Real Talk: AI, Voice Search & SEO 2025 Strategies That Actually Work

This episode of the Simply Be Found Huddle podcast with hosts Rob and Dean welcomed UK-based SEO expert Andrew Laws for a conversation that cut through typical marketing jargon. Instead of rehashing the same old SEO 2025 tips, they dug into what actually works in today’s digital landscape.

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This Huddle’s Special Guest

We’d like to extend a heartfelt thank you to Andrew Laws, founder of Yeso.io, for sharing some truly eye-opening insights with Rob and Dean during their recent conversation.

Based in the UK, Andrew brings over 25 years of digital marketing experience to the table, and what sets him apart is his no-nonsense, real-world approach to SEO. Since 1998, he’s been helping businesses cut through the noise and confusing tech-speak, replacing mystery with clarity and action. He’s not about smoke and mirrors—he’s about real results like more calls, more leads, and more revenue.

At Yeso.io, Andrew and his team specialize in everything from technical SEO to storytelling through content, all grounded in what we at Simply Be Found also believe: authentic connection wins every time. His approach isn’t about showing off—it’s about showing up, consistently and honestly, to help small businesses thrive in a digital world that changes fast.

Whether you’re a seasoned marketer or just trying to get your business found online, Andrew’s insights are a refreshing reminder that SEO doesn’t have to be complicated—it just has to work.

Want to connect with Andrew? You can reach him at:

Key Takeaways From This Huddle

During the conversation, one of the most refreshing takeaways was this: marketing fundamentals haven’t changed all that much. Yes, the tools have evolved—from fax machines and printed catalogs to TikTok and AI—but the core idea remains the same: connect with people in a way that matters to them.

Rob and Dean reflected on how we’ve moved from waiting 28 days for a catalog order to expecting instant Amazon-style results. But while expectations have sped up, the psychology of marketing is still about trust, relationships, and showing up where your customers are looking. What’s truly new in 2025 isn’t the “why”—it’s the “how well” we can now measure the impact of our efforts.

Myth-Busting SEO: It’s Not Magic—It’s Marketing

Let’s be honest—SEO has developed a bit of a mystique, especially in 2025. But as Andrew Laws reminded us, it’s not some secret spellbook—it’s about helping businesses grow. The real question is: “Are we helping you make more money?” If the answer’s yes, then the SEO is working.

Behind the spreadsheets and search rankings, good SEO is about real-world impact: more calls, more clicks, more sales. That doesn’t mean the work is easy—but it does mean the goals should always be clear.

What SEO Actually Looks Like in 2025 (Hint: It’s Not Glamorous)

Rob, Dean, and Andrew had a good laugh about what SEO work actually looks like behind the scenes. Spoiler alert: it’s not flashy. It’s hours of analyzing data, writing content, testing headlines, and tracking what’s working across dozens of platforms.

And yet, this honest peek behind the curtain is exactly why setting the right client expectations is critical. Growth takes time. Visibility takes work. And the biggest wins often come from the slow, steady stuff no one sees at first.

Your 2025 Strategy: Start with One Video

One of the most practical gems from the conversation was the “video-first content strategy.” Here’s how it works:

1. Record a short video about a problem your business solves.
2. Upload it to YouTube.
3. Use the transcript to create blog posts, social media captions, Q&A content, and more.

It’s simple, scalable, and—most importantly—authentically you. No fancy scripts. No generic fluff. Just real content from real people, built once and used everywhere.

Winning in the Age of Authenticity

With AI-generated content flooding the web, we’re now in what Rob calls the “Age of Authenticity.” The difference-makers? Businesses who dare to sound like themselves.

That means:

• Using your actual voice (literally and figuratively)
• Embracing your local flavor or industry quirks
• Sharing what’s really happening behind the scenes

Customers are craving realness, and in 2025, that’s your secret weapon.

In this environment, businesses that inject genuine personality into their marketing will stand out dramatically. This might mean taking bigger creative risks, embracing industry-specific humor, or simply being more honest about day-to-day business realities that your specific audience will relate to.

The Client-Agency Relationship

A recurring theme throughout was the challenge of managing client expectations, particularly around timeframes. The Amazon effect has created an “I ordered it today, I get it today” mentality that simply doesn’t align with how organic marketing works.

Successful SEO partnerships require clients to understand they’re investing in a long-term asset rather than buying an immediate result. The most successful campaigns happen when agencies can be transparent about timelines while still demonstrating progress along the way.

Learn More About SEO And Marketing Strategies

Dean and Rob can tell you more about SEO and marketing strategies that will help your business grow. Check out our membership benefits so see how Simply Be Found, can help you.

Transcript

• 0:39 | Meet Andrew Laws
• 1:16 | How Marketing Hasn’t Really Changed
• 2:31 | Collecting Vintage Marketing Books
• 3:38 | When Fax Marketing Was a Thing
• 5:16 | The Evolution of Email Marketing
• 6:12 | Google Search Console Limitations
• 7:30 | Real Metrics vs. Vanity Data
• 8:45 | Breaking the “SEO is Magic” Myth
• 10:05 | Mindset Shift: SEO is a Long Game
• 11:55 | Voice Search Trends & AI Frustrations
• 13:20 | Schema Experiments and AI Crawling
• 15:00 | Authentic Content Over AI Fluff
• 16:22 | Why Black Hat SEO Isn’t Worth It
• 17:50 | Managing Client Expectations
• 20:03 | UK vs. US SEO Market Differences
• 21:42 | Client Education & Transparency
• 23:00 | The Power of Showing Value Early
• 24:15 | Behind-the-Scenes of SEO Work
• 25:38 | Why We Built Listings Engine
• 27:15 | Connecting the Digital Ecosystem
• 28:45 | Google Is No Longer #1 in Search
• 30:00 | The Problem with Lead Attribution
• 31:42 | Local SEO vs. National Reach
• 33:00 | The Amazon Effect & Instant Gratification
• 34:38 | Long-Term vs. Short-Term Thinking
• 36:00 | Building Fuzzy Feelings Around Brands
• 37:40 | The Power of Content During Crises
• 39:10 | Video as the Most Authentic Format
• 40:45 | Age of Authenticity in Marketing
• 42:05 | Rob’s Content Creation System
• 43:30 | Video First → Blog, Social, SEO
• 45:00 | Why Authenticity Beats Polish
• 46:25 | What Really Frustrates SEO Pros
• 47:52 | The Tree Method of Local SEO
• 49:10 | Shifting Client SEO Budgets
• 50:38 | Getting Ahead with Personality-Based Ads
• 52:00 | Client Conversion Strategies
• 53:28 | The Truth About Free Advice
• 54:50 | SEO as Empowerment, Not Confusion
• 56:12 | Wrapping Up with Gratitude for Andrew

Rob [0:01]: Welcome to the Simply Be Found Huddle! You have Dean and Rob along with our guest today, Andrew. Andrew, how are you doing today?

Andrew [0:07]: I’m in rude health, Rob. Thanks for asking. It’s—the sun is shining, birds are doing things with bees, as I understand it.

Rob [0:18]: All right. More bees come from your neck of the woods because technically, bees weren’t native to Colorado or to the United States. Is that true?

Andrew [0:29]: I did not know that. Yeah, the Europeans brought them all over with them when they came over. God, that must have been a troublesome journey, do you not think? Kind of being in the hold of a ship. “Ow, ow, ow, ow.”

Rob [0:40]: You decided to bring the bees. Not to mention you put them inside of a ship, then you took them on the ocean. I mean, how many did you lose? And how did you know to go through and do that? Or did you have to send back and wait for another ship to arrive—God knows how long, this parcel post—to get there with the bees? I dig Europe. “More bees, please. We need bees. We need [laughter].”

Meet Andrew Laws [0:59-1:27]

Andrew [0:59]: I think every marketing or every digital podcast should start with a discussion like this.

Rob [1:05]: Absolutely. I mean, it totally throws completely everything for a loop. But I mean, if you think about it, I mean, there was a lot of marketing that had to happen back then just to be able to do something like that.

How Marketing Hasn’t Really Changed [1:16-2:15]

Rob [1:16]: I mean, marketing’s changed over the time, but it’s really the same, just different avenues of going about it.

Andrew [1:21]: It’s one of the things that really interests me about marketing. I’ve got a thing about collecting old books about marketing. So going to your secondhand or antiquarian—anti—old book places. Antiqu—I’m not going to keep on trying to say it. “Antiquities”—book, that’ll do it.

Andrew [1:41]: But finding books written on marketing or especially advertising—one of my favorites, it was written in about 1908 about advertising, and you look through it—nothing has changed.

Rob [1:55]: Well, you know, the platforms have, but not the way you—the way you absorb your information’s changed. That’s about it.

Andrew [2:01]: That’s about it. Send it. Yeah. The delivery of it has changed. And I think if people back then knew how well we can measure advertising now, they’d think our jobs were very easy. Or maybe they are.

Collecting Vintage Marketing Books [2:15-3:00]

Rob [2:15]: Now, you know, we were talking about old-school marketing, Dean and I, this morning, and I haven’t thought about fax marketing in forever. Wow. Do you remember when we did a lot of that?

Andrew [2:26]: It never really hit the UK in in a big way. Okay. I can remember the first time I saw a fax machine. I thought it was magical. I thought it was an incredible thing, and it must have been in the 80s.

