Fractional Futures

Unlocking SEO Success for SMEs

• Paul Mills • Season 4 • Episode 1

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Fractional Futures is the essential podcast for CEOs, investors, and senior marketing executives looking to unlock the power of fractional marketing leadership. Hosted by Paul Mills, Founder at VCMO, and with special guests, we'll share expert insights, provide actionable strategies and explore real-world success stories to help you leverage fractional marketing leadership for maximum impact.

In this episode

In this episode of Fractional Futures, host Paul Mills and guest Ryan Jones discuss the critical role of SEO for early-stage businesses. They explore the importance of a well-structured SEO strategy, the challenges faced by founders with limited resources, and the necessity of setting realistic expectations for SEO rankings. The conversation delves into effective content strategies, the significance of experimentation in SEO, and the usability of various SEO tools. Additionally, they touch on the impact of AI on content creation and the importance of proving the business case for SEO investment. The episode concludes with insights on managing existing content to enhance SEO effectiveness.

Special Guest

Ryan Jones, Marketing Manager, SEOTesting.com

Special Offer: Listeners of the Fractional Futures Podcast can take advantage of an extended trial to SEOTesting, giving you a 45-day free trial instead of the standard 14-day trial. You can add up to 30 Google Search Console properties with your trial account and you'll have unlimited access to every single one of SEOTesting's featured for that time including testing, site annotations, and their range of pre-built reports designed to make Google Search Console data easier to use. 

Simply click this link for the extended trial.

Key Takeaways

  • SEO is often seen as a free traffic channel, but it requires investment.
  • Early-stage businesses must prioritize SEO to gain traction.
  • SEO builds long-term value and compounds over time.
  • Content strategy is crucial for improving search visibility.
  • Experimentation is key to adapting SEO strategies.
  • Tools like Google Search Console can help monitor SEO performance.
  • AI can assist in content creation but lacks the depth of expertise.
  • Investing in SEO tools can save time and improve efficiency.
  • Managing existing content is essential for maintaining SEO effectiveness.
  • Collaboration with subject matter experts can enhance content quality.

Sound Bites

"SEO compounds over time and builds long-term value."

"Content can really still move the needle."

"Constant testing is important in SEO."

Contact VCMO

Thanks for listening & keep podcasting!

Fractional Marketing Leadership | Marketing Transformed.

Paul Mills (00:01.784)

Hello and welcome to Fractional Futures, the podcast where we speak with industry leaders about the real marketing challenges SMEs face and the practical ways to solve them. I'm your host and this season we're diving deep into the marketing mix, bringing you frontline insights from specialists who are helping businesses thrive in fast moving markets. Today's topic is one that every early stage business grapples with and that's how to make smart decisions on SEO when budgets are tight.

 

Now SEO is often seen as the free traffic channel, but in reality, it's a discipline that needs focus, resource, and a lot of Testing. So how can your SEO strategy help SMEs make informed decisions, avoid waste, and build sustainable path to growth?

 

To help us answer that, I'm joined by Ryan Jones, Marketing Manager at SEO Testing, a platform built to help marketers run structured SEO experiments and prove performance. Ryan brings a sharp eye for data, clarity in execution, and real-world experience that's highly relevant to founders, marketing teams, and advisors. So Ryan, welcome to the show. How are you?

 

Ryan Jones (01:15.559)

Yeah, thank you for having me on. That was a really nice introduction. So thank you for that.

 

Paul Mills (01:19.214)

Hopefully I've kind of positioned you right there. Would you like to explain for our listeners a little bit more about your role at SEO Testing and what SEO Testing is?

 

Ryan Jones (01:29.021)

Yeah, So I'm the marketing manager at SEO Testing. So I handle all things marketing for the brand. So SEO, any paid that we do, social media stuff, all that kind of thing. it's very multi-dimensional, but there is still a main focus on SEO, given that SEO is the main channel that we use to get customers and that kind of thing. So it's a very, very heavy SEO focused, which makes sense considering what we do is we help

 

businesses and marketers design SEO tests that help them find what works for their site and unlock Google's black box and that kind of thing.

