When it comes to SEO, Google’s advice is you just need to produce great content for your users. But at the same time, we all know there’s techniques for producing content that tends to rank well, but doesn’t necessarily match what the user wants or your business’s objectives, which is why I’m so pleased to be joined by freelance SEO consultant, Charlie Williams, to discuss how we can produce content that ranks on Google, but it’s also helpful for your users and your business.

Charlie, welcome to the podcast.

It’s fantastic to be here. Great to see you again. Yeah, likewise.

Look, Charlie, it’d be great if you can give a bit of background to who you are, what you do, your career, and what led to you becoming a freelancer.

Yeah, absolutely. I started working in SEO 15 years ago. Last month, actually, I worked this out the other day when I speak to someone.

Oh yeah. I’m not sure it’s a particularly great milestone, but there we go. I fell into it like a lot of people do, after this sort of starting a job and yeah, during my time in SEO, I’ve worked in all kinds of roles. I started off being essentially a kind of copywriter for SEO, like trying to, create pages and content that work for it very differently, back then as, the kind of content you produce these days and during my time, I’ve worked for a couple of in house roles.

For a few different agencies, notably probably in the UK, SEOptimize and Screaming Frog, probably the most famous name, as well. And, again, doing a variety of different roles, starting to specialize in kind of content design, producing the right kind of content and pages for people and technical SEO.

So making sure that those pages we create can actually be found and crawled and indexed, which is always quite an important step. And I started working freelance. I think around seven years ago, part time to begin with. the guys at Screaming Frog were really lovely, they let me work part time for them while I get things set up and see if I enjoyed it or not.

And after a while I went full time freelance work. Still get to work with the guys at Frog and some other places I’ve worked before, which is always really lovely to do. But yeah, I’ve been working freelance, I think it’s around seven and a half years now.

What was it that led you to take the leap to becoming a freelancer?

a couple of things to be honest with you probably should say, so I don’t think I’m a particularly great employee. So I think just from a, just from a happiness point of view and, from stopping various managers, turning the hair out point of view. just probably going freelance and plan where and thorough was something that kind of appealed.

I’m quite lucky that my background, both my parents sort of various points around their own businesses. And that was quite inspirational and just in life. I find one of the most fascinating things is just people setting up businesses, doing things, whether that’s making something or providing a service or cooking something, whatever it is, I always really enjoy that kind of aspect.

I’ve seen people just running businesses. And I think part of me just really wanted to see if I could do that myself in quite a small fashion, but in a chance to actually put a lot of stuff I’ve talked about into practice for myself.

And there’s a certain reward of doing it all under your own steam as well.

Absolutely. I do enjoy the challenge. I very much do appreciate the good things about it. There’s a bit more freedom, a bit more flexibility I do, which suits my family life really well. And I also really appreciate the fact that I get to say what I think the right thing is for a client every time. Not the thing I think is going to work to keep them as a client or keep them on board.

I get to work in a more project fashion and say, this is exactly what I think you should do. And I’ve said this to a couple of clients in the past. It’s not a great business strategy, but for quite a few of my clients and projects I’ve worked on, they’ve come to me with a problem, I’ve tried to help them solve it, and get to the point where they know how to do this so they can fire me, because they have the knowledge on how to do this.

Which, yeah, not the best business tactic in the entire world, but I do think means that they’re getting good value for money from me.

I found something similar, I had a client who, they, I’ve been working with them for a bit over a year, and they approached me and said, Oh, actually, what we’d like you to do, David, is can you help us to produce some content to help us with our SEO?

And I did some sums on the back of an envelope. And I said, Look, to be honest, I can, but it’s going to cost you this much. And You’re better off writing it in house. You’re gonna be able to write as well as I can. You just need some pointers on what you should be focusing on from an SEO perspective.

So why don’t I do that smaller piece of work, but then you go off and produce, the content yourselves and again, not, probably not the best business strategy from my perspective, but at the same time I can’t keep a straight face and just look them in the eye and say, yeah, do you know what? That’s gonna cost you 40, 000.

Oh,

that’d be nice. It would be lovely, wouldn’t it? Yeah. Excuse me, but I do think that’s something that’s quite important from that is that for a lot of websites, a lot of businesses having some form of control of your SEO or digital marketing, whatever you want to define these things as is important.