Andrew [2:38]: But then the person who had it, their friend—friend, I say in air quotes to wind them up—people used to send each other like 100-page blank, blank faxes. So your fax machine would just spew out all the paper and and just—

When Fax Marketing Was a Thing [3:00-3:31]

Andrew [3:00]: So it’s really interesting that the old fax became a popular way of marketing when they deregulated long-distance phone calling in the United States. So instead of mailing things, now you just dial the numbers, and they send out your propaganda at their expense. And that was infuriating as a business owner back then.

Rob [3:20]: It almost—it was almost like the email marketing at—before email existed. I mean, email existed back then. We were getting Viagra ads that were coming through and all the different porn stuff that was coming through on email in the 90s, but businesses really hadn’t caught on yet. I mean, a lot—the whole industry hadn’t taken that huge shift to where businesses were really doing a lot, to where the small business guy was on it.

The Evolution of Email Marketing [3:31-4:24]

Rob [3:38]: So I mean, at that time, still, fax marketing was huge. I remember my grandfather used to get really pissed off at the fax machine when, you know, someone would be like, “We could lower your credit card rates,” or they’re sending us porn through the fax machine again. They did that some too.

Andrew [3:55]: At least you wouldn’t be able to see it very clearly. But it strikes completely true. You know, we’re talking about how nothing’s changed. This strikes completely true because, you know, I’ve been telling people, or in the industry, we’ve been telling people for years not to bother spamming. Don’t spend your effort and money trying to reach people who aren’t interested.

Andrew [4:17]: Whereas if you’re kind of spamming people’s fax machines and they’re having to pay for the toner and the paper, that’s like even worse, isn’t it? Even if you saw a product you want, you’d be like, “Well, I would buy it, but you’ve just trashed my fax machine, so I’m not going to.”

Rob [4:29]: Can you imagine what that would cost today if all of your emails came by fax?

Andrew [4:35]: Oh, shudder to think. I was having a conversation with a friend earlier who said that when emails first became a thing in his workplace—he worked for a very large insurance company here—well, worldwide one. And they were told by the head of department they had to print out every email they received.

Rob [4:54]: Oh wow. Can you imagine that? Can you imagine doing that now?

Google Search Console Limitations [5:00-6:12]

Rob [5:00]: I mean, it might have been a novelty back then. You should see my desk anyway. It looks like hell because there’s papers everywhere. I can’t imagine printing out all my emails.

Andrew [5:05]: I still put on the bottom of mine, “Please don’t print this email,” and it’s been there for years, but I think there probably still people who do.

Andrew [5:11]: I got one client who comes in, and he says he doesn’t have a computer, and he says, “Don’t bother emailing me.” So I found myself in a situation for the first time ever having to print out keyword research, SEO keyword research. When I saw the stack of paper, I just thought how ridiculous it was. And I just gave him a red pen, just like, “No, no, no, no. Anything you don’t want us to do.” And I thought, the world has never quite caught up with technology, not 100%, has it?

Rob [5:46]: Well, if you think about it—look, I was inside of Google Search Console a couple days ago, I guess it would have been last Friday. It really hasn’t caught up to where technology is in itself. Google Analytics—I mean, yeah, they did some changes. They moved some stuff around for the new analytics whenever they released that a couple years ago, whenever that was. But still, analytics really haven’t caught up to where we are inside of the world of marketing. It should be much better than it is.

Andrew [6:12]: There’s a real problem with Search Console that Google admit themselves. Because, yeah, there’s these people that I feel real bad for them, but the people who work at Google who have to listen to people like us when we complain.

Real Metrics vs. Vanity Data [6:27-7:17]

Andrew [6:27]: And there’s a really odd thing with Search Console, especially last year, where all the people in our position are going, “Hey Google, these bits are inaccurate.” And Google ended up just throwing their hands up and go, “Yeah, it doesn’t work… like, doesn’t work. We don’t know why.”

Rob [6:45]: I’ve been inside of meetings where someone from Google was there. I’m like, “Well, I don’t know. Just—I mean, our numbers are kind of outdated, and they’re not 100% always up to date, and sometimes it takes weeks to come in and actually process the real number.” And I’m like, “Well, how do you ever make your judgments based on that?”

Andrew [6:59]: You can’t. That’s why when you come back and you look at things, the only way you can really look at SEO, you can look at analytics, is: Am I getting an increase in phone calls? Am I having more people walk in my door? Am I getting more leads? Or, and the bottom line is, am I getting more sales from it?

Rob [7:17]: It’s the simplest thing in the world, isn’t it?

Breaking the “SEO is Magic” Myth [7:22-8:03]

Andrew [7:22]: I think anyone who hasn’t worked with a digital marketing agency or specifically an SEO agency has a lot of preconceptions about the fact we’re handwaving wizards, and we do magical black cloak stuff. And it’s—I do public speaking, so I go speak to groups of businesses quite often, and it’s quite frequently somebody will say, “How will we know if it’s working?” Like, are you making more money? You know, it’s—there’s loads of geeky stuff we spend ages going cross-eyed at spreadsheets and whatever, but the reality is, whatever buttons we’re pressing and what we’re doing should make you more money. Should be the easiest decision in the world.

Rob [7:55]: I had to change my wording on this a long time ago. So I was working with—I’ve been doing SEO for 30-plus years. I think you’re right up there with me if I remember correctly from your profile, 1998. So you’re a little ahead of me by like three years.

Andrew [8:10]: Four years.

Mindset Shift: SEO is a Long Game [8:10-9:08]

Rob [8:10]: That’s absolutely crazy to think about. Four years. But it’s one of those things that I used to always say, well, if you have more money in your bank account, that’s how you know it works. And then I had a guy come to me and go, “I don’t know if I have—” He goes, “It’s not working, and I don’t have more money in my bank account.” And I’m like, “Why? How many more phone calls you getting?” “More.”

Rob [8:31]: “Well, how much—how many more sales are you getting?” I worked on it. “Well, his wife is just spending more.” I’m like, “I can’t help that.” So the question: “Do you have more sales coming in?” “Yes.” “Great. I can’t control what your wife is doing.”

Andrew [8:43]: That’s a crucial thing. It’s—we’re in a really interesting position in the UK at the moment. I mean, we cast off our—the large piece of rope fixing us to Europe, and we’ve been cast to drift into the Atlantic Ocean of the last few years with Brexit and whatever.

Andrew [9:00]: So we’re in a really strange position in this country where we’re ranking people better than ever before, but consumer confidence is like absolutely rock bottom.

Voice Search Trends & AI Frustrations [9:08-10:36]

Andrew [9:08]: So we’re speaking to a lot of prospective clients and long-term clients who have been with us for years who are saying, “Look, yeah, it should always be more sales, but as there’s a real spending kind of hold back nationally, as it were, at the moment, let’s look for other positives.”

Andrew [9:26]: And it’s not like clutching at straws. It’s kind of been quite interesting going, “Okay, well, if people aren’t clicking ‘Add to Cart’ and then buying, what can we do to still make them part of our gang? What can we do to get them feeling fuzzy about our brand, what can we do so that when we realize the country isn’t on fire and people start spending money again, we’ll be in a perfect place?” And it’s been quite an interesting exercise.

Rob [9:49]: It’s a very interesting piece. We’re seeing some of that here as well for the United States. What are you guys seeing over in your area for like voice search and all that? I know we have some members that are over there. We have more people in the United States and Canada than we do over in London. But is voice search a big thing for you guys?

Andrew [10:08]: I read a stat somewhere saying that British people say “thank you” to Alexa more than any other country but also swear at and cuss at Alexa more than any other country. So come the robot revolution, I think AI is going to be confused about what to do with us.

Andrew [10:28]: In all seriousness, voice search is not massively taken off with kind of baby boomers and upwards. Not that we’re seeing. It’s taken for granted with younger people.

Schema Experiments and AI Crawling [10:36-11:52]

Andrew [10:36]: I’ve got a kid who’s 13—I shouldn’t have had to think that long—she’s 13. And to them, they just bark orders at their phones, and they take it for granted that whatever comes back out of it will be accurate.

Andrew [10:52]: But the group in the middle is the interesting one. So people sort of millennials and my age—I’m Gen X—we sort of gingerly use voice search but with a heavy dose of skepticism about how accurate it is. And working in SEO means that I’m even more skeptical about how accurate it is.

Andrew [11:10]: It’s not something we’re being asked about very often, but it’s something that we’re trying to tell people, especially with—I don’t want to say the rise of AI. I’ve got a friend who did his degree in AI in 1992. You know, it’s been around a while, and they just repack—and we have huddles on this. They just repackage things, and it’s because marketers overuse something until it’s ruined. If something works, we’re going to ruin the hell out of it. It’s repeated itself over and over again.

Rob [11:36]: It’s so true. So you’ve been—I was going to say you’ve been been around as long as I have. I mean, you’ve both been doing SEO for so long.

Andrew [11:42]: Never ask a gentleman his age.

Rob [11:50]: I wasn’t implying anything. But do you remember around 1998 to 99, all new products coming out just added the word “2000” at the end of it?

Authentic Content Over AI Fluff [11:56-13:19]

Andrew [11:56]: You couldn’t get anything—you buy like toilet paper, and it’d be like—it was either it was “2000” or it was “Y2K.”

Rob [12:01]: Y2K. Yeah. And then we kind of forgot about it. Feels a bit like that with AI now. You know, they’re attaching AI to things that just simply aren’t or don’t need to be AI, and most of it isn’t AI anyway. So it is freaking people out a bit over here. And we’re just reassuring them that from an SEO perspective, getting—well, nothing’s changed for one thing.

