Amplifying Excellence: The True Role of SEO in Business Visibility

Hi, everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today, we have Andrew Laws, who is the founder and Senior SEO Lead at Yeseo with us. Hey, Andrew, how are you?

I’m pretty good. How are you?

All good. All good, Andrew. Thank you so much for taking your time to do this with us.

Pleasure.

Great. To kick things off and let’s get to know the human behind the mic, can you take us back to that time? What sparked your interest in this field of SEO? As a kid, no one actually dreamt of being an SEO expert, so to say. We all have our own back stories in terms of how we landed up in this space. We’re really glad to hear it from you in terms of how you landed up here and more about your agency in terms of what you guys do, what you guys specialize in, and we take it from there.

Absolutely. Thank you. I think it’s quite an interesting question because you’re right. Even people who are quite young going into SEO now probably didn’t choose at school. If they were 10 years old, they probably want to be a racing car driver or a footballer or a rock star. They probably didn’t choose SEO. I couldn’t choose SEO when I was that age because the internet didn’t exist. I guess it did in some form, but no, I’m old enough that there was no Google, there was no websites, there was Nothing. So I got into SEO in quite a strange way. I was actually working in IT and I was building servers. I was the only employee of the company, and there was one other guy, an American guy who owned the company. And we were building web servers, partly for fun, as strange as that might sound. So we were building a Windows NT server, putting on IIS, and then I would drive them to the Internet backbone, which was like a cupboard in a place called Coventry in the UK. And we were putting websites on them. One day I thought, no one’s ever going to look at these websites because how would they know they exist?

That’s when I started to figure out what SEO was. It did and didn’t have a name at the time. This is the late ’80s. Then something interesting happened. In the year 2000, I started my own company, a badge-making company, making little badges. This is a podcast. I’m pointing at a badge that I’m wearing. I thought, I have no money to launch this company. All I had the money for was the badge-making machine. I thought, You know what? I think SEO might be the way to go. Long story short, I sold the company within three months of starting it, purely based on SEO. I just figured that if people want and they search for badges and they find my company, then that will be good. That’s what got me the bug, because with SEO, you can be a tiny little company and you can take market share from the biggest companies in the world just by using your brain and a bit of research. I thought, This is fun. And 26 years later, I’m still thinking, This is fun. So there you go. That’s my origin story.

Lovely, lovely. And a great one, I must say. And recently, it seems you’ve undergone a bit of transformation yourself and you have this, your old agency name, right? And your law associates limited and, sorry, and embraced a fresh new identity. You’re CEO, and like you announced it, right in the green room. So let’s jump right in and hear the story behind this rebranding of your agency.

Absolutely. I formed the company. My first company was called Web Caretakers, and I was I’m 22, 23, and this is when I started out on my own doing SEO. I thought the name Web Caretakers was ever so clever. I was really pleased with myself, packing myself on the back, You clever sausage, you. Within about six months of starting that company, I absolutely hated the name. It was awful. Seeing it on pens and on invoices and around me, I thought, This is a terrible company name. When I went limited, when I became a limited company, I thought, I’m just going to be sensible. I’ll just use my name. My name’s Andrew I was Andrew Laws, Associates, LTD. The problem with that name is it sounds like it’s a company owned by a grey-haired, middle-aged man. I am a grey-haired, middle-aged man, but I wanted to get some separation between my name and the company name. The company should grow. It shouldn’t be an extension of my own ego. The company should stand on its own. We came up with the name Yeseo, and it’s purely because it’s It’s got SEO in it and it’s positive. It’s Yess and SEO together, Yeseo.

Unfortunately, I did lose one of my front teeth just after rebranding. So we rebranded and it took me about six months to be able to say my own company name. But apart from that, it seems to go well. There’s only one other yes-io in the world, and she is a South Korean pop singer. And we don’t get confused. People don’t confuse the two of us very often.

Absolutely. And then you have it in the space, like you said. You’ve seen enough summers and winters now, right? And so many Google updates, the algorithm updates and all of that with AI coming in and all of those changes or revolution that the industry has gone through, right? How have you been able to approach to this ever evolving space that we all are in and with all the algorithms and user behavior? And what are major shifts that you’ve seen in this space so far, Andrew?