The days have been able to go, Oh, we produce this stuff. And can you just go and SEO it over there somewhere in the background doesn’t really work anymore. The market is, almost every niche is far too competitive for that. I think actually what it’s, there’s an argument morally or, fiscally responsibly or whatever you want to call it about doing that kind of thing.

The actual argument of for a business to succeed long term in organic search or in most digital market channels to actually have some ownership of this, even if they don’t, even if they have some external capacity support to actually understand what’s going on and really push it as a priority, I think is super important.

Yeah. Yeah. Totally agree. And with your experience, agency side of it, are there any practices that you see or things that the best agencies do? Or are there any things that you think, do you know what? I’ve seen this a few times at different agencies and it’s definitely a questionable business tactic.

So with that, I’m going to obviously try not to name any names or anything like that. as a couple of ways, I’m going to, I think I can give some insight from my experience in that. The first is that. And this isn’t going to be a great, answer, but I don’t think the majority of SEO agencies do a particularly great job for their clients.

I don’t from working in some, actually, I’ve been very lucky. I’ve worked for some great ones, but from seeing a lot of different agencies over the course of time, I don’t think they do many of their customers a particularly great job or many favors, setting them up for success. Now the majority of that is not deliberate or nefarious or snake oil salesman, that kind of thing.

I think in the majority, it’s just people, one of two things, not understanding how everything works or having outdated knowledge and just trying to apply something similar to everybody. Or secondly, just trying to really hard work on this idea that I can provide this one aspect and this will be the solution for everybody’s problems.

It might work for a good percentage of your clients because that’s the thing they need but most clients Require some kind of individual mix for their market for their website set up their tech stack all that kind of stuff To be a good solution That’s the most of It’s just well intentioned, just not particularly great work or understanding the depth of what is actually required in that analysis phase.

I do think there’s a certain chunk of people that just do a bad job and is happy to get as many people on board as possible. And then it’s a case of how long can we keep them before they let us go? How much can we squeeze out of this? How can we keep them happy each month? Again, probably not going to make people happy that, but I do think that’s the case in a lot of the time.

And, I think, a lot of SEOs. There’s a lot of SEOs in the world and you can split most between those that work for clients and those that work for themselves on their own websites. And there’s a difference between how those people approach things. And that’s cool. But when it comes to those agency ones, I do think that the Yeah, it is the majority.

I think I should be, be confident saying this, that when I’ve seen work around, I’ve gone, that’s okay, but it’s not going to move the needle for you. Or that’s not actually what you need, or it’s not it. And so to actually answer your question a bit more directly, some common practices that I say, that’s not particularly great.

I think the most common one is just going, here’s your website. I’ve run it through SEMrush’s side auditing tool. And here’s the list of things it says you should do, ad verbatim. Go and do this, but not understanding whether they’re, their CMS can actually do that or not, actually having the depth of analysis to go.

Actually, I can see why you’re doing that in this case. Maybe consider doing this, or this. It’s just this kind of idea that you can shortcut. I can, use a tool. I think a lot of SEOs are constantly looking for silver bullets. Magic bullets, whatever the right terminology is, in some form to go. If I just do this, I can get these answers out and give it to you.

And I can make a good markup and I can go to the pub. There’s a constant search for short cutting. Now that’s probably the same in most industries. I just don’t have the experience of many industries. I’ve only worked in several. So for me, I think that’s the biggest kind of failing I see happening is a one size fits all regurgitation of, common tool reports, that kind of thing.

And then trying to apply that to the body equally.

Yeah. my experience echoes very much what you’ve described as well. And particularly the point around, I suppose the specialization in one particular area where often that isn’t the answer. It’s definitely not the answer to every question.

Marketing or business problem that a client might have. And there’s the saying, isn’t there, that if all you have is a hammer, then every problem begins looking like a nail. And I think I would apply that to SEO. I think structurally as well for agencies, there’s, I think there are some inherent issues with the way that agencies are designed that don’t always work in the best interests of the client.

So the example of making recommendations and trying to build efficiencies into absolutely every single process. I think that’s a great example. I do have a bit of a bugbear about, Account managers. I’ve never worked with an account manager who I’ve thought, you know what, that’s been a really valuable conversation that we’ve had.

My experience of working with account managers is that they tend to be, they’re there to try and upsell you things that probably you don’t need, which you touched on. and to protect the time of the knowledge workers, the real experts in the agency that actually you desperately as the client, you want to be speaking to so you can explain the problem that you’re facing and hear directly from them.

