How To Add An SEO Service

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Verbatim text

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Welcome to episode number 121 of the Agency Trailblazer Podcast. This is your host, Lee. And on today’s show, we’re gonna be talking with Rob Watson who’s gonna help us start to understand how we could apply SEO services into our agencies. So sit back, relax, grab a notepad and pen, and enjoy the show. This podcast is brought to you by the Agency Trailblazer community. Is agency life stressing you out? Then it is our mission to help you build an agency that you love. We’ve created a community which includes the agency reset roadmap that will allow you to get your agency back on the right track. We also have lots of noble, straight to the point, easy to consume workshops.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We have a thriving community of other agency owners, and we all wrap up every month with a mastermind call with myself and sometimes a special guest where we unpack your questions. For more details, check out agency trailblazer.com. Welcome to a conversation with me, your host, Lee Jackson. And today, it’s mister Rob Watson from Click To Sale, the SEO god guru king Overlord. What’s your official job title?

Rob Watson:
Well, it was digital marketing consultant, but your your versions all sound better than mine. Mine’s too British. And

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I’m pretty sure mine is better, to be honest. Yeah. I feel like it’s absolutely the best title ever. Yeah. Yeah. I do that. Yeah. Why not? Well, I wonder how your clients would actually react if you started sending emails to them, like signing off SEO Overlord.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. I

Lee Matthew Jackson:
got that. Minions. I don’t I don’t know if that would go down too well, to be honest.

Rob Watson:
It’s not not the best way to reach clients and clients.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Please do not take my advice.

Rob Watson:
No. Maybe not.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I beseech you. Yeah. Guys, if you don’t remember who Rob is, he has been on the show before. And if my memory serves me right, mate, we were talking local SEO.

Rob Watson:
We were indeed.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s right. So go ahead. Go to agency trailblazer.com. Use the new fancy search thingy Bobbidoodle that we created using facet WP, which is a great plugin to go ahead and find that episode, and we’ll also put a link in the show notes. But today, I believe we’re gonna be unpacking SEO for agencies. So that’s actually how can we add SEO as a service to our own businesses. Am I correct?

Rob Watson:
Correct.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Good. Because for me as an agency owner, SEO is something that I kind of push to the side because it seems to be complicated. It’s like the goalposts are forever changing. Google are always changing their algorithm. And my knowledge of SEO really is installing Yoast or something along those lines and just teaching the client how to set a focus keyword and make sure they make it green. And I imagine that is not SEO. I imagine that’s just how to put content in really nicely and make something green.

Rob Watson:
It is a it’s a good beginning of SEO, and you’d be amazed how far that puts you ahead of some agencies. The most frustrating well, just to to backpedal a bit. The the reason I had this idea to put this contact this podcast outline together

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Mhmm.

Rob Watson:
Was 2 things. Partly when I went freelance, I found that I quite easily and quite quickly got up to speed with the level of work I needed through working with agencies. And, the content for this podcast is coming back because I’m starting to make a real conscious effort now to to target other agencies because I just found myself in a position where I’m thinking, my god. I’ve got 3 agencies on board pretty quickly. You’ve all approached me. Just imagine if I actually tried. And it was which again is not you know, is a very un British big headed thing to to be to be saying. But, yeah, it’s but it’s you do you do see even in the handful that I’ve started working with some really common problems with where agencies go wrong with getting SEO on board.

Rob Watson:
And it’s not coincidence that most of the agencies I’ve worked with that are not doing it so well are quite sort of, design led. Some of them might be graphic design agencies that have segued into the web out of necessity because they still wanna make a living, but they haven’t quite picked up the SEO bit. And as an agency owner, they might get someone in who’s picking up SEO as part of a broad role, and they don’t really know how to hold them to account because they don’t know it themselves. And it’s, it’s a real challenge.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That is a a scary thing. And I think that’s some one of the reasons why, personally, I have avoided SEO in our agency. We’re very often we we build the site. We’re often asked, can you do the SEO as well? And I will always say, categorically, we do not do it. You need to get a 3rd party involved. We will show you how to install Yoast and how to make it go green, and that will be where our responsibility ends. The other thing, obviously, we will do is make sure that we’re doing w three c valid code, a a check code, etcetera, so that we’re at least ticking a few of those things off, which I don’t even know if are even relevant to SEO anymore. They used to be.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But we at least say, look. We’ll we’ll do some due diligence for you and give you a quality site build, but the rest has to be up to you guys. So, I mean, how do I, as an agency owner, then begin to get up to speed so that I can either do the SEO myself or as part of my team or make the right decision when I’m hiring that resource in, be they a freelancer or be they a full time employee?