 

Paul Mills (02:04.12)

Fantastic. And we're going to be doing a few episodes together, aren't we, for this kind of mini series. I think SEO is such a massive topic. It's going to be great, you know, picking your brains to answer some of those common questions and maybe also demystify some of the fluff that goes around SEO and some of the misconceptions around SEO. And particularly now we've got AI coming on on board. think most people will notice that the very first search option on any Google search is kind of an AI.

 

AI generated thing now. So it'd be great to pick your brains on that and how we need to start thinking about the AI search as well as the traditional search. So Ryan, let's jump straight into the first topic, I guess. I'd like to start with the fundamentals.

 

When budgets are tight, as they often are, especially with early stage businesses, it's quite tempting to delay SEO or approach it without a clear strategy. And I guess if customers can't find your product or service, you're going to struggle to get traction. So Ryan, can you unpack why the SEO strategy is so important, especially for early stage businesses, and why tools like SEO Testing are essential for budget efficiency?

 

Ryan Jones (03:21.119)

Yeah, absolutely. So I think the first thing to mention is the fact that yes, there is a sort of general rule that SEO takes time. And that is true for a lot of businesses. I mean, we saw it with us when we first started. I think the tool was first really started gaining traction around 2020 when the pandemic hit and everything. That was when it sort of went live and everything, but we didn't really start getting a lot of organic traffic until probably the beginning of 2023.

 

So that was, it's like a long process, but I mean, we are a small company as well, yeah, the kind of thing to mention is, well, it does take time to start off, but once you start gaining that traction, it really does build a long-term value. And it's, it really is one of those things that keeps chugging away for you in a sense. Yes, obviously you still have to do various things in order to keep that growth, but it's not necessarily set and forget, but it's one of those ones that you can work on for a little bit, see results from that.

 

then you can kind of readjust and move forward from that. it's why it's one of my favorite channels essentially. But yeah, that's, it kind of keeps that growth going along the way. And when you compare that to something like paid, paid stops working the moment you stop paying for it. So it's one of those, I can see why businesses who do have sort of more tight budgets and that kind of thing would lean towards PPC. But yeah, my advice would be to.

 

really focus on SEO and drill down into that, especially because it compounds over time as well.

 

Paul Mills (04:54.624)

And for, I guess, for founders who might be listening to this episode, they may have no marketing team whatsoever. It may be the founders themselves who are stuck with the challenge of building the website or maybe briefing an agency to build a website. But once you've got the website, how do you manage it? How do you manage SEO? For founders, it might be quite difficult, especially if they're not knowledgeable of the intricacies of SEO and SEO Testing and

 

SEO strategy. So for those founders, how do you recommend they approach the SEO challenge?

 

Ryan Jones (05:32.509)

Yeah, I think I'm probably one of the interesting people to speak to on this in the sense that I still believe, even with all the changes happening today, which I'm sure we'll move on to in a few minutes, but I'm still of the belief that SEO is actually quite simple, especially when you're dealing with small websites. Yes, there's obviously caveats for e-commerce and stuff like that, but SaaS businesses, brochure websites, when it's sort of a business that's just listing what they do and that kind of thing, those websites...

 

can be really easy to gain traction in the sense that the biggest thing that's going to move the needle for them is going to be really good content. And if you're the business owner or you're sort of helping a marketing agency along the way, you can guide them and do the right things. You are the expert to speak to in your particular niche. So, especially as AI starts to form a of proper basis and really

 

drills deep into these search results. think Having those expert people, those business owners, those founders, that kind of thing, really diving into it themselves is going to be actually pretty good advantage for people to have. I mean, we're seeing it now where people aren't necessarily, or if I go into chat GPT for instance, or an AI overview and search for a specific topic, it's not necessarily a business that's coming up, it's a particular person and what they've posted on social media and that kind of thing.

 

And so yeah, I still believe It's going to get more complicated. It's going to get more interesting, but it's at the minute we're still in that sort of prime position where content can really still move the needle. mean, we've seen that for our, for our business. but it really can still move the needle.