Do you know what, Ranveer? It’s surprising how often I get asked this question, and I’ve been asked it for as long as I’ve worked in SEO. And for a long time I used to tell people, oh, you have to pay attention to the algorithm updates. You have to know what Google’s thinking. And it’s not a mystery because Google will tell you. And then a few years ago, many years ago now, I thought, do you know what? You can ignore algorithm updates. You can ignore any changes that Google make because they’re not moving the goalpost. They’re not making more difficult for SEO. They’re making things much, much easier for people who do SEO sticking with one concept. And that concept is SEO is there to amplify excellence. It’s to make companies that are already good, more visible. You used to be able to use SEO to take a rubbish, terrible little company, maybe, and do all these clever, black hat things, and that company could become a real company or become more established because of the SEO. With every update that Google puts out, they’re getting better at sniffing those people out. So yeah, it changes all the time.

But if you’re using SEO to amplify your excellence and just to make your message your already good company an already good message, louder, then I don’t think you have to worry too much about updates. That being said, Google are far from perfect. So honestly, I say you can ignore them. You ought to just keep one eye on them, just in case.

Absolutely. And you must have encountered quite a few roadblocks yourself. What has been the biggest issue or challenge for you? Or let’s say a difficult client where you have worked for some time and things have not found out the way you had actually expected it to be. What’s some client story when you’ve hit a roadblock there.

I think the biggest problem I had with the company, and I’m quite open about the way I work, I had a company that we fell We were both trying to meet the same goal, but it just wasn’t working. And that was back when I was a lot younger. And I think if anyone listening to this is thinking about starting their own SEO agency, the best bit of advice I could give them is to work with people you like. Because if you work with people you like and you hit a problem trying to rank a website or trying to make progress, you have a good relationship to figure it out together. If you work with people who don’t like you, and this sounds strange, then when you hit problems, you’re going to have hard times. Now, Rana, you might ask yourself, why would anybody who doesn’t like a company want to work with them? And I think the truth is there are still so few companies doing SEO that consumers, the companies and the marketing directors who hire SEO companies, probably don’t realize how much choice they have. So all the conversations we have with potential clients here Start with one thing in mind.

I ask myself, would I invite this client to a barbecue at my house? Would I invite them to a family barbecue? And if I think to myself, you know what? I think I would. Then I will work really hard to win that client. I will do everything I possibly can to help them out. Because ultimately, understanding SEO can be like a secret weapon for your clients. But if you don’t like your clients, you’re not going to motivated. That was a difficult client, and they didn’t want to pay me. They didn’t want to pay the invoice because we fell out. It was very polite falling out. There was no chairs being thrown around or shouting, but it became clear the relationship had broken down and I ended up bringing in a debt collection agency to get the invoices paid. We met a compromise, and we both went away feeling satisfied with what happened. But it was a real clear sign to me not to work with people that I get a bad feeling about or people that I wouldn’t invite to a family barbecue.

That’s a good one. I’ll take this one from the podcast for sure. Again, I see something which can really be misinterpreted at times as well, especially by clients who do not have a deep knowledge of this particular space. Let’s say a lot of clients you would have encountered where they do not have marketing directors or CMOs there. Tell us about your interactions with your clients, where you have heard weird stories about SEO, those misconceptions that we encounter, right? So when we speak with clients, And then for our listeners, how can they avoid these pitfalls?

It’s a difficult It’s a difficult challenge, and I think it probably does separate a lot of good SEO companies from the ones that aren’t perhaps so good and perhaps won’t last. Because a large part of the job of being an SEO consultant, running an or technician, whatever it is you’re doing in SEO, a large part of your job is to educate your clients because most people don’t know what SEO is. To a certain extent, why would they? It’s a bit like if you imagine your business was a car, there’s bits in my car. I don’t know what they do, but I know they’re very important. I’m not going to take them out, but I don’t necessarily need to know what they are. One of the precepts of SEO when we rebranded is that Should clients wish to be educated, we will do everything we can to educate them. That includes simple rules like we never use industry talk, we never use acronyms. When we’re going to explain something to a client, whether it’s decision, a point of strategy, or something in a report, we will always relate it back to a basic business need. We can say, These geeky things we’re doing, we will happily explain them if you would like us to.