And I think as the account manager as well, they’re probably. not empowered always to be recommending the right things for the client. Because if, as the agency owner, you’ve got an account manager who every meeting they go into, the client says, we would like you to help us rank for these keywords.

And the account manager goes, actually, I wouldn’t bother. We’re going to save you some money. They’re probably not going to be an account manager for very long. And I think that is the value, that freelancers can bring because you are, You’re your own master. and if, internally you want to provide the best service for your clients, then you are entirely empowered to do that.

Yeah. A hundred percent. I think account managers at agencies, I see it in. All kinds of fields, from web build to PR to all the kind of things that we get to work with. Because obviously, as SEOs, you touch upon working with a lot of different teams. Account managers have a difficult job.

And if the agency isn’t set up right for them, it’s very difficult. The clients want to speak to the experts, maybe don’t want to speak to them. The account managers have a slightly different competing How should we say, goal, compared to perhaps the client and the, and the experts.

And while there’s always the goal is the agency and the goal is the client and the idea is you have this really good Venn diagram where there’s an awful lot of overlap when you have different people with different parties within the business, there’s more bits of the Venn diagram.

There’s more circles that have to overlap to provide a really good job and it’s much harder to nail. So I do think that’s the case. And. I’ve, yeah, the agencies I’ve worked at, the most successful ones and the best relationships and the longest term relationships of clients have usually been direct between the teams and the, perhaps with a manager, like a head of SEO or something like that as well as part of the relationship.

But between them and the client directly rather than going through a middleman for sure.

Yeah, great. thank you for that. And I don’t want to spend the entire episode grinding my axe about bad experiences with different agencies. So the theme for today’s episode is going to be about producing content that’s not only loved by Google, but also the searcher and achieves what we as the business wanted to do.

So it’s something that because there’s so many. Moving parts with so many components, it can actually become quite complex quite quickly. And I’ve seen the work that you’ve produced, Charlie. And I know you’ve got a very, detailed, thorough and organized way, an approach of, mapping all of this out.

It’d be great to hear from you about how you would approach that.

Yeah, there’s a, lot there. There’s a lot there, as you’ve seen, there is in my mind, which is why those documents are so detailed. But thank you very much for the kind words about my work. Appreciate it a lot. I’m going to break this just as a beginning point.

There’s two kind of things I tend to go in and talk to clients about initially, when it comes to looking at their work. Whether we’re starting a project from scratch, which is rarely building a site from scratch, normally you’re dealing with some existing assets, or you’re analyzing it. The first is, understanding the principle that every page has a job.

Every job only needs one page in terms of each stage of a job requires only one page. And there should only be one page for every job, not more than one. So the idea is that you have this organization of your website. You’re going, here’s the various goals, the various things we need our website to do.

we need to sell these products, we need to get people to read blog posts they sign up for our newsletter. We want to get people downloading this white paper. We want people to find this service page and call this phone number. There’s a whole bunch of, you know very good goals we can do with the website.

if you’re a publisher, obviously it’s page views, so you can do advertising or whatever it might happen to be. there’s lots of different goals we have. But what we do is we have different sections of our website, and they, they do, they are for different tasks. They are for different user journeys.

And then, We have user journeys that we want to plan and target via search because they’re doing typing and keywords into Google in this case for organic search, and we want them to come in and find those appropriate bits. So the kind of detangling. of a lot of a website and it’s all its content and going right, what are the goals you’re trying to do?

Let’s just bring it back to brass tacks here, right back to the beginning. What are the actual goals of the website? Which bits of the website should be doing that? And then you start finding the crossover bits and so on. So that’s the kind of first thing is this key principle of one page per job and all this kind of thing.

The second bit then is taking it the other way, maybe going from a very thematic top level point of view. Which is what we want to be talking about. What is it we’re trying to say? What is it we’re trying to be known for? And again, that could be commercial or it could be informational. Being known for being the place where you can buy dresses is just as valid as being known the place as the expert on how to do email marketing.

they’re both equally valid. and the idea For me, is this kind of, we have a set number of goals, themes, and topics we want to be known for, that they, that you can then start tying into those jobs, the various bits of the website are trying to do, and then you can make sure you’ve just got one type of page trying to do each of those jobs.

That’s how I start breaking this kind of stuff down, and most of my work in content design tends to come into people asking, what’s the point? One bit of this puzzle isn’t working or we’ve got a bit lost or we’re building something new. How do we go about building something that’s going to be robust and a good structure for this?