 

Paul Mills (07:15.552)

And I guess those founders when they are speaking to the agencies or trying to

 

I guess, get prominence on search. One of the things that they'll ask for is, want to be page one position one straight away. And that's often quite difficult to achieve, isn't it? Especially if you're in a category where there's a lot of competitive rivalry. So what would you say to those founders or those business leaders who are expecting or demanding a high ranking position from day one? Does that

 

Does that often happen? you Can you realistically expect that or what would the expectations be if you're starting from scratch?

 

Ryan Jones (07:59.775)

I mean, sometimes you can expect that. I mean, we've seen it as well. It's one of the things that happens later in an SEO campaign. It's not necessarily one of those things that if you're a business owner and you hire an agency and you expect page one rankings in a week or so, it's not necessarily gonna happen unless you're working with someone who's, I don't know, maybe doing a bit black hat thing, like sort of.

 

those dodgy tactics that we don't necessarily like to talk about on podcasts that might get with it, will probably get you results really quickly, but then you're going to get hit with a penalty at some point and it's going to, it's going to all come crashing down. But that's not to say that it's never possible. I think it all, it all comes into, I think it's a big problem or a big opportunity when it comes to communication, because you mentioned in the intro AI overviews and that kind of thing. they're, they're

 

surfacing results that aren't even on page one, sometimes they're surfacing results from page two, three, four, and all the way down to, think there was, I can't remember the exact study, but I think I read somewhere that it's surfacing results from page 15 in some cases, which means yes, your SERP listing might be not on page one, but you've still got the opportunity to be pulled through in that AI overview. And then it becomes a different conversation of whether you get clicks from those AI overviews, which

 

might not necessarily be the case, but, this is where I think the conversation needs to go. I think we need to move less, less to sort of monitor clicks, but more to monitor impressions and sort of brand appeal and that kind of thing. Getting your brand seen and then remembered, which you can do in AIO views if obviously you've featured in a good answer and that kind of thing. And that's where social comes into it as well. It's, it's going to become a really sort of

 

mix and match kind of approach. It's not necessarily going to be SEO siloed as just that and PPC siloed as just that. It's going to eventually all work together. So yeah, I think communication comes into it. think, but yeah, there's certainly a big opportunity as well.

 

Paul Mills (10:07.232)

And in terms of some of these early stage founders, they might have a very shallow website. There may be 10 or 15 pages maximum. And that website might be very product focused or service focused, but there may be very little content around that website. So you might find the product to service, but using different search terms, you might not reach that website. So from a content strategy point of view,

 

What does the content strategy need to be to kind of grow the website or to help you get found? Because can you rely on a very shallow website to get found?

 

Ryan Jones (10:47.997)

Yeah, sometimes you can, but more often than not, you are gonna need a content strategy. And I think still at the minute, one of my favorite ones is building topic clusters and topic hubs and that kind of thing, which is, it's been spoken about for a good few years now. And there are tools that will help you do it. But it's one of my favorite strategies because you can take, let's say you've got like,

 

a 10 page website and you've got eight pages that are related to different services that your company offers and that kind of thing. You can over time slowly build up, build out these topic hubs, one cluster per service and that kind of thing. So you can, you can have your service pages, the sort of main attraction, link out to all these different guides that are related, which is where keyword research comes into it as well. You can start with obviously the main service and drill down into what questions people are asking, what topics are interesting and that kind of thing.

 

and really build it out that way. well, yeah, You might start with eight website or eight pages on a particular website that then builds out into 20, 30, 40 over a period of time. But the ultimate goal then is for when someone searches something related to your core topic, they'll find one of these guides that you've put together. And then if they find that interesting enough, then they'll click through to the main services page. And that's where we see the value in the sort of

 

top of the funnel content leading through all the way into a conversion.

 

Paul Mills (12:16.257)

Fantastic. I guess this kind of leads nicely onto the next topic, which is you mentioned there. There's kind of a process. There's a strategy of building your content. And to me, it sounds like there's quite a lot of experimentation that you might have to do. So you might create a page and you might optimize it in a certain way, but the market changes or you get more competitors who probably create a better landing page on a similar topic. So.