Andrew [12:27]: We’ve spent years trying to make sure that Google and other search engines understand how brilliant our clients are. And it’s the same route and same method to show AI how brilliant our clients are.

Andrew [12:41]: I’m running a test at the moment. I’ve built a page on the SEO website, my own website, that’s just schema code. That’s all it is. So there’s nothing to distract crawlers from doing anything other than just absorbing the information. And so far—it’s a blank page, has no content, nothing but schema inside of it. It’s still got text, so it’s still human readable, but no styling, no typography, just a statement of facts. You know, the real basic schema code—the location, open hours, type of business.

Rob [13:14]: No pad approach, no styling, nothing.

Andrew [13:14]: Nothing at all. Just because I want to see if that makes an impact.

Why Black Hat SEO Isn’t Worth It [13:19-14:42]

Andrew [13:19]: I kind of foresee a time many years from now where we’ll all get used to having a website that’s for the humans and then something akin to a GitHub repository that will be for AI crawlers.

Rob [13:32]: So it will be like that JavaScript piece that’s happening right now where you can put the JavaScript overlay. It hides where—it basically allows the content to be generated, and the human never sees it, but yet the bots are getting to see it or the algorithms.

Andrew [13:46]: I’m really cautious about things like that. Just—

Rob [13:52]: Me too. Just because I figured out a long time ago, I looked at, you know, a lot of black hat techniques, and I don’t tend to talk about black hat unless I’m asked. But I realized a lot of black hat techniques, they look like a lot more work and a lot more expensive than just doing good SEO.

Andrew [14:05]: So I think anything like that, your money is probably better spent improving your usability of your website or making it the most beloved website in your niche, which is all you need to do for SEO, is just become the most beloved thing in the world. I mean, how’s that difficult?

Rob [14:23]: You have to produce good content.

Andrew [14:30]: Because if you don’t produce good content—I mean, it’s not about the volume of content. That changed—all the Geminis and ChatGPTs and all these AI tools and act—how accessible that information and those tools are now. It’s not about the number of how much content you’re producing, in my opinion. It’s the quality of content, and that’s still what—as much as SEO can give our clients a competitive advantage.

Managing Client Expectations [14:54-16:04]

Andrew [14:54]: And oh my goodness, I can’t believe 25 years or however many years after we started, it’s still something that we’re having to show to people. But as much as we can give them a competitive advantage, all we’re doing with SEO, really, is amplifying their excellence. And that’s where I think people don’t need to be afraid of the rise of Gemini or any other chat AI, is because if you know your business and you know what your customers are motivated by, you know what excites them, you know what irritates them, if you know those real proper old-fashioned 200-year-old business things that you have to know to run a successful business, then AI is just going to be a helpful tool for you. It’s not going to obliterate you because it can’t have the same passion. It doesn’t think.

Rob [15:36]: This is the thing that I think—the key word that you—the key word there is doesn’t really have passion. It doesn’t have emotion.

Andrew [15:42]: Exactly. It doesn’t have empathy.

Rob [15:42]: Exactly. Yeah, would be—would be the word I would probably use for that. It can’t be—I’m gonna pronounce this word wrong because I always say it wrong—charisma.

Andrew [15:56]: Charismatic.

Rob [15:56]: Charismatic. There we go. I said “cosmetic” though the other day, and now my brain keeps going cosmetic, charismatic.

Andrew [16:04]: I’ll just be the vocabulary guy. Okay. So, yeah, it has about as much charisma as a as a moldy bread.

The Power of Content During Crises [16:19-17:27]

Rob [16:19]: Exactly. So, so, Andrew, what is your biggest frustration with businesses and doing SEO? I mean, I’m assuming you’re a “done for you”—you do all the SEO for your clients versus them doing their own and you just get feedback from them. Is that is that how your model works for you?

Andrew [16:33]: Yes, majority is us doing everything. So I’ve built a team—we’re all musicians, and that that was never a deliberate thing, but I think it helps us all understand each other. Most of us are writers. I’ve written—I’ve written romance novels and all sorts of stuff. So my team is also—I have a—I hired a qualified proofreader because, again, content’s the real focus. So we we do it all for most of our clients.

Andrew [17:04]: Some clients do want to know how it works, and that’s kind of neat. I like that. But it’s a bit of a double-edged sword. So if clients really want to know the why, we can explain it up to a certain extent. But there’s some things where if you’ve been doing SEO a long time, you just kind of go, “Well, this is my gut feeling.”

The Tree Method of Local SEO [17:21-18:16]

Andrew [17:21]: You know, like you’re saying about overlaying the JavaScript. Well, I’ve not specifically experienced that myself, but my gut feeling is—and sometimes with clients who do want to know everything, we just have to say, “It’s just that way because it’s just that way.” That’s all it is.

Rob [17:38]: It is. And I mean, for the whole JavaScript piece, I mean, I ended up going through and writing a program that was going to go through and do it, and it did the overlays just to test it because I was like, “All right, is it going to be considered black hat? What’s it going to do?” I didn’t like what it did. It’s—it was faster to go through and make those changes. I mean, if you’re using WordPress and using, you know, RankMath Pro, it’s not hard to do that side. So it’s like you can just go through and knock it out almost as fast as it took to do everything that would be the overlay over the top. So why would you spend your time doing that?

Andrew [18:09]: Exactly. It’s harder work doing black hat than it is anything else. You stand a far higher chance of losing it.

UK vs. US SEO Market Differences [18:16-19:32]

Andrew [18:16]: It—my biggest frustration, having been in SEO for so long, probably is still that mindset that some people have of it being a magic pill or a big switch. You know, pull the SEO lever.

Andrew [18:28]: I get contacted by companies who say, “We’ve got a new website. Now can you do an SEO?”

Rob [18:34]: Right. Rob—I always—you know, so we have a movie over here called “Field of Dreams.” I don’t know if you’ve ever saw it.

Andrew [18:40]: Oh.

Rob [18:40]: And Rob always says, “Just because you build it doesn’t mean they’re going to come to you, you know.” So that’s one of his his favorite lines. I love it. I think our biggest frustration with SEO and our clients is the fact they think it’s an immediate happen. It happens immediately, and it takes a little time. Do you do you agree with that, or do you have the same frustrations?

Andrew [18:58]: It’s really difficult, especially because we specialize in SEO, to be realistic. We do other things. I’ve done the, you know, Google Ads exams and all that fun stuff, but SEO is a tough sell because you people say, “How long till it starts working?” And I say, “Look, absolute best case scenario is probably 3 months. Worst case scenario is a year.” And having somebody sat in your office and you’re asking them for money, and you’re saying, “You’re not going to get anything for a year?” It’s a tough sale.

Andrew [19:32]: The reality is—oh, right, I’ve managed to last—how long? 20 minutes into an SEO podcast without saying “it depends,” but the truth is, it—that might be a record. That might be, but if you’re not in a very competitive market—we’re working with somebody recently who they do driveways. So, you know, tarmacing, block paving. I guess you call them driveways in states as well—the bit where you put your car on in front of the house?

Client Education & Transparency [19:55-21:32]

Rob [20:01]: Yeah, yeah, we do. And roads—you have driveways. Usually here they’re made out of concrete, or they can be made out of asphalt.

Andrew [20:07]: Asphalt. So we obviously—any any potential new client, we check there’s—we check there’s meat on the bones. We check there’s opportunity there because the UK is very very small. And the numbers we look at, we’re normally looking for sort of 2,000 keywords with 2,000 search volume. And if we’re going by Semrush, then keyword difficulty of like 30 or below.

Andrew [20:31]: And when we look at American clients, we’re like, you know, search volume, it might be 2,000 in the UK. In America, it’d be like 40,000, and be like, “Woo, it’s exciting!”

Rob [20:39]: But this driveways—I would think driveways would be the most not mundane, but like least exciting thing. There can’t be many people searching for driveway surfacing.

Andrew [20:52]: It’s like 6,000 a month, which, for the UK, is big. And the keyword difficulty, I think, was four or five. So we’re like, “We want to work with you. We really want to work with you because that is is such an exciting prospect to be able to go, ‘Right, we just basically need to fix your website. We need to make, stop it being broken, and then we just need to write some good copy, and you’ll be off to the races. You know, you’ll absolutely rinse this.'”

Andrew [21:19]: But then six weeks into the project, the client is saying, “Well, we’re not getting any more leads now. Why isn’t it happening?” And we just like, “We did specifically said that it’s going to take a while.” And it’s tough going.

The Power of Showing Value Early [21:32-22:53]

Andrew [21:32]: I’ve been working with an amazing guy called John Mson, who—he’s a client delivery consultant. So this is a nut I’ve been really wanting to crack is for clients to really understand the value of what we do for them. And if things take longer, that’s when it becomes important. Some clients, if you can get them to rank really fast, they’re just happy, and that, you know, that’s totally cool.

Andrew [22:03]: So I’ve been working with this guy, and what he’s pointed out is that SEO agencies—probably more so in the UK than the US. You guys are sort of—I think of SEO in the States as being like three, four years more involved in terms of how you handle relationships with your clients. We learn a lot from from the States.

Andrew [22:22]: And he pointed out that SEO agencies are terrible at telling clients what they’re going to get because they fall into two categories: Either they are the people who are a bit more like me, which is like, “We’ll look after it. Just don’t sweat it.” Or they’re the people who go, “Oh my god, we’re going to do so many brilliant things. We’re going to do this, this, and—” Just bewilder their clients with technical nonsense.