All that kind of thing.

Brilliant. Thank you. And when it comes to determining what job you’re trying to get a page to do, have you got a process for actually trying to figure that out and understand what it is that you, need the user to be that journey that you need to use it to be going through?

That’s a great question. So this is something that I found, interestingly, is the, this is the reason why I focus a lot on this type of work. Because to me, it seems obvious. I look at a website. I understand, you do have those initial calls. We understand the business goals and things like that.

You understand what’s going on. To me, it’s really clear. And my mind immediately starts going like a weird montage thing from a movie where I could start seeing diagrams and arrows and things like that. I start going, okay, so those pages are for this, those pages are for this. We do this and so on.

So to me, it seems really obvious. And it’s one of those things where you go, Oh, Doesn’t everybody see it like that? And you go, actually, after a few of these conversations, Oh, maybe they don’t. Or, and okay. So my job is sometimes it’s just to be a bit of an interpreter of going, between is what Google’s looking for.

This is what we can tell you users looking for. This is what you want to do. Here’s a diagram that puts it together. And then people go, and that’s some of the most satisfying bits is where you go, Oh, I can see your understanding what I mean by this and you’re excited about it. And now you’re going to run off and do something really great about it.

That’s great. Again, to actually answer your question rather than me just rambling. how do we go about determining those jobs? You break down a website with analysis. If we understand what the various business goals are, and then we understand what the, for, to achieve those business goals, what the various jobs the website needs to do are, sell products, do information, get newsletter times, anything like that, you can then do analysis of the website, look at its structure, and go, at the moment, which bits of this website are doing, trying to do these various jobs?

for example, I like to crawl a website, I use Screaming Frog, obviously, because I’m biased towards my former employees, but it’s a fantastic tool. Loads of great crawls out there. It doesn’t matter what you use. But the idea is you build, get something that actually gives you an overview of the website.

How many pages have you got? What’s the URL structure like and the taxonomy like? Which might take a little bit of interpretation. What do the various bits mean? If you do a site diagram in one of these tools, what does it look like that way? And you start going, I can start seeing these different bits of the website.

Great. Which of these jobs they’re trying to achieve which are the ones where we’ve got different bits of website competing for the same kind of Thing I’ve got which bits the website should be complementing each other and which bits of the website don’t appear to actually have Any job that matches your website jobs, the kind of goals you’ve got your website.

Where are the anomalies? Where are the things where it’s gone a bit wrong and you can start pointing those out? These are all equally valid things to start improving the website. So that’s how I start doing it. It’s basically through analysis I often do Content inventories and things like that based on the record of the website instruction So I’m to understand the taxonomy the hierarchy the goals the optimization the keyword targets and from my understanding of the business Tying that into user journeys, and yeah, once you’ve done that, you should have an idea of all the different bits of the website, the different templates that are being used, and the kind of goals you think they’re aiming for, and then you have a conversation with the client and see if you got it right or not.

And what’s your view on producing content that doesn’t necessarily directly meet a business goal, but might influence? A business goal further down the line. So the example that springs to my mind would be, say, a company that sells HR and payroll software, so they’re gonna be selling to, relatively senior decision makers in mid to large size organizations.

Now I’ve dealt with, SEO agencies in the past whose their recommendations have very much been around. at the very top of the funnel. Why don’t we start producing content like what is human resources? And that might be a valid piece of content to produce because it might be a signal to Google that oh okay fine you’re selling HR and payroll software but you’re also related to the broader topic of human resources so therefore it’s increasingly relevant.

But the reality is people that are searching for what is human resources they’re probably like year one GCSE business study students. And they’re never going to become a customer or a decision maker in your process. So could you unpack that a little bit for me?

Yeah. So there’s a balance, isn’t there? I think with these things.

So in the case you’ve mentioned here, there’s a desire to become topically relevant to build that kind of, if you want to EAT, all those kinds of things around that to become relatively known around this topic. So you’re seen as an expert so that you can then rank better for your commercial terms because Google sees you as strong in this area.

If you’ve already got the informational stuff about HR, maybe your HR software, when someone’s searching for what kind of HR software is best, might be a good solution as well. Logical and kind of work for a good amount of time. However, it means you’re producing a large amount of Basic content, it might be that it’s quite hard to put together, but in terms of, topic level, it’s, basic understanding, which isn’t your target market and the company, the client, the business might not be so keen to produce said content because they can’t tie these two things together.