 

In terms of experiments, is it important to run experiments with your SEO approach? Is it kind of do it once and forget, or do you have to constantly optimize, run experiments to see what's working or not? how do you run experiments to discover what insights working without breaking the bank?

 

Ryan Jones (13:10.643)

Yeah, so to answer the sort of first question that you asked, it's definitely important to be constantly Testing. I mean, I've been involved back in my agency days of campaigns where we were working on a particular tactic and that kind of thing that has been working for us. And then got into the office the next day and that tactic has completely stopped working. So We know that Google changes their algorithms probably thousands of times a year, and then they publish these big core updates.

 

I don't know, probably eight to 10 times a year, if it's a big update year and that kind of thing. And that changes the algorithm massively, which means the tactics you were working on six months, one month, two weeks ago might not necessarily be working today and that kind of thing. And that's where testing can come in, in the sense that we can run these targeted tests, find out what works for our site, and then keep doing that until it doesn't work. And then we can test again and that kind of thing. And the sort of flywheel keeps on moving.

 

It's also important to mention that what works for one business type might not necessarily work for another. So if you're a SaaS business, you're going to have to do something completely different to an e-commerce business where e-commerce business might need to invest really heavily in technical SEO and not much on the content side. Whereas a SaaS business like us, we've had to really invent, like technical SEO doesn't matter so much to us. It's still important to have a good website and that kind of thing, but what's really moved the needle for us has been content. And that's why we've invested hosts.

 

so heavily into making sure we're like a really big topical authority when it comes to this sort of stuff. But yeah, in terms of setting up tests, you can actually do it for free. The key point is it is time consuming and that's where the conversation comes in of how much is your time really like worth and that kind of thing. And whether a tool is probably the right option, but you can absolutely do it for free in the sense that you can use Google Search Console, Google Analytics, take a snapshot of your data for

 

I don't know, six weeks before you make a change and then monitor the data for six weeks post change and that kind of thing. Or you can invest in a tool that you can just tell it what was changed and it will monitor all that data for you and really free up your time and that kind of thing. So it's one of those ones that you can absolutely do manually or if you're busy with other things, especially if you're a founder as well and you're obviously your time is really valuable. You need to be doing customer sales and that kind of thing.

 

Ryan Jones (15:37.235)

That's probably the point where a tool is going to be more useful because it purely just frees up your time to do more of the stuff that moves a needle.

 

Paul Mills (15:46.094)

I've seen in a few places where the SEO strategy has been to look at Google, see who ranks position one, two or three, then just literally copying the SEO titles and the meta descriptions and putting that over on their own content. Is that something you would advise or is that kind of one of the obvious no-no's?

 

Ryan Jones (16:09.029)

It's, this is an interesting one because it, suppose it's not necessarily something I'd advise, but it does tend to be the sort of starting point that most people will choose to go down in a sense. Like, let's say if, if I want to write a guide on keyword cannibalization, I probably will start by Googling it, seeing what, seeing who comes up on the search results, who's, who's ranking in that sort of top five positions and that kind of thing.

 

how are they structuring their titles? I'm not necessarily copying the titles, but what I'm doing is seeing how it's structured. Are they listing the number of tips that they give? Do they use different sort of filler words like best guide or ultimate guide or that kind of thing? And from there, I can kind of come up with a title that I think might work well. See where that lands once I click publish, that might end up at sort of bottom of page one, top of page two, that kind of thing.

 

And from there, I can test different title variations to see what moves the needle and see what brings it up towards that sort of top five positions.

 

Paul Mills (17:16.856)

Yeah, that's good. And I guess in terms of some of the tools that are available, you mentioned Google Search Console, obviously Google Analytics, Ahrefs, obviously tools that you've developed, SEO Testing.