Andrew [22:41]: So he suggested a really simple thing. We have a new type of kickoff meeting. Now, when we first meeting, we have a new client, we just have a very simple presentation that says, “Look, we’re going to be—you’re not going to hear from us for a couple of weeks because we’re going to be doing this list of things. We’ll explain those if you want. Then somewhere around week three, we’re going to come back to you with some research just for a sense check and say, ‘Is this—are we doing the right thing?'” And we’ve plotted out basically the first three months of of the relationship.

Behind-the-Scenes of SEO Work [23:05-24:14]

Andrew [23:05]: And the clients see that, and there’s no jargon on it. There’s no nonsense. And they just kind of go, “Okay, cool, that—we know what’s going on,” because so much of especially early-phase SEO projects is just us in a semi-darken room drinking coffee, hammering away at stats. You know, it’s—there’s nothing that exciting.

Andrew [23:26]: I made a video for LinkedIn because—few weeks ago, some of my friends’ companies, they’re in more interesting companies for video, like electronics and, you know, trades. And they’re all making behind-the-scenes videos. They’re like, “Oh, you know, I’m up at 6:00 today because we’ve got a project the other side of London, and we’re loading up the van, and we’re going to be—” And I thought, “Okay, I I’ll have a go at one of those.”

Andrew [23:54]: So I made a video. It’s like, “Right, SEO behind the scenes. Here’s what I’m doing today.” Then I made a 45-minute video with a camera just over there, just pointing at my back, with me typing, because that’s the reality of—perhaps the reality of what we do a lot of the times. So, yeah, trying to ramp that up and make it sexy can be a challenge.

Why We Built Listings Engine [24:14-25:33]

Rob [24:14]: Well, that’s why we did the approach. So I mean, we used to, or I used to have agencies that did all of that. We’re going to be introducing to where we’re going to take on so many clients to do the done-for-you because there’s a lot of people who need that service and can afford that service.

Rob [24:30]: Then you have another group that can’t really afford that service, and that’s where we do the—or they want to be able to do it on their own, and that’s where we provide the tools over. And we can provide the reports, we can provide everything over, make recommendations if they’re working with their favorite web designer here: “Provide this over to your web designer. Have them do it. We’ll go through, we’ll check it, make sure it’s there.” That’s going to be a lot more affordable than hiring us to do absolutely everything.

Rob [24:53]: But when we created the listings engine, it kind of changed to where we don’t have as much ramp-up time to be able to get SEO to work. Now this only works for that local business guy. Doesn’t really—I mean, it can work for e-commerce, but it’s it’s not the same.

Rob [25:08]: So I like to always say this is that, you know, that local business guy, you know, the guy that does the driveways or, you know, that kind of concrete. I just did a whole driveway one, so I have those numbers in my head. But so—so I’ll continue with that.

Rob [25:19]: But it’s one of those things to where you can register on the right networks. We’ve had inside of the world of SEO citations and backlinks forever. Well, it’s the important backlinks. It’s not going and buying these backlinks that are just BS, have no meaning, hired some backlink company. I don’t—I’ve never agreed with that because I always thought it was major spam and going to hurt you worse than it’s going to help you.

Connecting the Digital Ecosystem [25:47-26:41]

Rob [25:47]: But we work with about a thousand-plus networks when we put it all the way together for how everything links out for the citation piece. Now you can start building your local profiles more. And I believe everything is connected. You have your video, you have your citations, you have—or listings, whatever you want to call them. You have then your blog, you have your social—everything is connected.

Rob [26:11]: And if you connect those from a data aspect right, you can speed up the process a lot faster because you’re getting out there. Now you’re not going to see the prime of your results for probably 90 to 120 days because you’re it’s going to have to—the system is going to have to learn and be able to adapt to you. But you’re going to be able to hit those. So you’re going to get some—you’re going to get some small wins along the way, but you’re really not going to see the big potential.

Rob [26:34]: I think a lot of businesses still, even with having the small wins, still have a hard time going, “Well, I’m not, you know, I’m not number one on Google today.” Well, chances of you being number one on Google every day is probably slim to none, especially with the new update they just rolled out.

Google Is No Longer #1 in Search [26:48-27:34]

Andrew [26:48]: It’s—SEO has always appealed to me because of the sort of the David versus Goliath thing, saying, “Yeah, you can be a small company, and you can steal space from from much larger companies.” But the reality is now it’s much, much harder when Google became more obsessed with brands, which I know why they did it—why they focus on brands, because it’s very hard to fake a fully fleshed out brand.

Andrew [27:08]: And I think your piece that you do is fantastic for just cementing that in, probably much, much—well, it would be much quicker than that happening organically. Even if you say 120 days, that’s lightning fast to to anyone who’s got experience in SEO.

Andrew [27:27]: But yeah, I don’t think any of us have really found the answer for how to adequately match client expectations. I see some agencies go, “Well, we’ll do PPC, we’ll do Google Ads until you rank, just to make sure you’re not missing out.” Like, yeah, but you need three times the budget in that case, right? You know, it’s—if you got the money, great. Go for it. That’s an ideal situation. But, you know, if you got that kind of money, don’t—don’t—

The Amazon Effect & Instant Gratification [27:57-29:05]

Rob [27:57]: I mean, we use the tree concept. So you have the whole root base, which is, you know, all of your listings, your all your citations—that’s everything that’s built up. Then you have your website—has to have the proper structure. That’s your main pages and everything in the website.

Rob [28:10]: And then you have your branches at the very top. And one of those branches is a blog, because your blog, I think, is different than your website for how you manage it. It’s different type of content, different type of SEO structure, everything that goes into it. Then you have your social media, then you have, you know, your paid ads if you’re doing them. You might have your mailers, but everything ends up being part of that big ecosystem.

Rob [28:35]: And I think a lot of people really get hung up on Google still. And Google really—I mean, here in the United States, Google isn’t the number one search engine anymore. I mean, they’re only—they’re only counting for 18.4% of the search is what I heard the other day from Neil Patel.

Andrew [28:55]: That’s wild. I mean, YouTube is beating them out, which is a Google product. Voice search is beating them out, which some of those use the Google products. But reporting doesn’t really show where they are, so I really don’t know how anybody figures out the real true number. But you have to be found.

Andrew [29:13]: I mean, people—if you go buy a computer here in the United States that is a Microsoft, so not talking about Apple, but just, you know, a PC, Microsoft puts it on to where you have Bing as a default search engine. Most people, when they go and they “Bing” you, they’re still going to go say they “Googled” you because it’s like the box of Kleenex.

The Problem with Lead Attribution [29:32-30:04]

Andrew [29:32]: Yeah, absolutely. I mean, the one of the toughest things we find with any client is is lead attribution. You know, where did these people come from? And you’re completely right. People just go, “Google.” You’re like, “Probably wasn’t—wasn’t it?”

Andrew [29:44]: I saw—I searched you. “Well, where did you find me?” “I don’t know.” Or, “Hey, you know, I found—I found your ad over on social media.” I love this one. “I found—I found your ad on social media.” Oh, but really they were on YouTube watching the video.

Rob [30:04]: Oh, god. The amount of times we we used to see stuff come from clients, and their customers are saying, “Oh, we found you because you’re doing such and such.” And the client’s like, “We’re not—don’t tell them.” Just go, “Ah, okay.”

Long-Term vs. Short-Term Thinking [30:12-30:54]

Andrew [30:12]: “Yeah, we saw your billboard.” Like, “I’ve never done billboards.” And then all of a sudden, you just have that, “Oh, that’s where you found me.”

Andrew [30:19]: I think it’s it’s an interesting thing because say things are a little more challenging at the moment. So we’ve been looking into, “Okay, we’re an SEO agency, but the reality—we’re only going to survive if we just help our clients grow or meet their goals.” We do a pro bono work for a bunch of charities. So their their goals are obviously very very different.

Andrew [30:41]: So we started going, “Right, well, let’s talk about what we actually know about marketing outside of SEO.” And you’re completely right. Everything’s connected. It’s a complete network. So we’ve been looking at the, you know, how many touch points do you need? How much—how many experiences does someone need of your brand before they they feel confident enough to get in contact with you? Because it’s different for every—every niche, every area.

Local SEO vs. National Reach [30:59-31:53]

Rob [30:59]: Yeah, I was going to say every industry is different, almost, and sometimes it changes by—we probably experience this more than you do in your your neck of the woods, but I mean, different parts of the United States are a complete different ecosystem. We might have states that are—one side of the state does it this way, another side of the state does it this way.

Andrew [31:17]: Yeah, it’s one of the SEO advantages of living on a tiny, tiny little island with hardly anyone on it.

Rob [31:25]: You are more compact. You have to compete with more people in that same area, though. Is that is that a true statement, or—because, like, we have people that are in the LA or New York area here in the US, and they’re very competitive, and it’s a huge area, and there’s a lot of competition. You take that same group and you put them in the middle of the country, like in Kansas, and they rank really quick because there’s not a hundred people competing for the same piece. So it really, you know, there’s our word—”it depends” comes into play a lot.

Andrew [31:53]: It’s—it—it’s weird compared—it depends on what industry it is.

