Mastering SEO Strategies: Understanding Content Gaps, Keyword Clustering, and the Future of AI in Marketing

Hey, hi everyone. Welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Andy, who’s the co founder of Snippet Digital, which is a parent company to Keyword Insights with us. Hey, Andy, how’s it going?

Hey, man. Yeah, good. Thanks. Thanks for having me.

Lovely. Andy, before we move any forward, let’s touch upon your journey a bit. How did you land up in the SEO digital marketing space, and also about Snippet Digital, your agency and keyword insights, the platform, and then take it from there.

Yeah, cool. I think like most SEOs, I fell into it by accident. I started a company when I was 22, 23 selling roller shutters, which if you don’t know what they are, they’re the things that come down and secure shops. And on day one, I just sat there twiddling my thumbs. I’m not going to go into the story of why I started to roll the shows. But day one, sat there twiddling my thumbs, realizing we didn’t have any leads. And I was like, Okay, how can we get more? And so basically taught myself how to build websites. At the In the early days, we worked with an SEO agency because I realized that’s what we needed. I taught myself SEO off of the back of them and then took over our own SEO and built our roller share company to a turnover of about two and a half million over the course of three, four years. We ended up exporting all over the world, actually. So international SEO was a big part of it. In fact, I was in Dubai nearly every other month and Hong Kong every other month because we were shipping all over the world.

Seo was a big part of our business and I loved it. So when I exited that company, I thought, I want to do more of that SEO stuff. And so I joined a large agency in the UK to learn how to do SEO for bigger clients because it’s all very well doing SEO for a startup company because you can only go up. So I joined an agency in… They’ve got an office in London, but also in Shreesbury. And I joined them because they had clients like Victoria’s Secret and Netflix and HSBC. And I’m thinking, what on earth do these companies need SEO for? What can an agency possibly doing for them. So I joined that company to get some exposure there, always with a goal of leaving and going freelancing myself as I’ve never been one to work long time for an agency. Yeah, definitely. So went and did my own thing and met my business partner. Now, so as I was freelancing, I met my business partner, and we decided to form Steeple Digital, which is a small boutique agency. And the reason we formed that together was we wanted to give a slightly different deliverable.

I guess some SEOs, we really like getting our heads in the weeds, and we didn’t want to just generate templated and repeatable systems. I know that’s probably the easiest thing to do because you can scale easier, but we didn’t want to do that as a deliverables. We wanted them to be highly bespoke. We wanted to come in with very specific problems and solve them in ways that maybe other SEO agencies couldn’t. The problem with that business model is you can’t scale. When we had our boutique agency, we were getting bigger bigger clients. Believe me, we’ve got some really good names to put to our little agency, but we just couldn’t keep up with the workflow. We started automating a lot of our work, and that turned into the tool today, which is Keyword Insights, which we released as a SaaS tool. If you like, we’re now an SCO SaaS tool, but we’re there in management. That’s how I got into SEO right the way through to where we are now.

Lovely. There must have been a lot of challenges on the way from transitioning from working in-house to agency side to now running your own businesses. You have been on both sides of the table, right? How is it different to one another and what unique challenges does it offer?

I guess the biggest transition or the biggest problem, I don’t want to call it a problem because it’s not a problem, but the biggest challenge was finding your own clients. When you’re in-house, you are making all the marketing materials towards one product, and it’s really easy to do that. And you have a very clear goal. You know what the challenges, the problems are. Then when you move to an agency, you get more exposure to a lot more markets, and you may be spreading things a bit thinner in terms of your product knowledge, but you’re ultimately not finding the clients. At least I wasn’t because there’s a whole team of people that do that. So then running my own agency, it was not only being, especially one that, as we said, was highly invested in delivering bespoke, really bespoke deliverables for people. We had to know their product inside out, like being in-house. We also had to have a thinner knowledge of more clients because we have clients as an agency, and we also had to find our own client. It’s also that finding their own clients and almost promoting yourself. That was a big challenge to begin with.

Absolutely. When you start an agency, getting those initial clients, obviously keeping the lights on as its own challenges, obviously. If you could give us a story, Andy, to our listeners, probably what are the first onboardings that you did? How did you close the deal? How did it come through? And then the delivery side of it, because getting a client is one thing and delivering is a different ball game altogether.