 

How are the established tools, How user friendly are those? Because if you're a founder, if you're completely new to this, some of those tools are quite complicated to use. They kind of demand a certain level of knowledge before you can use them effectively. So how easy is it just to pick up these tools versus some of these new ones like SEO Testing and really sort of move the needle on your content strategy and your search positions?

 

Ryan Jones (18:01.225)

They are quite simple once you get around the initial learning curve. It's one of those ones that like Google search console is pretty easy to use if you know sort of spreadsheet stuff, because you're going to get into the stage of exporting your data and that kind of thing. So if you're confident with Excel, Google Sheets, that kind of thing, then you'll probably be able to make use of search console data pretty easily. Google Analytics is an interesting one because we had the change recently from

 

Universal Analytics to GA4. I'm still very much of the opinion that Universal Analytics was much easier to use. I can see why they made the change to GA4, but it has made it somewhat more complicated to use so that there is a much steeper learning curve when it comes to GA4. Ahrefs, again, it's one of those ones that once you're used to the software, is pretty easy to navigate and work your way around. But again, it's that learning curve of

 

actually learning how to use it in the first place. So it's, one of those ones. It's, suppose it goes back to my previous answer really, in the sense that you can absolutely do it all on your own with, with no external tools, with, with no help and that kind of thing. It's just going to be that time aspect and, and how, how much of your own time do you want to spend on it versus a tool like SEO Testing or similar in the sense that you can pay a small subscription.

 

You can tell it what you've done and then we'll just set up the test for you and we'll monitor all that data for you. All you have to do really on the set up side is add a Google search console integration. And that takes a couple of minutes, even if you're not very sort of tech heavy and that kind of thing. So it just comes back to that conversation of, you want to spend a lot of your own time on it or do you need to spend time doing other things and let a tool do it for you?

 

Paul Mills (19:57.582)

And I guess that there might be some people listening in, maybe the more cynical ones saying, well, I don't really want to pay a subscription to some of these SEO tools to do this. I'll just use AI. I'll ask AI to build me a landing page at ranks number one. Maybe people might see that as a bit of a cheap way of doing that. Is that likely to happen? Can you ask GPT if you don't understand how to do decent prompt engineering?

 

How effective is something like GPT? Will it get you onto page one of Google for a landing page? Or again, do you have to throw some knowledge at it to get that rank in?

 

Ryan Jones (20:39.871)

I really wanted to get through this entire podcast without having to say the traditional SEO term of, it depends, but I think when it comes to that question, I think it really does depend. If you're creating content for a keyword that really doesn't get searched much, there isn't much competition and that kind of thing. I suppose if you've started a business that is really, really niche and there's not many competitors around, not many people know about it.

 

You can probably ask ChatGPT to write some content or create a landing page for you. And it will probably do a pretty good job. It might not get you page one, but it will probably get you, it might not get you top page one, but it might get you on page one and that kind of thing. I think the interesting part comes in when you're, if you're in a industry that's pretty crowded, there's a lot of competitors. There's Reddit SERPs that you have to deal with as well, where people are asking other users questions. They don't necessarily want help from.

 

a business's guide and that kind of thing. That's where I think AI, it can still be a useful tool to help you draft content and stuff like that. But I don't think it's ever going to, or at least at this point now, it certainly doesn't have the experience now to compete with SEO specialists who have got 10, 20, sometimes 30 years working in this particular industry. And they've spent time learning about Google Patents and doing

 

ongoing tests and that kind of thing, learning how the algorithm really works. I think it's going to be one of those interesting ones. if you've got a business that no one searches for and there's no competitors for it, yeah, absolutely use ChatGPT. I think it's certainly a useful tool. I don't discourage anyone from using it. And I use it a lot in my day-to-day job as well, along with Claude and Gemini. and that kind of thing. At the end of the day, it's never going to replace the sort of...

 

actual expertise that you can get from someone who's been in the trenches learning it.

 

Paul Mills (22:37.112)

Yeah.