It’s hard to prove ROI. So for me, if we’ve determined that actually building topical relevancy Is super important. We need to do this to compete in this niche because everyone else is. We can see the market, the search market, I should say, for this particular niche requires it. Okay, great. What’s the next level we can do?

You can still produce blog content that attracts links, that attracts attention. But how can we do that in a way that achieves both the business goals and the search goals, which are both valid goals to the website’s goals, these are all content goals, if you will, for the website to achieve.

But how can we get in a way to go, one of our content goals is to get that topical relevancy, that expertise displayed, right? Are there slightly longer tail terms? That show a bit more seniority in who’s asking them. Okay, less relevant, less top level. What is HR? But more like it’s abuse of our audience or at least someone close to our audience and still doing enough to build Informational expertise in this area.

Can we then combine that with things such as okay? We have a bunch of people in house who are really hot on HR and a good public speak Sorry a good public spokesman for this right? It’s digital PR time You Let’s get our names in front of people. Like next time there’s a new story talking about this change in HR law.

Person X from HR software company Y who often helps people in these situations had this comment about this new story. That is going to be building your expertise just as well as having a blog post on what is HR. Yes, it’s a small, we’re talking about things with smaller search volume, but they’re more relevant.

It’s that balance. I think the days of just going. We have to target what is HR when everybody is targeting not just HR software companies But I imagine all the all this this the sort of various SAS Review sites probably have big articles on this and so on. I think some of the excellent studies that are done by people like Foundation Inc and so on in our space who measure the impact of big sites and they focus on SAS, but you can still see these SAS sites produce content on every tangible content if they’re doing that as well as every HR one.

You’re not going to rank that well with what is HR are you, unless you’re extremely lucky or the big, one of the biggest names, just sage or something, I don’t know. so it’s quite tough. So I, for me, if you’ve got a limited amount of budget, which is almost always the case, we don’t have infinite budget, what can we focus on that’s going to be actually doing an impact?

And more and more, I focus on just good marketing that is Focusing on what you’re actually offering is the bit that’s going to help you stand out a little bit more than just trying to target every head term that’s associated with your sort of vague market, shall we say?

Has any of this changed with the updates that Google have released recently?

And there’s been several in the last year.

So there’s a couple of things that tie in to that. So first is that I think a lot of the negative reaction in SEO and in the wider market, things like, the Verge article about, content goblins, November, late last year and so on, those, I’ve not heard of that.

Oh, okay. So there was a, there was, a big article from the Verge. They actually did two, for what it was on, but they did a big article basically just saying how SEOs had ruined the internet. And or at least search and they’re not wrong. There’s people frankly, I disagree with a lot of what was said in the article or the way went about it.

And they started off being quite schlock, targeting, talking to people who’d made fortunes in SEO 20 years ago. And I go, it’s a very different kind of thing to what most people do. And then they actually had an interview with Barry Schwartz and so on, which gave a much more nuanced view, which, was fairer.

But a lot of this is actually fair in terms of. Yeah. We ruin everything in terms of, anytime there’s any kind of chink in Google’s armor about what will actually rank, we’ll just exploit it to think about guest posting 12 years ago and again more recently and, how this is a good time.

This seems fair. We can do is a way, but all the question then becomes, but does it scale? How can we scale it and do it on mass so that it works for all my clients all the time and we ruin it. So there was a great article from the verge about this kind of thing. and part of the kind of argument that people say that, oh, a lot of Google’s results aren’t very good is because there’s this idea of this sort of formulaic way of we have to go about things.

And that’s what ranks of Google. So The classic example is recipes.

Yeah.

It was, okay, I want to know how to make a, chicken pot pie, shall we just say. I don’t know why I picked that, I just picked chicken pot pie. I do that, and I bring up search, and I go onto it, and there’s some recipe cards, which are great, and there’s, a bunch of blue links, and they show me a bunch of pot pie recipes.

Pretty good. But I click through to any of them and I have to scroll through two, three thousand words before I actually get to the recipe. Now having a bit of an intro, having a bit of an explanation of some of the key facets about, when you’re making this stage requires this stage requires this, that’s great.

But actually just going through a spiel about why my mum made chicken pot pie and it was one of my favourites and all this kind of thing here, which was how you had to play the game. Because that was the only way these recipes actually ran, was if they did this. Now that’s an extreme example, but I think we’ve got this place where lots of.