Rob Watson:
Well, I’ll answer that in a second. What what I would say as well is, if you go back a few episodes, anyone who’s not heard it already, I really recommend you listen to Martin Huntbach’s episode because he talks about almost the opposite of what I’m gonna say. He he explains why he stopped doing SEO, which is worth in the interest of balance going back and looking at that as well, because you might find that you might listen to his episode and think you and I both wanna help other agency owners get on with things that are important to them. Martin, funny enough, though, he does still make sure that his clients are sorted in terms of SEO Yeah. But just in a really creative way, doesn’t he? So it’s and and he’s got a post on his blog about why he stopped doing SEO, which I think is in really I found a really interesting read even though it’s sort of on the face of it looks to be going in complete opposite direction to what we’re talking about. I thought it was, I’m sure you’ll agree, it was a great episode.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
We’ll make sure we put that in the show notes.

Rob Watson:
So, yeah, to go back to the actual question, so I’m not being like a politician and swerving the question. But yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I was about to accuse you of it. Yeah. I

Rob Watson:
mean, the one the one word answer, how do you get SEO into your agency? I’d say the one word answer is gradually, and I think that’s where a lot of people go wrong with it. Because they’re used to working on website builds or it might be something, you know, rebranding or something That’s a long term project. And when it’s a 100% finished and signed off is where they get the bulk of the money or maybe all of it. And they’re a bit used to that sort of mentality. Yeah. And so they don’t wanna do SEO until they can do it a 100% perfect. They look into the what that entails and think, nah, not for me. So, yeah, so I’m gonna go, we’ll give out the details at the end of the guest book.

Rob Watson:
I’ve I’ve put together a guide for getting SEO into your web agency, which looks at all the different ways you can do it. So you’ve gotta, first of all, think about the resources. So it might be you get, I don’t know, an apprentice. It might be you. If you hired in an experienced SEO, you’ve got no business to give them on day 1, and they won’t have come cheap. And if they’re then you’d have to have, tempt them away from another job if they’re any good at what they’re doing. So it’s just about looking at those different resources and saying, well, how are we gonna actually resource it people wise? You might outsource it to a freelancer, then you got the decision, do we kind of white label it, or are we just transparent about point pointing in the direction of this person? It’s just about making all those decisions. There’s a 101 other things to to discuss as well.

Rob Watson:
Like, you’ve got to think about what software tools do we need. So there are a number of kind of, they call them SEO sort of Swiss army knife type tools like Semrush, which is one that I use as also Ahrefs, which I’ve used in the past, which is also very good.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
These are two names that you will struggle to say after about 5 pints, by the way.

Rob Watson:
Yes. Yes. And, SE Ranking, which is even more it has to be pronounced carefully after 5 pints. I don’t know whether, Jonathan Ross uses that one.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, Brits will get that. I’m not gonna explain it.

Rob Watson:
Yes. We’re we’re sort of, skirting around the explicit content

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Moving on.

Rob Watson:
To rules there. Moving on.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Family show. Sorry. It’s not. I can’t imagine anyone sitting listening to this with their family, but, anyway, carry on.

Rob Watson:
Don’t your family listen to this?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Mine are the same. They have no idea what I do. They just think I’m some weird nerd chatting to people in the back office.

Rob Watson:
That’s it. I mean, as if they but, no. And that that is the thing is that I think you should rather than try and get a 100% proficient in SEO before you do it, I absolutely urge all agencies that they really must be doing keyword research so they can they can plan out the content of the website to match what people are searching for because that is the worst thing, and that is one of the recurring themes of of the agents who have have dealt with at first is unpicking a site that they’ve just built that the client was initially really happy with, and then having to tell them, oh, well, we didn’t structure it right because we didn’t do keyword research.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So is that right at the very beginning then?

Rob Watson:
Yeah. It

Lee Matthew Jackson:
should Even before designs, are we talking keyword research is one of the very first things we’re doing?

Rob Watson:
It’s the first part of SEO. You should start to think about clients as well first. But, of course, if you’re doing a website or a rebrand for somebody, that’s, I would hope, already been picked up. So there’d be something to go on there where if you say, if you’re working on, SEO with a freelancer, you can give them the brief and say, this is the client. This is what they do. This is their aspirations. This is what they hope to wanna get out of it. Some competitor stuff as well.