Yeah. So to begin with, I can’t recommend personal branding enough. My initial business strategy was going to be PPC marketing bidding on SEO consultant near you or SEO consultant in That was going to be my initial strategy. But I guess it actually happened by accident. I know a lot of people give this advice anyway, but it’s happened by accident. I just started writing a lot on forums and writing a lot on blogs and search engine journal, that thing. I guess the client started just finding me through that. Building up my what was Twitter, but now X, building up my social media presence was huge. A lot of the early clients came through because they’d seen my work somewhere or read this, and they were trying to solve the challenge, and they came to me that way. It actually wasn’t very difficult for me to close the clients because they were already warm to me. There was no cold part about it. They’d read what I had, they solved their problem, and the deal was pretty easy to close. I think the early challenge was actually, as freelancers are listening, obviously, I’m not a freelancer now, but setting my rates to a point that guaranteed the work.

I think my rates must have grown. Let me work this out. It grew from Let me try this. Sorry, bear with me. Just working it out. Yeah, I increased my rates about 80% in… No, that’s not even right. It’s even higher than that. Let me just cut this bit out. To, yeah, 85 or 90% I grew my rates in the first year just because there was that many clients coming in off the back of the things I produced. It was trying to get the rate just right. I think that was harder than closing people. I just didn’t know what to set my value at.

Absolutely. Now, coming to Keyword Insight, Andy, it does emphasize a lot on topical authority. How do you recommend businesses identify and then capitalize on these content gaps within the particular niche?

One of the things, coming back to my first business, the Shutter Company, the one that I grew, the reason it did so well is, and again, I didn’t know this term existed at the time, is a hot topic at the moment, topical authority, if you read about it, but I didn’t know this term existed when I started this Shutter business. I just wanted to make sure I was available at every stage of a user journey and covering every type of topic or content related to what they wanted to be. I found naturally, when I did that, my site just ranked for everything. If you type in any version of roller, it’s just a security, it’s just a fire, it’s just a hurricane, it’s just a we-rank number one. It was because we had all this supporting content. As I’ve grown into SEO and actually learned it, it was this idea of becoming a supplier authority, which I didn’t know. I just did it anyway. I recommend doing it because it’s actually… Link building is a service that we offer, you offer it, and buying or getting or building good links is actually incredibly expensive to do.

It’s necessary, but it is expensive. In the early days of anyone’s SEO journey, I think becoming a top authority, especially in the way that you can produce content now with AI, and I have got my thoughts on that for another time. A little sidetrack, use AI to help speed up your content, but don’t use it to write the whole thing. Coming back onto my track. Especially today, where you can create content fairly quickly using AI, becoming a topical authority is a very cost-effective way of getting results before you start building links. Actually, it helps with your links because it gives you more assets to build links to. Yeah, and you need that. You can’t just be, let’s say you’re a website that sells roller shutters as we were, or let’s choose another industry, traffic cones. If you’re building links to your category page selling traffic cones, they inherently look spammy because why would someone be linking to a traffic cone category page or a roller show category page. So building up that bank of content that sits behind it and then internally getting links to your content and then linking your content to your category pages, it’s a very safer way to build the links, and it becomes a lot more cost-effective as well.

So yeah, coming back to, I guess, your question, becoming a topical authority is an incredibly cost-effective way to get results in the early days, and it’s a lot safer way to build links once you’ve got that content as well. So it’s a really good way of doing that. I’m not sure if I answered your question. I think I went off on a tangent.

That’s okay. Moving on, I also wanted to ask you about intent-based keyword clustering. How does it play on shaping content strategies and how do you educate your clients on its importance?

I’m going to be pedantic with it. We’re a clustering tool that does have intent in that we can pull through. If you upload all your keywords to our tool, we’ll cluster them. For anyone who doesn’t know what that is, it’s basically grouping loads of similar keywords together so that you can see what keywords can belong on the same page. We are a keyword clustering tool that pulls through intent. What that means is you upload, let’s say you’ve done your keyword research, you upload your 20,000 keywords to our tool, we’ll cluster them, but we’ll tell you the intent of each cluster as well. This cluster of keywords is informational, so you need to create a blog on it. This cluster of keywords is transactional, so these keywords need to be targeted on a commercial page. Be pedantic with the way you’ve worded that question. We’re not an intent-based clustering tool. We are a clustering tool where you can have intent. What we are is a cert-based clustering tool. What I mean by that is there’s two There are different types of ways you can cluster keywords. One is by SERPs or search engine result pages, and one is NLP or semantic-based clustering, as other people call it, natural language processing.