Helpful informational content like what is HR and so on has become formulaic We all have that we need to have the author bio and byline. We are with a separate page. We all think we need to have the index thing with the jump links. We all think we need to have X amount of subheadings which answer people who ask questions which come up whenever you search for this.

And it’s true, you do. I recommend some that to my clients even now because actually one, actually structurally that’s actually useful things to do. But two, if everyone whose ranking has got that, you feel you need to do that to play the game. But when you do these things, It’s just as a tick box exercise rather than because they’re useful and because you’re focused on that rather than actually the quality of the content itself.

It downgrades or degrades, I should say, the actual experience of users. And that’s what I think a lot of people complained about. Now Google’s recent updates have tried to principally combat AI and things like that. are bringing in, these kind of new bits and some things are working, some things are not working.

There’s an awful lot of churn and flux at the moment. But what I do think is happening is that a lot of people feel that, bigger sites are being rewarded by it because if you take away some of the power of the formulaic layouts and things like that, then are we going back to heavy reliance and brand and I don’t think they are going too much on backlinks, but it’s the idea of these big call signals that reward big sites.

If they become more powerful again, does that mean these top sites always rank? So for example, there’s, I cannot remember the website name now, which I’m annoyed about. I’m trying to remember. which is run by Giselle Navarro, noted SEO, digital, link building in the past, but it’s about air purifiers and they’ve lost all their traffic.

They produce some great articles about pure air purifiers and, they produce just this top level stuff to run an affiliate style site, but they do get hold of all the air purifiers. They test them. They do all this great stuff and they lost 90 percent of their traffic. And there’s all these kind of big level publications ranking above them with Pretty bad product advice because they haven’t really got hold of them.

They haven’t tested them as experts, but what they can do is they just leverage their name, there’s a, there’s like a small number of publishers who own many publications in like the UK and the U S at least. And they all have very formulaic results and they just rank on their brand reputation and we go from there.

let me give an example. I work with Systrix, the SEO tool, and write some articles for them. And one of the things I do is we do this monthly look at different sectors, like what’s ranking well in a sector. you’ll see, okay, I’m looking at lawnmowers or I’m looking at, actually we did one on, on, I think it was accountancy software and things like that, the SaaS market.

But any kind of time you go into an informational one, at least up until a few months ago, you’d go into it and you’d see, Oh, there’s lots of websites doing quite well for this, but it’s all the same. Any kind of did anything in tech. It was always the same magazines doing it. But then you look at those tech magazines and four or five of them in the top 20 would all have identical, the actual roundup of the best smartwatch for fitness trackers and things like that.

Yeah. Four or five of the top 20, you actually look at the roundups, and they’re identical. They’re using the same CMS, they’re using the same templates, they’re identical. And you go, they’re all owned by the same publisher. And what they’re all able to do is they’re leveraging their name, and they’re just doing absolutely no, not that much original stuff, but they’re able to rank really strongly because they’re just able to leverage these brand, they’ve got a formula for their layout that works, that Google rewards.

They then leverage their brand name. And they’re always able to rank, which makes it really hard for everyone else. I’ve got a bit of a tangent here, but to the point about understanding what’s working and what’s not, and what’s changed with Google updates, I think Google’s trying to fight that as much as they’re trying to fight AI and things like that.

We’re seeing Reddit with five times as much organic traffic as it was getting, a year ago and then I made it because they had their IPO recently. And then I think, is it a week or two weeks ago, they released their first kind of results since the IPO. And they were like, profits up, our revenue from our advertising has really gone up.

And it’s yeah, but none of the data seems to go. Yeah, because they’re being shown five times as much in the search results. So we’re going to have so much more traffic. That’s what Google’s trying to get away from is this formulaic thing, worried about AI answers, and I think they’re worried about formulaic content doing it, but now we’re all seeing that because of this, they’re moving it away from the formulaic and the AI, some websites seem to be getting bigger and a large number of smaller ones seem to be getting smaller.

Yeah, I think the Reddit example is really interesting because if I think back a year or two ago on. All sorts of different forums, SEO forums, just or even Reddit itself. So many people would say, Oh, you know what? Google’s not as useful as it used to be. I’ve stopped using Google quite so much.

Or whenever I’m searching for something, I always put Reddit in part of the search because then I know that I’m going to get a real user’s experience.

Yeah,

and then Google start featuring reddit a lot more and everyone’s going. Oh my god All they’re doing is showing reddit results. I

didn’t mean it.