Rob Watson:
Because you’ll always get the client will always come to the agency saying, oh, I wanna knock this this lot off page 1. And, you know, there’s always there’s quite often one big competitor they wanna go after.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You would be surprised though how many agencies we work with who do not have a lot of that information upfront. A lot of it is just about the design. It feels like they’re missing out on a very good opportunity for a good conversation. So they’re kind of setting themselves up to fail because they don’t have those conversations. So it’s it’s good to hear this from you that it sounds like we need to be making sure not only we’re discussing the importance of, you know, the target audience for with regards to the design, but it sounds like we also need to be making sure we’ve got those keywords or at least some of them or an understanding of them nailed at the very beginning.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. Yeah. Absolutely. So that’s one of the first things you should do. And then, logical next bit after that is the on page stuff. And I’ll name drop him again just like I did in the local SEO podcast we did before, but Brian Dean of backlinko.com. If you if you search for just Brian Dean on page SEO, he has a blog post where he breaks down what it takes for great on page SEO, and he updates that every year with anything new. So there’s there’s all the obvious things like title tags, making sure you’ve got your keywords in your h one tag early on in your body content as well, all attributes on your images with keywords in.

Rob Watson:
If you’ve got rich media such as you even if it’s a a YouTube embed video or a PDF guide, get those on there as well. And also the surprise the one that surprises many people is if you link out to quite an authoritative source, that’s helpful as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Really?

Rob Watson:
So there’s all sorts of yeah. So there’s, as long as to a good quality source, to to link to a say a relevant BBC article on a on a particular subject or something like that.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Or or to a relevant anglecrown.com article as well, obviously.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. Of course. Yes. And that yeah. The most authoritative source there is, of course. And things like, the URL structure, you don’t necessarily have to have nowadays. Google’s a lot smarter at at spying SEO structures. So something that a couple of SEO experts have looked at, Brian Dean I think Brian Dean has looked at this.

Rob Watson:
He said, if you got the keyword very early on in the in the URL and it’s a short URL, that seems to work better nowadays. So you don’t have to have directories and subdirectories. Google can actually figure out the hierarchy for itself a lot better just by looking at your internal link structure. So get that keyword nice and early in the URL. But if you’ve if you’ve done good keyword research and then followed good practice for Onpage as well, you can’t go too far wrong. You you you’re in the right direction already. And that is kind of that is work that you shouldn’t be ashamed to be charging for anyway.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But that’s like that that we could say and sorry to interrupt, but that’s like that’s step 1.

Rob Watson:
Mhmm.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that’s part of the gradual process. So you’re just adding step 1 would be adding the keyword research

Rob Watson:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Service because that is gonna make sure you’re building a site that has the content that is relevant to the target audience. So that’s a good thing anyway. But that’s also going to set you up to be able to hand over then to the SEO guy. So they’ve got an SEO guy. That’s step 1. Then step 2, we can kind of follow a process through and and obviously, as an agency, the staff up will build up our own internal understanding of SEO so that we can then take that the next level.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. Absolutely. Because, I mean, I have some that I still do everything from beginning to end, and it’ll include me still doing the keyword research. And there are others now that are getting, smarter to it and doing it. And it’s as a freelancer, I I see that as such a positive. It’s not the fact that I don’t see that as that, oh, they’re they’re taking on too much of the work themselves. I see that as great that I can then come into a site that’s already been built well in the 1st place and look at how they can take it to the next level. So, yeah, whether you whether you do it yourself or whether you whether you get a freelancer in to do it and whether you price it transparently or you hide it in the overall site build budget, Keep I really, really cannot recommend strongly enough that you do keyword research.

Rob Watson:
Because, also, if you make it very transparent what the keyword research is with the, clients, they’re often really surprised. And it’s it’s a real sort of, eureka moment still for a lot of clients. And if you can put that maybe alongside some ranking data as well and say, these are the keywords you wanna go after, and these are the ones where you’re already on page 1 versus these are the ones where you’re on page 5, and you’re nowhere near. We need to put some work into it.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s actually quite exciting because I’m just thinking of what I would like to rank for as an agency. So Angle Crown, I want to rank for WordPress agency, and I’m hovering around page 2 all the time, and it’s really frustrating. I wanna be at the top of page 1 for WordPress agency. Page 2 isn’t bad, though.

Rob Watson:
Doesn’t everybody?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Well, that’s true. But, it it is more for for design agent. I guess the other one could be PSD to WordPress, but I presume that’s an extremely competitive phrase as well.

Rob Watson:
I don’t know. You just never know till you search it. That’s the difficult bit. So, your your keyword research, depending on what’s which tool you use, it will it will throw up the vol the monthly volumes of that keyword in your chosen country or, territory.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Oh, yeah. That’s true. I always forget this. Always forget that I you can local you can, like, you can hone down, can’t you? I forget it. I even forgot it on our podcast that we did last time, and I was blown away when we had that conversation that, you know, you can level the playing field a little bit, can’t you, just by picking particular areas. Because I don’t need to rank, you know, at PSD to WordPress in, I don’t know, Indonesia. But I certainly wanna be ranking in other countries where there are agencies that I wanna connect with.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. Of course. And there there are some some searches. If you did WordPress off the top of my head, I don’t know what it’d bring up. But off the top of that, if you if you looked at WordPress agency, I don’t know whether it bring up localized results or not. So I don’t know whether it’d trigger the map results as part of the results page. It probably would. It does with design agency, marketing agency, and that sort of thing.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. It doesn’t actually trigger. Oh, you know what? Oh, I’m back on page 1 again. I’m 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6 down. Well, that’s not bad, is it?