Building Fuzzy Feelings Around Brands [32:04-33:00]

Andrew [32:04]: But we find—we now—we track all all rankings nationally because all our clients, unless they are like a driveways thing, you know, they—they are national. Especially e-commerce clients, because the country is so small, it costs the same amount to get a package anywhere in the UK. So they’re all national.

Andrew [32:23]: We do also track—track local. Even if a client isn’t necessarily a trade or something that would need local—we’ve got like an ecom store that sells stuff for window cleaners, you know, squeegees and spraying things. And something we’ve noticed over the last few years is that local rankings have become a little bit easier to get.

Andrew [32:47]: And it doesn’t mean that’s necessarily going to be helpful to the client if they—if they want to—if they want to sell throughout the country, but it’s an indicator you’re heading in the right direction.

Andrew [33:00]: But it’s always interesting to me, actually, that in the States, because you’re such a big country, do your shipping rates on e-commerce—say somebody’s in Massachusetts and—and somebody in in Florida or somebody in California wants to buy something—do you have to pay more shipping for that to happen?

Video as the Most Authentic Format [33:23-34:25]

Rob [33:23]: Oh, geez, that—I’m starting to see it not be as big a swing as it used to be, but yes, there is a—there is a little bit of a premium. Used to be like three or four times to ship from California to Florida, but now it—it’s not. I think Amazon’s changed a lot of that with with how things they’re doing. I don’t know how big Amazon is in your country, but it’s—you—

Andrew [33:42]: Huge. But the problem is with Amazon is it’s created this “I ordered it today, I get it today” attitude, and it’s really affecting our industry because everybody goes, “Oh, I just ordered it.” “How soon—” “I’m not—how soon will I start ranking?”

Andrew [33:54]: I’m guilt—I’m guilty of that in the last 24 hours. I mean, so we’re going on a trip, which will probably already happen by the time this gets posted. But we’re going on a trip, and one of my daughters stepped on her tablet that got left on the floor, which is a whole another story, granted for five years, and shattered it. Well, I ordered tablets this morning. So before we hopped on this podcast, I was trying to get those set up because they’re home for spring break this week, and I’m like, it was supposed to be here between 4:00 a.m and 8 a.m. It is 8:05. Where is it?

Andrew [34:25]: Yes. And we’re from the generation where I used to love mail order catalog. So I always wanted to run a mail—such a weird kid. I really wanted to run a mail order company when I was a kid. But I remember filling in the forms, sending off a check, and it was always in the UK, it was always 28 days delivery. 28!

Age of Authenticity in Marketing [34:51-35:45]

Andrew [34:51]: You think how long now—if you said that to to anyone, like, “Okay, well, thanks for making your order. It’ll be with you in a month’s time.” You’d be like, “How is it so slow? This country is tiny. I could walk and pick it up from you, even if you’re in Scotland, you know, and I’m in London.” 28 days. But maybe our expectations were more—it’s an interesting thing that you say it’s kind of spoiled us a bit.

Andrew [35:13]: I’m a guitarist, and I needed a new guitar amp, and I went into a shop, and Fender, of course, because they make the best amps. And I played this amp, and I was like, “Yep, I’ll take it.” And over here they’re more than double what they cost in the States. And the guy said, “Okay, when would you like it?” And I was like, “I’ve just played through it. It’s—it’s there.”

Andrew [35:31]: They’re like, “No, that’s the shop one. We need to speak to Fender in the States and find out when they can get someone to the country.” And I just thought, “What? Why is that happening? What what’s broken down that this thing—?” Do you not like bring them over in shipping containers? Like, “Oh, yeah, hello, Mr. Fender. Andrew’s decided he’d like to buy an amp. Would you mind popping one in the post?” I’m like, “That’s—surely we’re past that, aren’t we?” Or maybe I ought to just be more generous with my expectations.

Video First → Blog, Social, SEO [35:45-36:52]

Rob [35:45]: That’s funny. I mean, it’s—it’s gotten to the point to where that—I mean, we’re all guilty of it, and we—and we want—we don’t—no one ever looks at the long-term play anymore on a lot of stuff when it comes to marketing. And that’s the problem—the difference between getting a product in the mail and having that instant gratification that we want so bad, that sometimes that long-term play is going to be the better play because it’s going to give you more over time. And you have to look into your future, not just short term. And I think that’s a hard—a hard piece for the brain to be able to say there’s a difference between those two types of—types of pieces that you’re getting.

Andrew [36:31]: Absolutely. And this goes back to what I was saying about the—the sort of the—the morphing of of SEO into being a larger piece, especially over the last few years.

Andrew [36:46]: So we’ve got a client who sells holiday—holiday lets. So they’re really nice, dog-friendly, got a hot tub, and really cool, but they’re not cheap because they’re really nice.

Why Authenticity Beats Polish [37:03-38:10]

Andrew [37:03]: So it was—had to have an interesting conversation with this client, say, “Look, you now rank really well.” He said, “Yeah, but the people aren’t buying.” Say, “Well, there’s a number of reasons that may or may not be happening, but you’re still acquiring people.” They’ve got like 30,000 people on a mailing list.

Andrew [37:20]: So we’ve been going through this piece for a few years of like, these people might only buy from you once every two or three years. You know, it’s not an immediate purchase. It’s not like, you know, you don’t go, “I fancy that.” “Okay, here’s £2,000 for for a stay next week.” It just doesn’t happen.

Andrew [37:40]: And the—the point was really proven during COVID, during lockdown. During the—we had two lockdowns here. The first lockdown, everyone staying home. Absolutely everyone. Although apart from the prime minister, as it turns out, but that’s another story. He had—he had a party. Did this news reach you guys? The prime—Boris Johnson locked down the country. Then photos came out of him and his colleagues partying with like wine.

Andrew [38:05]: Anyway, so he was like, “Ah, no, you know, nobody can come stay. I’m—I’m not going to make any money. So, you know, I’m going to have to stop spending money on marketing.”

What Really Frustrates SEO Pros [38:16-39:21]

Andrew [38:16]: I said, “No, when really bad things happen like this or recessions or anything like that or a downturn, it’s an opportunity to fill a void because your competitors will will stop the messaging. They’ll stop the budget and they’ll reduce it, and they create a void that you can rush into.”

Andrew [38:33]: And to prove it, we did something really, really basic. We emailed everyone on the mailing list, and we said, “Look, you know, we’re all locked down. Nobody can come stay. What do you want from us? Do you want us to try and give you information about COVID? Do you want us to just shut up and say nothing, or do you want us to post a load of crazy crap to you each week?” And they went, “Ah, crazy crap, please.”

Andrew [38:59]: And we sent out the—the just the dumbest junk throughout COVID. And we ended up having online pub quizzes where they were so shambolic. It was done on Facebook Live. We didn’t really know what we were doing. I would write the questions. Sometimes they were factual, sometimes not.

Andrew [39:21]: But the audience—what happened is at the end of the—end of lockdown, the audience bought on mass. They went from having no bookings at all to having a record year because we were staying in front of them.

Shifting Client SEO Budgets [39:35-41:06]

Rob [39:35]: Hugely. I mean, it matters. The audience is so impassioned. You know, we always want to give people a warm, fuzzy feeling about a brand, and that—the audience for that client is is passionate about them. And it’s—it’s because we just asked them what they wanted. You know, what—what do you want? “Well, we don’t want anything sensible.” “Okay, here’s a picture of the business owner wearing a Santa suit sitting in a jacuzzi. Is that what you want?” “Yeah, more of that, please.”

Rob [40:02]: You know how much easier that would have been to manage and to be able to come up with your content ideas if you had ChatGPT at the start of COVID?

Andrew [40:09]: Oh, yeah. Sorry—no, I was just like, I—I introduced this—he won’t mind me saying so if he ever sees this video. He’d just—he’ll be pleased. I—I was introducing him to the—well, the basic concepts of inbound marketing, you know, people have questions, answer the questions. So I gave him the book—have you heard of Marcus Sheridan?

Rob [40:27]: Sounds familiar.

Andrew [40:27]: American guy called Marcus Sheridan who, he used to run a pool company, and he—he wrote this book called “They Ask, You Answer.” And it’s just the best—

Rob [40:39]: Yes, I’ve heard of that one.

Andrew [40:39]: Best explanation of inbound marketing. So I said to this client, I said, “Right, he’s really good on video.” And I’ve—I’ve taught him how to edit, and he’s—he’s just—he’s a natural at being a presenter.

Rob’s Content Creation System [40:53-41:44]

Andrew [40:53]: I said, “Right, go away and think about the questions that people ask you. Every time somebody is about to make a sale, think about the last question they ask before they give you money, because that’s—that’s the potent one, as it were.” He said, “Okay.” And he came back a week later, and he’d written 350 questions. And I was like, “Okay, that’s a lot. That—that’s quite a lot of questions.”

Andrew [41:11]: A year later, he’s made around 400 videos just answering. And that’s without ChatGPT. I think if he had ChatGPT, he’d have to, like, buy 10 times more coffee than he does. This man gets up at 4:00 in the morning, starts making videos. With ChatGPT into that, and he’ll be making thou—absolutely thousands and thousands.

Andrew [41:33]: So that—that was why I kind of went, because—yeah, he didn’t—we didn’t need it, basically.

Rob [41:40]: So I’ve been working on a lot of other things that of getting different systems up and what—what things are going to happen, training different staff members. But all I can produce—and it freaks my staff out, or our staff, I guess I should say, Dean, sorry. But it it freaks them—it freaks them absolutely out because I can sit down in a day and produce 20-30 long videos.