I didn’t want to do it. Yeah. No, absolutely Yeah, everyone goes site colon reddit. com. Yeah, this is my hack for getting really good search results I type reddit site reddit. com and then what the weather topic him? Yeah, I guess what they do it and how quickly I Glen Olsop Viper chill did some great stuff on this several months ago How quickly those answers became Barnacle SEO’d?

Where there was just all these things that were ranking well, that people would go, Oh, this is ranking well for this answer here. I will quickly create an account, and then the second answer, that came back to it, is somebody with an affiliate link. Oh, here’s a really good one here. Here’s an affiliate link.

And then you buy Reddit bots to boost that answer with loads of pluses, and send the answers, really promptly. And so the Barnacle SEO on it was incredibly quick. And But the data from Systrix, Ahrefs, et cetera, shows that Reddit’s traffic since the March core update and so on is only still going up.

It’s not been, it’s not leveling off. so yeah, it’s still, a bit of an issue.

Yeah. Yeah. I think, as, an overarching approach, what you described of being really focused about the intent, Or your purpose for each page and what you’re trying to do and how that relates to the businesses, objectives and tying that back to a sort of a wider ethos of it’s, actually got to be supportive of the businesses brand as well.

That’s long term. That’s got to be just a great strategy for, you. for making sure that you’re never too dependent on just SEO and that it’s supportive of the wider business. so I’m, conscious of time, Charlie, and I really appreciate all of the insights you’ve given. Before I let you go, I am asking everybody for a book recommendation.

and it doesn’t need to be a book necessarily. If you’re not much of a reader, it could be just a, an online resource, that you would recommend everybody in marketing reads.

Yeah, that’s a really great one. I’m not much of a reader, which probably isn’t a great thing, to omi generally in business.

everyone seems to be quite proud of their reading prowess. I’ve never read

any of the books behind me. They’re just there for Oh, I

don’t, yeah. Yeah. I do believe that for a second, David. So for me, I use a lot of online resources. I do a lot of online resources. So if you’re working at all in SEO or have an interest in it, there are a bunch of roundup emails that kind of pull the really best news together a week just to help you keep on top because it’s moving so fast.

And Aleda Solace’s SEO FOMO is a great resource for that. if you’re interested in kind of the mechanics of SEO, but also bigger thinking about stuff that’s actually happening. I strongly recommend, the, Kevin Indig’s newsletter growth memo. It, there’s a paid version and a free tier. there’s a couple of week ones, paid ones, free.

That is great for pushing my mind about thinking about things in new ways and stuff like that. I, so I strongly recommend. thinking there. I also have a couple of other things. So the podcast wise, I listened to it’s very popular podcast, at least in the US, called pivot, which is with.

Scott Galloway and I’m Kara Swisher, noted tech writer. what I find about listening to that is it just, again, gives me this top level view of what people are talking about in the tech industry and including things about search, like they basically said that with the new results being launched by Google last week, that search was, SEO was in real trouble, which I’m not sure how much it’s not, but it’s certainly when they were saying that suddenly made me go, okay, hang on now, that I’m stopping for pause a little bit here.

So I strongly recommend that for just keeping abreast of all kinds of things like that are happening in the wider tech industry. There’s also, Stratechery, which is a podcast and a newsletter. it’s a weird name, so it’s like, Strategy and technology like Straty. Yeah, that, that is again, another really good thing I find to keep on top, of stuff.

And there was one more I wanted to suggest when you asked me to put this list together, which I’m calling a complete blank on. And if I remember, I’ll let you know in, you can

email me and I’ll pop it in the show notes. But thank you for those. I will check ’em out. I’m always on the lookout for more podcasts to pop into my feed ’cause I.

I get through so many of them every single week when I’m walking the dog. Charlie, thank you so much. You’ve been a wonderful guest. How can people connect with you after the episode?

Oh, you are very welcome to connect with me anywhere you want to. I’m on Twitter X as it’s now known at, PageSource P A G E S A U C E.

I am. It’s a pun on, view page source, which we used to do, but we don’t inspect element these days. That’s how old I am and how long I’ve been working in SEO that my, my user handle is out of date. you can also find me at chops. io. That’s my website, single page website. You can feel it.

There’s a form there. You can contact me, or if you ever see me at things like Brighton SEO, everyone’s always very welcome to come and say hello.

Brilliant. Thanks so much, Charlie. Great to see you. Thanks everyone.