A natural language processing clustering tool or a semantic tool, they group keywords based on how similar and meaning they are. If you had 50,000 keywords and you had, let’s say, the keyword plane and planes, it would group them together because one is just the plural version of the other. Plane, planes, it’s the same thing. It would probably group vaporizer accessories and vaporizer parts. Bate parts, vape accessories, it means the same thing, we’ll group them together. Skate board wheels, group that together. That’s what an NLP Clustering tool does. It is really useful if you want a very early view of, Okay, I’ve got 50,000 keywords. How can we make sense of this. It helped group it into some meaningful topic. We’re a search-based cluster and tool, so we’re a bit different. We scrape search results for each keyword you upload, and we’ll group them based on how many URLs they have in in the top results from Google. And why that’s different is because you sometimes get very surprising results. The reason I use plane and planes as an example is I literally just ran it yesterday. They’re actually in two different clusters according to search results.

If you Google the word plane and Google the word planes, you’ll have two very different sets of results. Same with skateboard wheel and skateboard wheels. Actually, skateboard wheels is generally more transactional. It means you want to buy it. Skateble wheel, if you Google, it actually gives you more informational What is it? Was it made out of? What are the bearings in it? So a SERP-based Clustering tool is a lot better if… I don’t want to say better, it’s different. It’s a lot more accurate if you’re an SEO and you’re using it to optimize towards Google. We’re playing in Google’s world, so let’s see what Google will show. What pages do I need to create? So to come back to your question, we are a SERP-based Clustering tool which offers a number of benefits over an NLP one. The biggest one being we’re playing in Google’s world, so let’s create pages as Google would create. That being said, we are a cert-based cluster and tool where you can also get an intent. As part of our deliverable, once we’ve clustered them, we also tell you what each cluster of keywords is. Is it informational or is it transactional?

Absolutely great. You have a platform, you have an agency. What lessons have you learned about product pricing, about monetizing a SaaS tool like keyword insights, especially in a niche market?

I’m still We’re learning. In fact, we’ve changed our pricing model about four times. We’re about to change it again. I think what I’ve learned is to get someone in early who actually knows this stuff because I dread to think how much it’s cost us in development and things about changing pricing models. To be candid about your question, I’m still learning, and I think there’s people far better at pricing strategies than me. There’s things like price anchoring. We never did that before. In fact, if you go back to our very early first days of our pricing, we gave these ridiculously complicated comparison tables with credits for this and three credits for that, and it’s 1.5 credits for this, and it’s just too much. We scaled it back and we’ve changed it and we’ve done things. Yeah, I’m still learning, but the key takeaways I’ve learned, and our new pricing should go live the next two weeks, is keep it really simple. Our next one’s going live. It’s just going to be three. There’s not 16 different ones that we used to have. Three options. Two of them are really close together. That’s price anchoring. So you’re forcing them to go, Oh, I may as well go for that one, and make the actual comparisons really simple.

I think it’s going to be about five lines rather than the 50 it used to be. I’m still learning, but I think there’s experts who are better at it than me that I would have wished I got in earlier.

Lovely. Then finally, as AI continues to evolve, Andy, what do you see as the next frontier in AI-driven SEO tools?

Ai in SEO tools? Is in where do I see AI going in SEO tools?

Yeah. Where do you feel we are heading with all of this AI storm?

I’ve got two answers to it. I guess to answer your literal question, where’s AI and SEO tools going? I think certainly something we’re going to be bringing into our tool is using AI to actually help give the insights. For example, For example, once you’ve clustered all your keywords, there’s certain filters at the top and you can really easily add a filter on to show me, Hey, show me all the clusters of keywords I don’t rank for that are informational. Then you could add another filter on to show you the low difficulty ones, and you could add another filter on to show you the ones that had no AI over views because that’s the content you prioritize. There’s various things that I know what to do by applying the filter. That doesn’t need to exist anymore with AI. I could just overlay AI on the top of that, and I could type in, Please me all the clusters that I should write content for in a priority, and it would automatically know what filters to do based on that. I think if you answer your question, literally, AI will be using SEO tools to give more of the insights.