Rob Watson:
And is that an incognito tab as well?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Or is it skewed by Shall we try that for real, please? Shall we? Oh, damn it. Damn it. I always get excited. I always get excited, and then I go in, and then I realize yeah. You’re totally right. Let’s have a look. Let’s go in incognito. Am I even on this home page? Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Incognito. What happens if you do it?

Rob Watson:
I don’t know. I’m not

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You’re not in near a computer?

Rob Watson:
I don’t know. But

Lee Matthew Jackson:
yeah. So anyone listening to the show, email me. Let me know what I’m ranking in your country. That’s exciting.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. Indonesia?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Indonesia. If you’re in Indonesia, let me know where I’m ranking.

Rob Watson:
So yeah. So segueing way off topic here. But, so, yeah, keyword research. What I then come up with is a is a plan that sort of says, well, these are the keywords you want. These are the main ones that are really obvious ones that are really core, and you should have pages of dedicated content on that subject. And then there’s sort of the secondary ones who say, okay. There’s a lot of question based ones that would make great blog posts or FAQ content on your product pay product and service pages to flesh that out more. Because you wanna be getting good quality long form cut.

Rob Watson:
Nowadays, you a lot of search results will be sort of up to a 1000 words or so. Yeah. You know, some if someone’s looking for help on a really specific topic, you you’re looking at a sort of 2,000 word plus blog post might be what ranks best for that. So it’s it’s all relative, of course, to the industry you’re in, because, for example, design and marketing and design agencies are renowned for not writing a hell of a lot on their their websites. So you don’t need to do a 2,000 word piece when everyone’s doing 300. But it’s, just look at the industry you’re in. And, of course, the important part of keyword research that many people overlook is actually doing some Google searches based on those keywords to make it make sure that it is bringing up results that you think are what people are looking for. Yeah.

Rob Watson:
Because Google talks a lot about what they call searches intent. They say it’s not about keywords. It’s about searches intent. Yeah. Think about the the keyword the the intention behind that keyword and what someone’s hoping to achieve. And and, of course, it might be ambiguous. I think I’ve used the example with you before about how a company that was doing they sold gas oil and gas valves that went on, oil rigs and stuff, and they had a great reputation for sort of the after sales bit and repairing them, but, they wanted to show up number 1 for valve repair, but that’s also a form of heart surgery. And it’s one of those rare queries where Google is actually a bit conflicted about it doesn’t know what people want when they key that in.

Rob Watson:
So half the pages about half the page results are about heart surgery and half of them are about valves. So it’s like, yeah, you occasionally get this little anomaly. And if you don’t search for the for the main head terms just to make sure, just to sense check them, it can end up you can end up looking a bit silly.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Now, you mentioned searchers intent, but you just reminded me of the phrase commander’s intent. I’ve heard you and seen you mention this a few times in the agency trailblazer community. Can you just kind of unpack what that means?

Rob Watson:
Yeah. Well, it’s kind of I mentioned it in the trailblazer community when I was talking about planning of my own goals for the year and the way that I work. And it just seemed to strike a chord with a few people who then, I was referring to a certain book that I’d read, and they all 2 or 3 people came back and said, oh, I’ve ordered that book, or I put it on my Audible download list. There’s a book called Made to Stick by Chip and Dan Heath, which is I think it’s about 10 years old now. Since I remember reading it when my son was a was a baby, and he’s 10, so it must be about that. And, yeah, it’s it’s a great book about communication and that there there are 2 psychology doctors who break it down and say, well, okay, what is the science behind sticky messages? And one of the concepts they brought in was what they call the commander’s intent. And they said, they they said, it’s the way that the military plan. And they are in a sort of very dynamic, unpredictable, resource constrained environment.

Rob Watson:
They have to plan on their feet. So instead of having really detailed plans where they say where they take a gantt chart into the feet into the field with them, and then they say, oh, hang on. Such and such is supposed to be doing something here, but he’s in the medical room now. So what do we it would be ridiculous, you know. So it’s the commander’s intent basically is a is a way that you just look at the 3 or 4 key things that you absolutely have to do. And there is no shame in being very much make it up as you go along about your planning. And so if you think of dynamic and predictable environments, well, I think digital agency pretty much falls into that category. You you have to plan a lot like the military.