Collecting Vintage Marketing Books [42:06-43:09]

Rob [42:06]: It’s, you know, about five minutes a piece, and I can pump those out and no problem. But then I might have another day where I can’t do any because my brain just won’t get into it. But I love when we have—because we do all of our support by chat and by email, and I love when we get a lot of messages, because I use those for my videos because that’s—that’s where I come up with my content, because if you ask that question, somebody else asks that question.

Andrew [42:30]: Absolutely. I find it really exciting. I think at the moment, if I was asked what will give SEO agencies or any company, actually, an advantage, it’s taking video seriously.

Andrew [42:36]: Because, you know, this is—this has been reinforced by what you were saying about YouTube taking such a massive chunk out of the Google search market. But at the moment, we’ve got the opportunity to get ahead of competitors, to get ahead. So just not—not churn out video, but make video, make video.

Andrew [42:56]: Have you seen my point—have you seen my whole entire philosophy on that?

Rob [43:02]: I haven’t. Absolutely no, shockingly, I haven’t, and I do apologize for that.

Rob [43:09]: But here you go. Here’s my philosophy on that. If you are any kind of business, you can record a video about a problem that you solved. So think about this from an SEO aspect. You record that video, you publish that to YouTube. Doesn’t matter the quality. Nobody cares about if you’re in your car, in your shop, no—you can be in your pajamas. Nobody really cares. But you got this piece of content.

Getting Ahead with Personality-Based Ads [43:32-44:15]

Rob [43:32]: Now you have a transcript. Now you can take that into AI. You can make your blog posts. You can make your social media, and it’s all in your language based on the video that you cut. So it’s a real information.

Andrew [43:44]: So I think that the key word there is, it’s original content from your original content.

Rob [43:50]: Yeah, that—that’s the—the biggest thing right there. And I think the more you do it, the more original it will get, because—

Andrew [43:55]: None of us are actually trained presenters or anything, but you—you get better and better and better, and the only way you get better is by repetition. And you’ll find out what people like.

Andrew [44:03]: The one of the things I really enjoy—I—I do public speaking. I’m a member of Toastmasters, which is a—

Rob [44:09]: Yeah, I was part of that a long, long time ago out. But yes.

Andrew [44:15]: It’s always nice to find, you know, meet someone else who’s been being a member.

Client Conversion Strategies [44:21-45:07]

Andrew [44:21]: So I go to that—that’s how that’s how I kind of have learned my skill. And one of the things I like both on watching YouTube channels develop but also people with their public speaking at Toastmasters is when they realize that they can be themselves. It’s like the penny drops, and the quality goes through the roof.

Andrew [44:33]: As soon as people are making videos for their business and they think they have to be a very particular way, that doesn’t connect with anyone because it’s—it’s not as authentic. Have you heard this, the phrase that is starting to be knocked around the marketing world—the age of authenticity? Have you heard that phrase?

Rob [44:53]: I haven’t heard of that one yet. I keep hearing about AEO, which is answer engine optimization, which is no different than SEO, but—but that one I haven’t heard of.

Andrew [45:00]: So the age of authenticity, the—the theory is that as poor use of AI continues to accelerate—so I mean, that’s people sitting down, firing up GPT, and just typing, “Write me an article about driveways,” and then go, “Hey, look, now I’ve got an article.”

The Truth About Free Advice [45:13-46:02]

Andrew [45:13]: So that kind of beigeness, that middling, that lowest common denominator—that—because obviously AI has just absorbed the internet, and it gives you the median. It gives you the inoffensive nothingness.

Andrew [45:24]: Because of that, the more personality people inject into their marketing, the more it will cut through. So it’s—over the next few years, you’re probably going to start seeing people take far bigger chances with their advertising, especially on YouTube advertising, because personality will become more important than message to a certain extent. The message is going to be like a—almost almost a sub thing.

Andrew [45:49]: We’re testing this out here at the moment. We’re starting to make videos for clients, and we’re trying to cut through. Right? So when you—when you research an advert, research a video, do your SEO research, whatever it is you’re basing it on, what people are searching for or what the—what the perceived challenge is.

Andrew [46:02]: So we’re working with this company that does window sells, window cleaning supplies. They’ve been doing it since 1995. And I said to them, “What really annoys window cleaners? What’s the one thing that makes them really sort of cuss and throw the rag on the floor and go, ‘I’ve had enough’?”

SEO as Empowerment, Not Confusion [46:24-47:20]

Andrew [46:24]: And they said, “Glass houses, conservatories.” I don’t know what you’d call them in the States. You know, big metal structure on the side of your house.

Rob [46:37]: We’d call them green houses, I—I think it’d be the—the term.

Andrew [46:42]: Similar things. A greenhouse or a sun room.

Rob [46:42]: Sun room. Sun room be better.

Andrew [46:49]: Yeah, because it’s a part of your house. So we’re going to make a video with—it’s only 10 seconds long—window cleaner turning up for a job, looks around, sees the biggest greenhouse or glass house ever, throws his rag on the floor, and that’s the end of the video.

Andrew [47:01]: Because anyone who sees that who is a window cleaner, the—the theory is they’ll connect with that and they’ll go, “I know that feeling. I know what that is,” as opposed to being some kind of like perfectly dentured, bronzed person going, “Hi, you need to buy our window cleaning supplies.” That that sort of stuff, I think, is going to start to connect a lot less over time.

Rob [47:28]: So I’ve—I’ve kind of heard of that. What—what I’m seeing is keeping it real because when you go out there and like that whole video concept I brought up is, you are bringing up things that an SEO person or a web person or a marketing person might not even know is even happening in your industry because you know it. You see it every day. You might not even think about it because you see it every day.

Wrapping Up with Gratitude for Andrew [47:54-49:03]

Andrew [47:54]: You’re absolutely preaching to the choir here, Robert. It’s—this is something that I really wish more people understood. I’ve got a client who—his company makes whole TV series. So a TV channel will contact him and go, “Right, we want a six-part series on motor racing or—or whatever,” which is one they’ve done. “You’ve got four weeks to deliver it.” He then gets his—his companies to get—they go make whole seasons. British seasons are really, really short compared to American seasons on TV. Okay, we get like six, maybe.

Andrew [48:27]: So he does that, and I was having this conversation with him and saying, “Look, we need—you need to get more content out there. You’re in—you’re in a sexy industry. You’re an appealing industry. I’ve got clients who sell hot melt adhesive application equipment. It’s hard to really find mass appeal or really connect with people with that. But you make—you make films, and you make television. People are interested in that.”

Andrew [48:54]: And he was like—he’s like, “I—I really don’t know about that.” While he’s talking to me, behind him, this massive framed picture, probably like, you know, meter and a half wide, and it’s him stood next to, I think it was Guy Richie, the director, and Guy Richie’s got his arm around my client. And my client’s holding his Oscar—Guy Richie’s Oscar.

Andrew [49:12]: And I’m like, “Just turn around just for a minute. What’s that?” “Oh, that—that’s my friend Guy. He—he won an Oscar, and we were celebrating.” “Like, and you’re telling me you’ve got nothing to say? You’re telling me you’ve got no content? Oh my goodness.” This is like a dream come true, having this kind of thing. It’s—oh, just wow.

Bad Publicity Insights [49:32-50:01]

Rob [49:32]: But I think it’s those little things, and the little things are what are going to make you stand out, and it’s going to make you real to be able to drive that traffic to your website or drive it to however your medium is. If it’s a, you know, to a profile or whatever it is, but you have to be able to drive that—that user over, and then you have to convert them once you get there, which is two total different things.

Andrew [50:01]: That’s a really—I’m really enjoying this conversation and being able to go—go into some depths. And I’m—I’m quite open about the fact a lot of SEO, it’s—it is—it’s like experimental theory. We know the theory. We—we know—we know the black and white, but what really interests me is looking at the fringes of that and going, “Okay, well, what’s going to actually connect through to people?”

Outro [50:26-58:01]

Andrew [50:26]: So, yeah, increasingly we’re doing more conversion rate optimization—CRO work than we’ve ever done before. And it’s because of that piece. It used to be our job—I was speaking to somebody in PPC, and they said, it used to be our job to get people to the website. Now it’s also a part of our job to make sure they buy.

Andrew [50:38]: And the age of authenticity thing, I think, is—is going to be—we’re just—it’s going to be the next AI. You know, everything’s—all the marketers are going to—what was that phrase you used, Dean? You said they grab hold of a—a phrase, and then they saturate it and ruin it.

Dean [50:52]: They—they ruin everything. Right? But—but—but, you know what—

Rob [50:57]: But you know what—as a marketer, we can go to our own website, we could just design a website and spend all this time, and then all of a sudden at random go to it and go, “Why is it missing this? Why is it missing this? Why am I doing it this? Who—what—who came up with this idea?”

Rob [51:13]: It’s your whole idea that you came up with. It’s—it’s—we have a phrase here. I can’t remember what it is. It’s something about the cobbler. That’s it, do you know what I mean by cobbler? Talking about the cobbler’s shoes—the ours is always the last one to get done.

Rob [51:34]: But it doesn’t matter. I can just go through and do a client’s, and I go back to it in a week later and be like, “Well, I mean, we could tweak this and tweak this,” because it’s always something to change.