 

I think that brings us nicely onto the next topic. think what everything you've said there kind of implies that you have to make some sort of investment on your SEO strategy, whether it's a subscription to one of the various tools that you've mentioned or investing time on these tools or learning the topic, learning the SEO domain as a specialist. So in terms of the time it takes to do that, the investment, the experiments

 

you need to take, you do need a structured approach to this. And sometimes marketers or founders, they may say, well, actually, there is that kind of time cost relationship that I need to overcome. So how do we prove the business case for investment in SEO? And how can we demonstrate the impact that the SEO strategy has that supports the wider business goals?

 

Ryan Jones (23:38.515)

Yeah, I think this comes down to, I think the key philosophy that we like to use and we've used with clients in the past is start small. and that kind of thing. We see this a lot in really sort of large businesses that use our software is they might be quite worried about making a particular investment into a site change or a lot of content that they need to produce for a certain topic. or that kind of thing.

 

their finance teams or their decision makers are really quite hesitant. They don't want to a lot of money on something that they don't necessarily know is going to work, which is completely fair by the way. So I think it comes down to what you can do is you can take a scaled down version of that change. So if you've worked out that you've got to publish a hundred pieces of blog content, maybe start with 10 pieces of blog content.

 

Smaller financial investment, test on that, see what the results are. And if those results are positive, it points to the fact that if you do this on a scaled up test, you might see similar results across the sort of larger scale. So getting by in that way is, a really useful thing that people do. And it works with any kind of test that you want to do, whether it's content creation or changing a page template to fit something else or, or even like a complete rebrand. You can.

 

scale down, take a section of your site and do the rebrand first on that section, see how that performs. And then obviously if it performs positively, then you can roll that out to the entire site.

 

Paul Mills (25:14.132)

Sounds good. there's, I guess, flipping that question slightly. There's certainly a lot of clients that I've worked with, particularly in the more technical complex services, the B2B environment, where these might be established businesses. They've had websites for, you know, five, 10, 15 years. And over time, they've generated a lot of information, a lot of landing pages, typically

 

blog content, knowledge hubs, stuff like that. And when we get into the analytics, we actually find that, you know, the two or 300 pages that you've already spent quite a lot of time over several years writing, you you've got...

 

key opinion leaders or key subject matter experts who spend their time away from the desk thinking about what blog or article they need to write, whether it's a white paper or just an educational piece. And so you've got massive libraries of all this content and it's getting very little traction and engagement. So if you kind of look at it through the lens of, well over 10 or 15 years, we've probably spent a considerable amount of human hours developing this content, but no one's

 

it's not getting looked at. So from an investment point of view, how would you tackle that challenge if you've got a massive library of content that no one's finding? Is it easier to start from scratch, just delete it and have some sort of 301 redirect strategy to the new content? Or do you go back and rewrite those individual pieces piece by piece? What kind of approach would you kind of recommend for that?

 

Ryan Jones (26:56.041)

think For that specific approach, it's probably, I suppose the answer is it might be a mix and match between the two in the sense that some topics that you're writing about, and this happens with every site, right? That starts really heavily involved in content production. We saw it with our own site, is you have two different topics that Google has associated with your brand. So for us as an instant, because we integrate with Google search console and we spend a lot of time

 

writing these really helpful Google Search Console guides that people can find. Google have associated us with a really sort of big presence when it comes to Google Search Console. So anytime we write an article on a specific topic related to that, we tend to rank highly pretty quickly. But when we try and branch out into sort of more general SEO topics, we might not see the same

 

success happens and that happens with every site. They tend to start with something that they really know. And then once they've kind of covered all bases on that, then they'll start branching out. and that kind of thing. And that's where we see that sort of problem of having hundreds sometimes of pages that just don't bring in any traffic whatsoever. So I think it's one of those ones where if you've got content that's related to a core topic and you can bridge that gap in some way, that might be.

 

a situation where you can 301 redirect or you can refresh a guide and link it back to the sort of main topic and bring it back that way. But if you found like a lot of businesses do that you've started to spend time writing content that Google really just doesn't associate with your brand at all, Like, I mean, I suppose us as an example, we, if we've spent all this time writing SEO based content and then we try and branch out into conversion rate optimization. that's, it might be.