Rob Watson:
So it’s just about saying, instead of developing insanely detailed 5 year plans, just think about this year. What are the 4 3 or 4 things you wanna achieve that are gonna help you achieve your goals? Simple as that. Work backwards off those in each month, say to yourself, what are the things I gotta do to get closer to each one of these? That make sense?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That makes sense. I’ve I’ve also I have, this terribly attractive button on Amazon called one click buy. I may have accidentally clicked it on that book.

Rob Watson:
I need to start dishing out affiliate links, don’t I? Because that’s how I really

Lee Matthew Jackson:
because you could have at least got 10 10 p for that.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. Because I remember, I I do I think I mentioned on the last podcast, I do tutoring in digital marketing for this on the CIM qualification as well. Mhmm. And I’m always name dropping books in that, and then sometimes people will say during the coffee break, yeah, I’ve ordered that book, he said. And, I think, oh, that that 10 p gone. I could’ve retired off all these 10 p’s.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
All those 10 p’s. I mean, this is brilliant. First of all, we’ve established get started gradually. We’ve we’ve unpacked a bit of buyer sorry, of Commander’s intent. Obviously, we’ve just name dropped a great book of which we should make sure that by the time this podcast is live, it’s your affiliate link in there, mate.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. I’ll arrange it. I’ll make it happen this time.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Where do you think though agencies typically go typically go wrong when they think about introducing SEO?

Rob Watson:
Well, just like I said, they think they look at it, and they think, I can’t do this. There’s just too much there. And they try and do it 100%. They quite quickly realize that they can’t. And, they leave it at that. And I think they should the in the free guide, which we’re gonna we’re gonna plug at the end, I’ve looked at the main ways that you can do it. So I’ve said you could you could hire an experienced SEO person. These are the pros and cons of that.

Rob Watson:
You could get someone in as an apprentice and train them up. These are the pros and cons of that. But it you shouldn’t make yourself feel as though you’ve got to make a decision and say, right. We’re doing it this way. We’re getting an apprentice. We’re gonna have it all up and running by the end of the year. Because as you learn the process, you can do stuff that’s good quality work with billable work. Like, for example, as we’ve said already, keyword research and good on page planning, and coming up with the keyword strategies of the client and and and being being able to say to them then, now we’ve we’ve we’ve done all of this for you.

Rob Watson:
We’ve even got a list of half a dozen blog posts. All we need you is to to to sort of flesh out that content from here. But we we even know some common questions that people ask. And then just working your way through it from there and learning it learning it gradually and knowing when you know a certain area of SEO well enough to to move on to the next step.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So really break it down into core services within SEO? Because SEO is a huge term anyway. I don’t think anyone really understands what’s involved, at least not third parties. You know? Know? And I’m a butcher. I’m I’m launching my site. I’ve heard the term SEO. I actually have absolutely no idea what you’re gonna do for me, but I’ve been told I have to pay you £500 a month. Whereas if you’re breaking it out into these different services, I can actually understand that as the butcher and understand what you’re doing and understand what I’m paying for. And, equally, if I then wanna kind of deep dive in this and get extra services, you know, where your services stop at whichever point, then you can then recommend to me, can’t you, and say, okay.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Well, this is where our service has stopped for 2018. We’ve decided that we’re gonna offer this, this, and this part of SEO. But if you wanna do a deep dive and go and go advanced, then we can recommend our preferred partner or which might be a third party company like yourself. Or it could be that, like you said, they’ve got somebody in house, or they’re they’re having someone join, at the end of the year, and then they can then start to offer that service in the future, but certainly not try and do everything. Mhmm. And then get kinda get that third party involved at some point.

Rob Watson:
And then you you know, there there can still be I’m I’m troubled now. I’ve got this vision of you in a butcher’s apron with a meat cleaver.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
But I used to work in a butcher’s. It’s exactly why I gave this, I won’t tell you what I had to do, but it was gross. If you wanna find out what I used to have to do in the butchers, join agencytrailblazer.com, and I’ll tell you in the forum.

Rob Watson:
I like it. Good angle.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It’s a weird angle, mate. If people wanna join based on that, then I would question why they’re joining the community. But, anyway, carry on.

Rob Watson:
But now I kinda lost my train of thought there. But, yeah. The, and and there will become a level where you still might wanna outsource certain things. And Yeah. I mean, even as a calling myself a bit of an SEO specialist, there are certain things where I would say, it’s all about knowing your limits. And even as a as a a freelancer, I will say, I’ll know my limits. And if someone came along with a a massive inventory ecommerce business, for example, and they’re trying to go head to head with Amazon on a few things, I would know my depth. I would not be ashamed in saying, well, okay.