But the reality is, since we’ve been doing these things, you have more leads, you’ve made more sales. But I think for the SEO industry to thrive and grow, everybody needs to be a part of this mission to educate the public in simple terms. We talked a little while ago about perhaps disreputable SEO agencies, and I think in the early days, in the early 2000s, some of them did sell using wizard language and smoke and mirrors and making SEO sound like it was like, The jogging. The jargon. It’s like digital voodoo. Wouldn’t understand. Just give us money. I thought, no, I don’t like that.

We also spoke about AI, right? Sometimes back. At your set, what is the best use of AI that people are doing right now? And what’s something that you’re excited about.

At the moment, I’m quite excited about the interaction between humans and AI. And would you believe, Ramna, You might think this is a set up, but a Rabbit R1 has arrived on my desk about half an hour ago before this recording. It won’t switch on at the moment. It seems to be dead. But it’s that interaction and it’s that simplification. But one of the things I’m really excited about AI at the moment is the ability it will give us to try and drastically speed up the way we can deliver results for our clients. So at the moment, every client we bring on, it comes on board with us, collaborates with us. We have a list of things that we have to go through. Now, some of those things are really basic. I’ll give you one example. In WordPress websites, there’s a little tick box in the settings that says, discourage search engines from indexing this website. I might not have the words exactly right. You might think to yourself, why would you possibly need to check that? Who would put a tick in a box that says, Hey, Google, ignore us? That’s on the checklist because we worked with two different clients now who we went and checked that early days, early on in the experience, and yeah, the developers had left that tick box in place.

One client had been trying to rank for four years. The first meeting I had with him, I said, I’m just going to check this thing. Don’t take offense, but we have to check. And yeah, the whole website was set to no index. So there’s a long list of things like that, and they are just mechanical checks. They don’t necessarily require a lot of or a lot of prior knowledge of SEO. It’s just check this, check this, check this. And what I’m excited about with AI is automating that part of the process. And other ways we can speed up, it’s not just speeding up the onboarding, it’s speeding up the gathering of knowledge. It’s speeding up the analysis of knowledge. Seo, we love a good spreadsheet, and some client, you can have 25 spreadsheets by the time you’ve been working with the client for a few weeks. It’s using AI to get past that point, to get past those roadblocks, get past those mechanical things. That’s what really excites me. Anything that can get us quicker to the parts where we’re using our creativity in our brains is what excites me. Ai isn’t a replacement for our creativity.

It’s just making it easier to get to.

It’s more of an enabler. It can never really be, at least at this point, it is not really a final product, final deliverable product, be it content, be it anything. It needs that final humanization or the human area whatever we want to call it. But yeah, it’s still not there for sure. It is not going to replace us.

It’s not going to replace us, no. Or if it does, then we’ve certainly got a few years. We’ve got a few years before we have to worry about that. You got music. I mean, AI is trying to make music at the moment, and it’s absolutely horrendous. We’ve all seen now people who are using AI, mostly ChatGPT, to make articles for their website. It’s got to the stage now where people in SEO can actually see it. You can spot it a mile off. Because I think what a lot of people who haven’t yet played with AI don’t understand is that AI can’t think. It can only be a mirror. It can only regurgitate. The problem with regurgitating content from all the places that AI has found it is that it makes it very beige. It just makes it very safe and very uninteresting. I would prefer to work with a writer who we have to spend a lot of time correcting their work than I would work with a boring generator of words. We need that crazy. We need that wild card, that wacky idea. An AI is not good at wacky ideas.

Absolutely not. Perfect. You agreed, Andrew. I know this has been a brilliant conversation, but before we let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re going in for it.

Yeah, let’s go for it. All right.

Your last group will search.

Rabbit R1, not switched on.

Okay. All right. Favorite spot?

Professional cycling, pro-cycling.

You do it?

I don’t do it professionally. When I was a younger man, I was fast. As I get older, I have to listen carefully to see if it’s my bike creaking or whether it’s my knees.

Okay, good one. All right. Your celebrity crush?

Björk, the Icelandic pop singer.

All right. What did you do with your first paycheck, Andrew? First paycheck of your life?

I bought a skateboard. Not this one. That would have been… Sorry, I just held up a picture of the skateboard. Yeah.

That would be me. Lovely. We’ll not give you any further. You have been a spot, Andrew. Thank you so much, once again, for taking our time to do this with us. Really appreciate it, man.

I appreciate your time and your questions very much. Thank you. Thank you for your time, Ranmay.