you need to go to the google search console and tell Google that you have made those changes yeah and don't just
assume that Google is gonna pick up on the fact that you've made changes yeah so the majority of websites I come
across when I'm analyzing them I notice a lot of them I like the sitemaps are
six months out of date so if you can imagine if you've got an event say let's
say that I donate the first of one where are we to st of June for example so we
put an article up there but we don't submit it it could be after that date
that Google actually finds it what you want to do is maximize it so I did a
live exercise on LinkedIn where I optimized for keywords that didn't have
any competition or anything but people were typing it in through the predictive
search and so I showed you can actually put put a page up and get it listed on
Google within minutes then the test is actually on my LinkedIn profile
back in October early October th or the night something like that but you can
imagine that if you get how do I keep the inside of my hoodie if you can imagine that
somebody's typed that into a search engine yeah it would say Google again and it comes up in the title it's an
exact match search so therefore it's more likely that person's going to click on that link yep and that's why you do
the keyword research and why it works so well while you spend the time in the
keyword research yeah and so there's a lot of other things but but generally
speaking I always get asked the same question does it work I've tried on about sort of websites I started
working for a company who didn't want the mentor and they actually wanted me to do the work and so I had a look at
Wes that's from their analytics so in November the organic traffic was
% in January the organic traffic was % in November his traffic was at
% paid advertising and I got that down to % and so this saving in cost was
pounds saving a month so everything
that he paid me he actually got back within three months and now he's obviously in profit yeah that's
fascinating fascinating James listen I am aware of time and I'm aware of you
know the fact that we've gone through a lot there a lot of information I really appreciate you taking the time to share
that with us and like I so much more to say but it's I find that I just find the
whole thing fascinating and actually SEO optimization paid media and good content
marketing strategies are still the the you know some of the key backbones aren't they even for e-commerce businesses for any kind of business you
know if you've got a website if you're doing something online getting your head around this is critical but it's not
complicated it's a few hours of learning and what we found really had really helpful what the guys at the
office weren't really helpful was the fact that you have you've you've got on the phone you've answered their questions and you know you have done
this mentoring thing with them for a few hours which is great so our experience here is actually this is you know this
is very straightforward to get your head around and when you don't know the answer just - James seems to know the
answer how do how do people reach you how do people get hold of you if they want to connect with you well I've got a
LinkedIn page obviously James peipus it's a bit an unusual surname so there
can't be many of us out there be us right ey be us yeah and I've also got
website digital marketing mentoring code on UK and the other site i've got his
emarketing - strategy code at UK and so just any of those websites digital what
was this digital marketing mentoring code at UK yeah and they can just reach
you through those sites or just head on over to link in LinkedIn and search James up ibis and you'll you'll find him
probably with a little bit more hair in his photo than he's got now hopefully before the razor and shaved it all off
yeah listen James thank you so much for your time it's been great having you on thanks for sharing the wisdom with us
really really appreciate you being with us thank you very very much thank you for the invite appreciate it no problem
thanks okay
I'm just realized I'm muted sorry let me start that again so thanks again to James for being a guest on the show I
hope you got a lot out of it he's really interesting guy's name is his methodologies is actually I think it's
quite straightforward and simple and easy to get your head around but it's remarkably effective so do you spend a
bit of time thinking that through and what that means for you and your business you can of course head on over
to the website when this podcast is launched Matt Edmondson comm and grab yourself the show notes we do put the
show notes on their way we'll also link to James they go up at the website on the screen just cuz we can with Mon
technology just make sure you head on over they grab the show notes if you're listening to this on the podcast version
you're in the cart it's got intimate evidence and calm just click the blog link and then you will see the posts on
there to search out for James and we will link to him and we'll put the show notes on there where you can understand
his methodology and how it works his keyword tool is actually a very
simple tool to use we have used it a lot so do connect with James and and ask him
to show you how that works and I'm sure he will be more than happy to do that James is very kindly giving you guys an
offer as well so if you're listening to the show or you're watching it and you would like to get in touch with James he
will give you a trial on the mentoring services that he does normally it's a
hundred and ninety-five pounds a month for six months which is well it's negligible amounts of money to learn
this type of thing let me tell you but he's offered that at ninety five pounds a month for six months I'm just reading
that to make sure I've got it and he will do some training with you and some webinars and even if you don't want to
use this tool you've just got a few questions James will be more than happy to help you it's just who he is he's a kind guy that will just chat with you
all day long about this type of stuff and he gets a real kick out of it so do connect with him and like I say my
thanks again to James for being on the show so let me just give you a little
bit of housekeeping at the end of course make sure you subscribe to the podcast wherever you get your podcast from
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I hope that all makes sense I'm sure it does so thanks for watching thanks for listening thanks for being part of the
community and part of the e-commerce tribe it's great to bring this content you've really enjoyed today's show once
again thanks to Jane thanks everybody we will see you next time god bless and stay safe