Andrew [51:44]: I’ve got I’ve got my reminders list—is on the little window just behind the thing that I’m speak—the thing—the screen that I’m speaking to you on. And I think it says, “Remove the awful illustrations from your website,” because I—I paid for all these illustrations—their stock illustrations—for the—for the SEO, my own website. And I hadn’t looked at the website for a couple of weeks because my team keeps it updated. And I went and looked—I, these drawings are awful, absolute—what was I—? That must have been like a Saturday morning or like late at night. And I know, “I’ll put illustrations on it,” and just awful.

Andrew [52:15]: So, yeah, my—my kids’ shoes are fallen to pieces.

Rob [52:15]: Yeah. So I—I will tell you, Andrew, I do love the homepage above the fold, that the—I and that’s what he’s talking about getting rid of, I think, if I remember right. I—I used to be a rock climber before I became this big guy, and it, you know, and I saw that and I went, “I’ve been in that situation.” But I love that analogy, “Are you stuck?” You know, so—

Andrew [52:41]: See, I quite like that one. That’s not one of the illustrations—I was going to say it’s not the one I was thinking of.

Rob [52:47]: I will tell you, I do like above your homepage, above the fold. I—it—it spoke to me as because of what I used to do, but it—it had a good—you had a really good meaning to it. So it’s hard to come up with good graphics that mean something because we see so many people put so much graphics that just—what—what is that all about? I don’t—I don’t understand their thought process—pointing at a screen or a graph going up or people in a conversation.

Andrew [53:11]: Well, it makes me laugh when you see—see SEO agency websites—even—even companies local to me, and the pictures will be like two good-looking people having a conversation in a long, chrome, glassy corridor. I’m like, “We work from home.” Well, I’m not at home today, but like, no one’s office looks like that.

Rob [53:30]: I’m in my basement. Exactly.

Rob [53:35]: I—I need to—I’ve been saying I need to redo my background, but I haven’t gotten to it. But I’ve joked about putting the very first thing that they see is either myself or Dean—and I both, you know, flipping off the—flipping them off when they first come, because I mean, I’ve got—it would be different. It’s a lot better than smiling.

Andrew [53:54]: I’ve got—I’ve got a good friend who, we collaborate a lot. He does LinkedIn—LinkedIn work, and he’s—I’ll say his company name. It’s Digital Dominator, and I think they’re incredible. The Digital Dominator homepage—you go to it, and it’s a badly photoshopped picture of my friend Milo giving the knockout blow from the Rocky film, and all the pictures of him are stuff like that.

Andrew [54:19]: And “Something About Mary” is on there as well, but he’s—he’s Mary. And it’s all these things. If you told like your college or your high school business tutor what you were going to do, they’d be like, “No, don’t do that.” But it’s that authenticity piece again.

Andrew [54:32]: And I—I very keenly—years ago, I’d very keenly keep my personal life, my business life completely separate. So on LinkedIn, I was Mr. Serious person. And going back 25 years, I used to occasionally wear a suit. But it never fits. It always just looked like I was going up for parole hearing or something.

Andrew [54:54]: And the—so but then—then what happened was, my—my non-work life and my musician life and my—my stupid—I make dumb videos about things—that start to leak through to LinkedIn. And what happened was I got more work. So I was like, “Well, okay, hi everyone on LinkedIn, I make these fake documentaries about local towns that are full of lies.” And I mean like really audacious lies that clearly could not ever be true. Like, “Oh, in this small village, William Shakespeare once took a bath. Now interestingly, his toe got stuck in the faucet.”

Rob [55:32]: And like—well, look at Gary Vee. Why did Gary Vee take off? Well, because Gary Vee was Gary Vee.

Andrew [55:38]: Yeah. Absolutely. I’ve completely gone off track. I had this really—this really neat line I was going to draw between conversion rate optimization and the age of authenticity and stuff, and ended up telling you about William Shakespeare getting his toe stuck in a—in a faucet.

Rob [55:50]: So, you know what? That’s what we’re really good at is tipping people off their script or off their—so we do that on purpose, and I’m sure you probably do that when you get those telecommunication calls. It’s—it’s—it’s a lot of fun.

Andrew [56:01]: I found in a podcast I did a while ago—I’m just saying that just to sort of not—not soil my own the last one I did really sucked—long, long ago—I am going to say it was a different one. It—it was a podcast called the “Internet Marketing for Humans,” and I started—I decided I’d say yes to every PR email I got from a podcaster.

Andrew [56:20]: You—you must absolutely—must get them. “Hey, these guys look like a great fit.” And like, just reply and say, “Why?” “‘Cuz you love salmon fishing.” And I’ve never done that in my life. You’ve—your spreadsheets just got messed up.

Andrew [56:34]: But I decided I’d say yes to every single one of them. And I—I just did that on Pod Match. I just accepted everybody. Didn’t look at anything. Just went through and accepted, ‘cuz I figured it’s going to bring a lot of stuff. I’m kind of curious what it brings.

Rob [56:46]: Pod Match is a bit different. So that’s how we met. But Pod Match is a bit different because they—they connect. It’s a bit more intelligent. It’s a little bit smarter than that.

Andrew [56:57]: I—there was a new social network started that was supposed to be for creative people. I cannot even remember what it was called. And I just said, “Hey, anyone want to be on a podcast?” And I got inundated, and I said yes to every single one.

Andrew [57:09]: And what I found out was, a lot of the guests were—they’d clearly been trained by someone in PR, or they’d been prepped, or they’d been given a script. And a friend of mine was—was in a band who signed to quite a big record label—the same one as Nickelback—years ago. And he said like one of the first things the record label did was give them PR training.

Andrew [57:27]: They said, “Right, you going into an interview, you’ve got three messages you need to get across. Always bring the interviewer back around to one of your three core messages.” And I saw that so many times with having guests on my—on my—on my podcast that now—no, I—I’ll do what you do. I try and—occasionally I’ll try and derail them if I think they’re just—all right, they’ve given this message out 10 times already this week. That’s so uninteresting.

Rob [58:01]: I was getting kicked off of podcasts ‘cuz I was badmouthing Google. You got—you get kicked—you got kicked off?

Andrew [58:07]: I—I had—I had at least three that I could think of off the top of my head. They’re like, “Yeah, we can’t interview you anymore. This is done. We—we’re—we’re a Google partner, and we’re this, and we’re that. We can’t badmouth Google.”

Rob [58:19]: I’m like, “Partners—Google’s dead as we know it. It has to change. All search changed.”

Andrew [58:25]: I was—I was part of the Google partner program because I like the freebies they sent out. But all the Google partner—used be good back in the day. They used to be good—good freebies. But every—every phone call you get from the Google partner program is somebody at Google going, “Uh, yeah, we’ve noticed some opportunities for your clients campaigns.” You’re like, “What is it?” “Uh, they need to increase their spend.” “Yeah, of course they do.”

Andrew [58:52]: You know, like, the whole point—the—the whole—the whole point of—of managing Google Ads is trying to—try and give Google as little money as possible whilst your client gets as many sales as possible. That’s the thing.

Rob [59:06]: Well, it’s like—it’s like the—it’s in the world of SEO, you have people that have—and I guarantee you’ve had this happen—but, “Oh, you know, you’ve been doing my SEO work, but this guy called me and he says, ‘You’re not doing your job correctly.’ He has this whole report saying, ‘Look at this. Look at all the stuff you’re not doing.'” I’m like, “What do you think that report is?” They’re like, “I don’t—” I’m like, “That report is to sell you.”

Andrew [59:32]: Yeah, exactly. It doesn’t even have your company name on the report. It’s—I always think it’s a good job that other industries don’t do this. Can you imagine like a plumber ringing it up and going, “You—that plumber who fixed your toilet just—he didn’t know what he’s doing.” Like, “Well, how—how would you know?” “Well, the turds floating out your front door. You know, I drove a bike, and there’s water running out, so obviously something wasn’t right.”

Rob [59:56]: Yeah. I like that’s a great—that’s a great analogy because you’re right, there’s other industries that just don’t do that like—

Andrew [1:00:02]: No, but you know why they can do it inside of the world of marketing? It’s because there’s so little understanding from people—they can confuse, and we use the same words—kind of like the word “post.” “Post” can mean that you posted to Facebook. It can mean that you post out to your social media networks. It can mean that you wrote a blog inside of some website platforms like WordPress. It could mean that you’d use this tool over here because they called it “post.” And then you might have—oh, this person over here thinks it’s the post that goes in the ground.

Andrew [1:00:39]: I mean, we use terms to cause confusion. And the more we confuse somebody, the more you can charge. It’s the most messed up thing in the world. If I went to a dentist and he tried to sell to me by confusing me, I don’t think I would want to open my mouth and be injected. Do you know what I mean? But why—why sell by value? Sure. Sure. We—we all do that. That’s really important. But make sure the client’s going to understand the value of what they’re getting, because if you sell with confusion, they’re not going to stay with you.

Andrew [1:01:14]: “Mr. Andrew, you—you have a major problem inside your mouth, but you have to pay me $100 right now for me to tell you what that problem is.” “Okay.” “Now, if you want to be able to know the rest of that problem, that’s going to cost you another hundred bucks,” because now we’re just going to upcharge you throughout the whole process.

Andrew [1:01:32]: I’m—I’m trying to figure something out at the moment that I think I might be getting wrong. And I’d appreciate you—you guys, your opinion on this. So my sales process, when somebody contacts me, I have a nice conversation with them and find out, you know, if they’ve worked with SEO before and a few things like that. Then I go away, and I give them a free report. It’s normally like a Loom video, two or three minutes long.