Rob Watson:
I I I probably need to either get some external help on this and get some specialized, for example, some link building because I’ve never done the you know, I’m not used to that working at that kind of scale of the links you would need to try and compete with Amazon. So it’s, you know, that nobody knows everything. But the I don’t know if you you probably know this already and might even have mentioned it last time, but Google looks now at over 200 factors but doesn’t say what those 200 factors are so that people don’t scam them. And I there was a I was at Brighton SEO the 1 year, and the the keynote speaker said to that said at the end, it’s, we we are all as SEO people, we’re all winging it to various degrees because nobody knows outside of Google what’s in the algorithm, and even a lot of people within Google don’t know what exactly what’s in the algorithm. So it’s That’s scary, Gary. We all know our limits.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Yeah. Yeah.

Rob Watson:
But it’s it’s just about putting together a a proven strategy saying, like, hey. I can I’ve got examples here where I’ve put the basics in place. It’s a small local business. I’ve managed to get them to rank your butcher shop, for example. It doesn’t need loads of links from the BBC or, or Angledcrown. He just needs, probably some local citations will be enough to get him showing up on local searches because that’s all he needs to to be. He doesn’t need to take over the world. And it’s about being able to, I I think quite quickly in a small agency, which is putting a few basics in place, can really compete for their clients on their local SEO based search terms.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. If they’ve got a got a large client that competes nationally in a really competitive market, that’s when and they probably need to get someone else to to add the next level stuff as well.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You see, you just made that sound really easy, but I don’t think it is. It’s not that easy for me because I would not have connected all of that. So I think one of the I think that really highlights your point about taking it gradually because you have learned that because through trial and through, you know, through trial and error, through having clients in the past and working your way up, you’ve worked all of that out. So I think that really does highlight your point, doesn’t it, of don’t try and offer full service SEO tomorrow and employ someone who may or may not know what they’re doing. But, actually, just take those steps gradually because you’ll start to pick up those really important details with regards to citations versus third party links. Because when you told me third party links, I’d have been telling the butcher tomorrow, hey, mate, you need to get the BBC to link. You need to link to the BBC or whatever it is. Mhmm.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Whereas, actually, because of your experience, because you have built up this experience over time instead of just jumping in it with both feet, you have this experience now, and this is something that comes to mind. Mhmm. That’s cool. I like that. Alright. Good. Oh, yeah. That’s good.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So tell me, resourcing. Yep. How can we prepare? We’ve decided that we’re gonna put SEO in our agency. We’re obviously, we’re gonna do gradually, etcetera. But how how are we gonna set our resource sorry. How are we gonna set up our agency for success? What do we need to get? Do we need to employ a whole team of people? How do we get how do we get started?

Rob Watson:
Well, as a consultant, I’d have to start that on so with it depends. So it depends on the

Lee Matthew Jackson:
size of How long is a piece of string?

Rob Watson:
Yeah. So it depends on the size of your agency, the type of the client base, and that sort of thing. And then it’s just about getting up to speed quickly on keyword research. Keyword research, I think, is it is pretty common sense, the basics of it. As I’ve just described with my valve repair example, and as I’ve described with the the fact that you need to Google your head search terms as well just to make sure they are what you you think they are. You know, there’s a few little pitfalls that first timers might fall foul of, but, you know, they quickly learn from those. So, yeah, I think just learning, keyword research. I think they do need some sort of a software tool and I at the moment, I’m really liking Semrush.

Rob Watson:
Some people, if they’ve got an ad got access to an AdWords account that’s got some money going through it, still use the Google Keyword Planner. I would say that I’m finding it less reliable than it used to be at times. But I would say, like I said to I think it was Michael McGinty in the ATB community.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Mhmm.

Rob Watson:
If you’re doing that, that’s that’s still better than nothing. It’s still better than a lot of agencies do. But if you need a keyword research tool Semrush has a fantastic keyword research tool. It’s called keyword magic, where you it just gives you it’s just better than the Google tool at giving you various, variations on a keyword. I pay, I think it’s about a couple of 100 quid a month How much? My Semrush account. There are cheaper ones available, and it’s got the the keyword research tool within it. That would, I mean, if you’re serious about SEO and and getting it as a as an ongoing services

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Then that’s a drop in the ocean.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. It does do a lot of other things besides keyword research. It gives you all the rank tracking and that sort of thing and pronounce that one carefully as well. And there’s the the gives you a sort of an ongoing technical audit and gives you a a a basically, spits out a to do list of any technical issues with your site and gives you weekly updates by email. So it’s, that’s really important to get something like that on board if you are serious about SEO. Getting yourself really well versed in Brian Dean’s on page ranking code. That that’s, you know, just a great free resource that tells you pretty much everything you need to know about on page. And as he updates it over time, just keep an eye on that that blog post of his.