It can crunch the data quicker and give you that. Whereas before we’re adding filters, knowing what we’re looking for, we don’t need to do that anymore. My actual answer for your question, so that’s the answer to your question, literally, is I don’t think SEO is going to be the same, I think, and I’ve said it before I wrote a piece on it. I think it’s not going to be about search engine optimization anymore. I think it’s going to be search experience optimization. Ai has made content so commoditized that, as I said earlier, you can just generate loads and loads of crap in seconds. As I also said, that’s the thing, that’s how you should be using AI to do your writing. I’ve got my own thoughts and guides on how to do it, but that is how people are using it, unfortunately. With content being so commoditized, Users and searchers aren’t going to Google anymore, especially Gen Z. Before AI was even a thing, they’re starting to look more at TikTok and Pinterest and various other channels for different queries. I’ll give you an anecdote. We’ve just had our bathroom done, and let’s say, hypothetically, we had a client, Tops Tiles.

They’re a huge tile company in the UK. They sell bathroom tiles. These are five keywords they would want to be visible for because they are relevant at some point on the user’s customer journey. Bathroom, ideas. Let’s get the people high up in the channel. Cool bathroom gadgets because, again, it’s related to what they do. It’s high up the funnel. Buy bathroom tiles because obviously they want to sell the tiles. And how to tile a bathroom. Let’s just use those four because obviously, if I Google that, I’m going to search it. I watched my partner search each one of those five queries. The bathroom ideas, the search started on Pinterest. She wanted very visual ideas of how we could do a bathroom. Then when she had an idea, when she was going through, she saw this really cool or gadget which does UVs, your toothbrush to clean it. She’s like, Oh, cool. She went to TikTok and she searched cool bathroom gadgets on Amazon, and it was like a load of reviews on TikTok. Then when she found some gadgets, that was nice. Then she was like, Okay, now I actually need to get on with the bathroom.

She went to Amazon to search for the bathroom tiles, and then YouTube to search for how to tile the bathroom, and then back to Google to get reviews from tile company. So five queries, five different search engines, let’s call it. Top stars are going to be for all of them. And there’ll be a waiting on… And your traditional SEOs would be like, Hey, we rank on Google for all five of these. We’ve got a guide on how to tile your bathroom. We’ve got a guide on bathroom ideas. We’ve got… And that’s all well and good. But I think we need to start waiting a query based on the better platform. So TikTok should get a higher waiting for bathroom gadget ideas because that’s where more people search for that. Pinterest should get a higher wait. And so we need to look at start thinking about visibility across channels rather than just Google. That’s the way I see SEO going is that it’s not just going to be about Google anymore. It’s, okay, what is the best platform for a given keyword? Let’s weigh our visibility on that. That’s where I think we’ll be It’s lovely.

Lovely, Andy. This has been a brilliant conversation. Thank you so much for the insights shared. But before we let you go, I would like to play a quick rapid fire with you. I hope you’re game for it.

Yeah, sure. Always.

All right. Your last Google search.

How do I look at my history? It’s going to be something really lame because I was probably doing a client work now. Hang on. He’s probably just looking for social channels. I was looking for Blue sky. Removing Echo from audio in Premiere Pro because I’m making a video and I wanted to remove the background reverberation.

Okay, all right. All right. Your favorite spot?

Rugby.

Favorite travel destination?

That’s a good question. I’m very fortunate to have been to a lot of places. I think Indonesia at the moment.

All right. On Friday evening, Sandy, where do we find you? After office or after work?

I like to go for a few drinks in Central London, which is where I met my business partner. I know good things can come from it.

Absolutely. All right, finally, we’ll not kill you anymore. The last question, what did you do with your first paycheck of your life, Andy?

Wow. So when I was 16, what did I do? I think. It doesn’t sound good. It just sounds like a very typical Scottish guy. I think I just went to the pub. Okay. All right. I wouldn’t have done. I was 16. I actually think I was self-reliant and bought my mom’s birthday Christmas present with it. That’s what I did.

That is so sweet. Great. You love me, Andy. Once again, thank you so much for taking out time to do this with us. For our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

On Twitter or X, my name is DigitalQuoic on there. A Quoic, by the way, if you don’t know, is a weird animal in Australia, but I love them. Shouldn’t have chosen it because no one ever knows how to find me. But I’m increasingly moving over to Blue Sky as Twitter becomes a bit of a nightmare or LinkedIn, just to search my name, Andy Chadwick.

All right. Thank you, Andy. This has been a great conversation. Cheers, man.

Cheers. Thank you very much for having me.