Andrew [1:01:50]: And it just says, “Right, I’m looking at your website. These things are broken. You know, that—that can be fixed.” Oh, classic one we always see is you haven’t got one of your primary keywords in the navigation. So I worked with a landscaping company, and it said “Projects.” I said, “Why doesn’t that say ‘Landscaping Projects’?”

Andrew [1:02:08]: I—I try and give away as much value as I possibly can within two or three minutes. Things that they can go away and actually action. My—my logic has always been, show value, prove value, show—show something useful that they can go and do because the outcome is either they’re going to go do it and go, “Well, that made a difference.” Or they’re going to try and do it and go, “That’s trickier than I thought it was.” And then—then come back.

Andrew [1:02:32]: But I had another conversation with somebody recently said, “No, if you’re doing that, you’re just adding to the confusion.” So I—I don’t really—this is literally fresh in my head today. So I don’t really don’t have a—an answer for what’s right or wrong.

Rob [1:02:44]: I—I think knowledge is power. I think if you explain it in a very easy way and say this is what it is—it’s a good—good approach. We do that here. I think and Dean, you can disagree with me on that if you want. But we do that here. I mean, that’s the whole reason why we have the huddle. That’s the whole—we used to have a free program back way back in the day to then try to get them to upsell, kind of doing that premium model. That was a bust and didn’t work well, and we relied on Google way too much. And that’s a whole—we wasted a lot of money, which is a whole another conversation.

Rob [1:03:23]: But it’s one of those things to where they could take our blog posts, they could take our—our—our huddles that we do, and they would have enough knowledge if they wanted to go do it on their own, they almost could—there’s enough there.

Rob [1:03:35]: Now a lot of people confuse that of, “Well, you said it could be done for free.” Well, yeah, I mean, voice search registration can be done for free if you go register on all the right networks and spend the time to do it. It’s just going to take you time and effort. Or we could speed that process up for you. That choice is yours.

Rob [1:03:52]: I mean, my—my approach that I learned a long time ago—my family eats regardless, but I gave you that information. So I gave you enough to be able to show, not to just bombard you with reports. Here’s real information. Here’s real things that could be fixed today. And I think that has a lot of value to it, not confusion. Dean, what’s your thoughts?

Dean [1:04:11]: No, I agree with Andrew. I think you’re doing the—I—I would do it the same way. We do it the same way. Give it—you give out as much information as you can without giving away the—the farm, if you will. But it’s got to be valuable, and it shows that you understand their problem. And they’re—they’re simple fixes because SEO isn’t always just a real simple change this keyword, and it’s going to fix everything. But you can do simple things to show them, I—I—I like your approach on—on what you’re doing with that moon video.

Andrew [1:04:32]: Okay. That’s—that’s really, really good to hear. But it’s also because I want them—I want my clients to be empowered. I want them to, you know—we—we lost a client recently, and we took them from, say, bear in mind these numbers—the UK is a tiny country. We took them from 4,000 uniques a month to about 26 through a 2-year long program, mostly through a two-year long program of content revision. Just—they had like 500 blog posts.

Andrew [1:05:01]: And they got to the stage where they’re like, “Look, we—we need—we need to move our budget somewhere else because we’ve now got so much traffic that we need to focus on sales.” And we’re like, “Brilliant. That’s a win. That’s fantastic.” I mean, I’m going to miss the money ‘cuz that’s really useful. But that, you know, but that’s a win. They—they’ve—they’ve won at SEO for now.

Rob [1:05:20]: You’re like, “Damn it. I can’t buy that amp now.”

Andrew [1:05:25]: Yeah. It’ll be here in 90 days. Yeah, exactly. Like I said to the guy, he said—it was on a Saturday, and I—I took my whole rig down, you know, my pedals and guitar. I was like, “Yeah, I’ll take it.” And he said, “When do you need it by?” I was like, “I’m playing on Tuesday, like this coming Tuesday, in a fairly important gig.”

Rob [1:05:43]: “Oh.” Well, I know you said you had a hard stop and being able to do it at about an hour. We’re kind of at that point, so we’ll kind of wrap up. But Andrew, if anybody wants to find you, where do they find you at?

Andrew [1:05:57]: Search on YouTube for the Business Amplifier podcast, or come and have a look at the awful illustrations on my website at yeso.io.

Rob [1:06:04]: Oh, there isn’t—so I’ll just turn around and look at my own logo behind me—Yeseo.io.

Andrew [1:06:12]: Yeah. You know, everything starts to rhyme and go through, and then sometimes you second guess, but you spent so much time on a—on a domain. I’ve had that happen before.

Andrew [1:06:24]: See, I—the company was called until a few years ago—the company was called Andrew Laws Associates LTD. And the problem was that sounds like a middle-aged gay-haired man, which I undeniably am, but I found out—

Rob [1:06:34]: No, you say you’re a senior white-haired—senior—senior white-haired SEO. He’s—he’s generation X, so he—I’m the baby boomer here. I’m the old guy.

Andrew [1:06:48]: So I—I just—I just had a—a really tough job when I was young and lost all the color in my hair. So I found out a couple of years ago, Yes! is a K-pop star. I’m fairly sure we don’t get confused, but just in case anyone comes to the website, I’m afraid I’m terrible at singing. Absolutely awful.

Rob [1:07:06]: I can sing, but people ask me to do it far, far away.

Andrew [1:07:11]: Well, I mean, I—I get confused with Robert Downey Jr.

Rob [1:07:17]: Oh, really? Well, yeah, I mean, so I mean, having—Robert Downey—I mean, if anybody Googles “Robert Downey,” I’m not going to be number one that comes up.

Andrew [1:07:24]: Like—Google alerts when it first came about, I used to run Google alerts on loads of things around my own brands and—and every client. I found out that Andrew Laws is a corrupt politician in Australia or the production designer for “The Witcher.”

Rob [1:07:38]: And that’s the—those are the ones that came up first when I YouTubed you.

Andrew [1:07:45]: Oh, really? Firstly, I—you know, I talked about—I was like, “Who the hell’s coming on the podcast tomorrow?”

Andrew [1:07:51]: This is—you know, I said about having the separation between work and—and the cra—you know, the crazier side of my life. I’m known to most people as Andrew Culture. Andrew Laws is my real name. Andrew Culture is my stage name, my pen name when I’ve written books.

Andrew [1:08:10]: And I’ve had clients when I realized it was crossing over—I’ve had clients when I send them the first invoice, they’d say, “I thought your name was Andrew Culture. Why does it say Andrew Laws, you know, on the invoice?” “‘Cuz that’s my real name, you know. That’s who I actually am.”

Andrew [1:08:21]: But I can’t smush them together, unfortunately, because that would make—Andrew Lucha—Andrew Claw—Andrew Claus? No, that sounds too Christmassy there.

Rob [1:08:29]: Now you got the gray hair. Now you got to get a belly.

Andrew [1:08:37]: When—when the universe is trying—when the universe is trying to point you in a direction, sometimes you just have to listen. So come back next time, and I’ll be wearing a—a red suit.

Rob [1:08:46]: Well, thank you so much, Andrew, for coming on today. It’s been—we’d love to have you back in the future.

Andrew [1:08:53]: I’d love to. I think we could deep dive into some really good stuff.

Rob [1:08:59]: Yeah, we’ve gone deep today. I’ve really enjoyed this. So thank you so much, and thank you for listening. Make sure you like, make sure you subscribe, and do all the good stuff at the end.

Robert Downey

Robert Downey: Revolutionizing Local Marketing and Voice Search Optimization Robert Downey is a distinguished figure in the dynamic world of local marketing and digital innovation. As the co-founder of SimplyBeFound.com, he has proven to be a master in local marketing strategy and a pioneer in voice search optimization. With a career spanning nearly three decades, Robert has dedicated himself to enhancing the visibility of small businesses and fostering stronger connections between these enterprises and their local communities. Robert's journey in the marketing realm began in 1995, and since then, he has led over 1,000 marketing campaigns, contributing significantly to developing more than 5,000 websites. His expertise spans various industries, equipping him with a nuanced understanding of their unique challenges and opportunities. This extensive experience broadens his skill set and cements his position as a thought leader in local business marketing. One of the keys to Robert's success is his ability to deliver impactful results using local SEO strategies. He excels in this area, demonstrating that businesses can use small advertising budgets to be successful. Instead, they need the right strategies to reach consumers actively seeking their services. His approach needs to include the importance of bridging the gap between local businesses and potential customers, which has often hindered the growth and visibility of many small businesses. As a fourth-generation entrepreneur, the entrepreneurial spirit runs deep in Robert's veins. This heritage has ingrained in him a profound understanding of business growth and evolution, especially crucial in the fast-paced startup environment. At SimplyBeFound.com, he applies this strategic vision to simplify the local business discovery process, leading to significant growth of the platform, an expanded user base, and increased revenue streams. Beyond Simply Be Found, Robert's achievements include launching over ten successful online businesses and startups, a testament to his versatility and expertise in the digital business landscape. He brings a unique blend of programming skills, marketing acumen, and business development experience, offering a fresh and invaluable perspective to today's digitally-centered business challenges. In essence, Robert Downey is more than just a local marketing expert. He is a catalyst for growth, a digital marketing innovator, and a mentor to businesses striving for success. His extensive experience, profound industry knowledge, and unwavering dedication to the success of small businesses make him an indispensable ally for any business aiming to enhance its local presence and achieve sustainable growth.

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