Rob Watson:
Mhmm. And then you you’re well away you’re well on the way to getting, much better than agencies that aren’t doing SEO.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think what I’m gleaning from this as well is is not only I mean, I was talking about the resource, but I think what you’re saying is is you need some of the tools in place even before you get the resources involved. Doing it gradually again. Yeah. Doing it gradually is at least gonna give you some experience or some exposure to some of these tools. If you are a big agency, you’re taking on big contracts. I presume there’s gonna be I guess there’s 2 ways of doing this. You either spend 6 months or so getting exposed to SEO and doing some training so that you can understand whom you may need to hire. Or, alternatively, you can partner with someone like yourself to actually get started and or use someone like yourself to help get team members involved.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
So so, for example, if I was gonna start up an SEO department in my business, I would connect with you, Rob. And I’d say, Rob, you know, can you come and help me interview the right people for this role? So I guess that’s another way that you could do or use to to make sure you’re finding the right people because there are so many people that say they can do SEO, and so many companies that I know are charging 100 of pounds a month. And I have literally to this day no idea what they’re actually doing every single month, which is very unfortunate because that gives SEO consultants a bad name. I’m sure you’ve you’ve seen and experienced this before in the past.

Rob Watson:
Yep. Yeah. Absolutely. And I’ve it’s a real open brief with my clients. I have said to them that I’m always happy to sort of train up their staff and gradually phase myself out of certain bits of the work, and it’s just always a great one to sort of argue against your own self interest to to make people trust you. And the the fact that I’m willing to train them to, take some of that that lower end work away. Yeah. In fact, it has the the opposite effect, because so far, it’s not I’ve not really got involved that much in training of of agency staff, not so much on SEO.

Rob Watson:
I have more on AdWords. But, there a lot of them, as they build trust in me, are happy to just keep me working on it anyway. But, yes, it it’s something you can do. I I know a few guys within the UK that do that sort of thing. Just train help training up agencies. And, of course, as I said, it’s something I’m happy to get involved with myself.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I imagine as well though that if you do come in and say that we’re we’re even willing to train your team. At some point, there is gonna be the thought process by the client that although that is all well and good, you are keeping your finger on the pulse or, you know, the 3rd party agency are keeping their fingers on the pulse of SEO. It’s a changing game. Things are changing all the time.

Rob Watson:
Yeah.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And it’s actually good to keep someone like yourself on the books as it were.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. It just might be, a lesser involvement over time. So for example, they might get an apprentice who’s you you you know from your own experience with the risk of their knowledge just grows exponentially every year, and their ability to do a good job grows in line with that. Yeah. And it might be that they just need me as, then I actually could call myself an SEO overlord who just comes in as their as their mentor on a maybe once a quarter basis just to sense check their work. Yeah. And it’s, that that might be a good way of working. And that’s why I said that there are there are as many ways of doing this as there are agencies, and it’s just about finding the approach that works best for you and using commander’s intent to think flexibly.

Rob Watson:
And a a couple of other little practicalities. Like, for example, I have a Semrush account and, I’m very I’m I’m always very careful with with sort of other people’s client data. In in theory, most of I’ve got information on their website and how it’s performing and the technical strengths and weaknesses of that website. Now it’s all it’s actually public domain info because anyone who wanted to keep tabs on that site could do it and just as as easily as I can. But it’s just, whether you get those tools in house so that someone’s a third party is not sat there without information readily available on their laptop on your client’s site. You should think about things like that as well quite carefully. And another one to think about is the income that you get from it. I think part of the reasons that Martin Huntbach had moved away from SEO, I think I think it was him that had said someone had said to me recently about, well, the trouble with SEO is because it’s ongoing.

Rob Watson:
You could lose it at any time. So you might wanna think carefully about what you do with the money you get from SEO. SEO. You might wanna say, let’s keep that as let let’s make our bread and butter from making websites and we rely on that. We work on our pipeline to make sure that’s always full. Let’s treat SEO money that we come in as that we get in as discretionary. We keep that to one side and then we keep that for any sort of nice to have projects like like yourself when you need a whole new suite of, IT equipment. You could maybe keep that as a separate pot somewhere.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. Because that is money that you the client could say, well, actually, it’s not working for us or well, actually, it is working for us and we’ve got all the traffic we need now. So we’ll turn the tap off. It’s more volatile than your web design income. So does that make sense?

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That makes sense. Because I presume there’s gonna be more work upfront. Because one thing I’ve never really understood is how agencies are able to continue to charge 5, 6 100, £10,000 a month or whatever it is because I’ve heard all sorts of things for ongoing SEO. And when I’ve spoken to the end client, they’ve I’ve said, well, when did you last talk to them? And they said, well, we haven’t well, our last meeting was a year ago. Mhmm. That that kind of blows my mind as to what is actually going on behind the scenes. What are they really doing? I mean, that would be great. I guess it would be amazing to have that sort of income, wouldn’t it? But that does worry me.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think I I’m getting the what I’m getting from you is is that unless there is ongoing communications, then it does in theory phase out because there is a lot of it’s kind of at the beginning and you measure it, and then it then takes along. And as long as they can as long as you train the the end client to do the right things, it’s just going to tick along.