 

considered beyond the scope when it comes to Google's point of view. So that then is probably a good sample of content that we can just delete and we can start fresh. And yes, if the URLs have links and that kind of thing, we can redirect them somewhere else if it's relevant. But yeah, for that type of content that's not bringing anyone in, it's not really relevant to your business's core services, then that's the kind of content that you want to just be removing from your site and maybe not starting fresh, but like just kind of forgetting about almost.

 

Paul Mills (29:18.636)

Yeah, that's good advice. there's, I guess my final question for you, Ryan, and I've seen this a lot in clients and organisations that I've worked for before as a fractional CMO, particularly in professional services where you have lawyers, accountants, financial experts,

 

they will be tasked with writing a blog, an article for the website because that's what you do, know, it's fuel for the engine.

 

More often than not those technical experts they probably would write a you know a piece that's good for a magazine or you know Trade press or something but putting it onto a website, it's unlikely to get the traction, it's unlikely to get found. So how do you balance working with your your key subject matter experts requesting them to write content that's maybe very good technically,

 

but it's probably not very good from an SEO point of view. How do you kind of bridge that gap and presumably you can use some of these SEO tools to help re-craft the article or is it best not to get them involved at all? How do you sort of address that balance?

 

Ryan Jones (30:35.613)

Yeah. So I think to sort of start off, I think that that type of content is still really useful to have on a website. Yes, it might not bring visitors in from Google itself, but when people land on Google from other stages of your site, they might find that guide on your site. If, if let's say you've doing SEO for a personal injury solicitors and that kind of thing, someone might land on the site through the main page if they've Googled

 

personal injury solicitors, Nottingham, that kind of thing, just where I'm based. If I've searched that and I've landed on a site and their main landing page, it's natural for me to want to learn a little bit more about them, how can they help me? Or on the flip side of that, learn a little bit more about my potential claim. And that's where I might then visit the blog and learn more about it that way. And that's where these guides come into play of, okay, that's actually, this is pretty useful.

 

So that's the kind of stuff that you can see via SEO tools like GA4. You can see where people first came onto your site, whether it was it through organic or social media and that kind of thing. Then where did they go from that? they visit, Did they go to a contact page straight away? That might be unlikely. The likelihood is that they visited quite a few pages on your site before actually contacting you. So from a kind of...

 

strictly SEO point of view, it might not be the best advice to just write all this content and stuff, but it then comes into from a more general marketing point of view. It is really useful to have this and to link it back to what we were discussing earlier about AI and stuff and how that's coming more into play now. People might eventually start searching less on Google and more on ChatGPT, or if they are searching on Google, they might rely on the AI overviews more and more.

 

Having that kind of content on your website is gonna be really useful because these LLMs will be able to see that content on your site, see that it's been written by a subject matter expert and say, okay, this is really useful. This is something that we should surface to someone. So then it becomes more valuable that way that you might get direct visits that way or yeah, it's one of those ones. yeah, strictly SEO point of view, it's probably not great, but from a sort of...

 

Ryan Jones (32:55.391)

an overall overview from a marketing perspective and a conversion standpoint, that's the kind of stuff that's going to be really useful.

 

Paul Mills (33:02.67)

Fantastic. And that's probably a good point to wrap up the first episode. I know we mentioned AI there, and I think those listening in will probably want to know more about AI and how it's impacting search. I know we're going to cover that off in some of the next episodes we're going to record together. So look out for that one. Ryan, I just want to say a huge thank you for giving us your practical insights into how robust SEO strategy can help not just early stage businesses, but any business really maximize ROI, avoid wasted effort, and make smarter decisions

 

with limited budgets. In the next episode, Ryan and I will be building on this conversation and be exploring how CMOs and other marketing leaders can demonstrate SEOs value through smart testing and measurable results. So look forward to that one coming out soon. Until then, Ryan, thanks again for your time. I really appreciate that. Thank you for listening, and we'll see you in the next episode.

 

Paul Mills (34:00.226)

just press stop there.

 

People on this episode

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Paul Mills

Host
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Ryan Jones

Guest