Rob Watson:
Yeah. SEO and AdWords are both similar in that they have they’re quite front loaded in terms of cost, but clients like to the simplicity of paying a monthly fee. So it’s just about how you square that off. Yeah. So but it’s, the also the results don’t come quickly. So the fact that the, if you have to spread the the initial bit over 2 months because you say, well, with the keyword research and everything else, that’s a lot of work. So the keyword research might be all that we do in month 1. It’s about just finding an an ongoing sensible level of cost that works for all parties and just making sure that you’re feeding back and saying, well, okay, what we.

Rob Watson:
It’s a no brainer that you should be looking at digging into your analytics data to say, well, what’s coming from SEO. And what I like to do with with my clients is say, well, let’s let’s measure that over a 3 month and a 6 month rolling average just so that you’re not just knee jerking and based on 1 or 2 good good or bad months. And that you’ve seen a true picture of how SEO is performing. If you’ve got a really really seasonal business, like I’ve got one that sells Christmas trees and stuff. I think, well, you the only time frame that makes any sense is to look at a 12 month rolling average because you’ve got to include the Christmas Christmas peak in there. You’re just looking at your your your level of traffic and your conversions that are coming from SEO over time just to make sure it’s actually adding something because it’s, you should absolutely be measuring your conversions. And, if not, it might be that drive calls instead of, sales, but there are there are various tools like this thing called ruler analytics or there’s, call tracking services like call tracks that can see the full multichannel picture of saying, well, SEO is bringing people here, and this is what they’re doing as a result.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
That’s phenomenal. Mate, this has been an absolute eye opener. I I think it’s actually raising more questions. But to be honest, let’s be honest, 40 minute podcast, we’re never gonna fit all of this in. But you have created an amazing guide or I’ve already seen it. It looks phenomenal. How to kind of bring professional SEO services to our clients, that’s the subject. Guys, if you wanna get your hands on this, it is free.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Rob has been super generous in offering this guide to help you understand how to add SEO to your business. And I think, like we’ve said, it’s definitely sounds like something we wanna do gradually as agencies. And you’re gonna be able to find that on click to sale.co.uk/seoguide. That’s clicktosale.co.uk/seoguide. And the to is a t and a o or a t and a o. And if you’re not sure, the links will be in the show notes. Mate, how can people connect with you and we will then bid you adieu?

Rob Watson:
This is gonna sound scripted now. They can join agency trailblazer now. They can, they can find me through the aforementioned website.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Open at the moment. But anyway, Cameron.

Rob Watson:
They can find me through the above mentioned website. Also on Twitter at click to sale or on LinkedIn. You’ll find me easily enough on there.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And remember, we still have and love the WP Innovator Facebook community. Rob is in there, an active contributor in there as well. You can find that on wpinnovator.com/group long live the wpinnovator. Mate, you’re a legend. I’m really excited because you’ve given me some ideas. Sorry?

Rob Watson:
It takes one to know one.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
It does, isn’t it? That’s true. But you’ve given me some ideas because I have honestly discounted SEO from my agency continuously. And I’ve not even done I’ve not even suggested to my clients the the whole realm of keyword research. I’d never really considered it. I’ve always just said, yeah, you need to get an SEO guy. Now give me the designs and I’ll get cracking because that’s just the way my thought process has gone. And I realize that I’m actually not really doing them, you know, a very good service. I’m doing them in Injustice almost, you know, if I can add this, if I can help them out, even just tell them to go ahead and do it for themselves, at least I’m helping them start right and not have to then reinvent the wheel when the SEO company comes in later on.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
I think that’s the mistake that so many people have made, isn’t it? It’s just bringing in SEO as an afterthought rather than become it becomes part of the planning process of building. If you wanna grab that free guide, then remember, click to sale.co.uk/seoguide. Rob, we love you. I’ll see you in the Q and A. You more. Thank you. Kiss kiss me more.

Rob Watson:
You you hang up first.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
You okay. I’ll hang up first. No. Just hang up first.

Rob Watson:
It’s been a pleasure as always, mate. Thank you.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Take care.

Rob Watson:
Speak soon.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
Bye.

Rob Watson:
Cheers, mate. Bye.

Lee Matthew Jackson:
And that wraps up today’s show. Don’t forget if your agency uses WordPress or you are a WordPress enthusiast, then we have the free Facebook group. Join over 1,500 people in the WP Innovator Facebook group over on wpinnovator.com/group. It’s a place to support each other, to have a good laugh, to share gifts, cat pictures, and now and again to talk about agency life and WordPress. So we will see you over there. Wpinnovator.com/group.