Expert Insights and Strategies for Content and Conversion Optimization

Hey, hi everyone. Now, welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. And today we have Ben Johnston, who is the SEO Director at Harvest Digital with us. Hey, Ben, how is it going?

I’m great. Thanks, Ranmay, How are you?

All good. I can’t really complain. So, Ben, thank you so much for taking out time to sit down and do this with us. Really appreciate it. And before we take it forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Talk us through your journey, how are you growing up as a child, and how are you in your college, and how did you land up in the digital marketing SEO space? And then also a bit about your agency, what are you guys specializing in at Harvest Digital, and what are your core competencies, and we’ll take it off from there.

Wow, that’s a lot. Let’s not worry about how I grew up as a child because there’s a lot of work there. Essentially, I wound up in SEO in round about 2007. Back then, I firmly believe no one actually wound up in SEO on purpose in 2007.

We never really thought of in school or college that we’re going to get into SEO or digital marketing for that matter, right?

Yeah, exactly. There was nothing. I went to university. I did an English and a media degree. I did two degrees at the same time. I wound up working at a microbiology lab, of all things. Interesting. Yeah, just doing lab tech work. I was keeping the machines working for the NHS. It was a great job, actually, but my heart was writing. A good friend of mine and I were running a club night, and we were doing music for the Colchester Seat, and we were working with… We started working with local bands and started creating websites or MySpace pages. That’s how far back we’re going. And from there, people were asking us, Can you get us higher in Google? I started looking it up and seeing if I could get people’s MySpace pages higher in Google and figuring it out from there. And then one day, my mom, she sent me a picture that she had seen in the local newspaper for an agency that was in Colchester. Saying they’re an SEO agency, they were looking for copywriters. And I was like, Yeah, okay, I’ll apply for that. And I applied for it. And because I already had a bit of knowledge in that space and a bit of A bit of technical skill.

I’d always been building my own websites and so on and so forth. I got my first agency job, ran about 2007, 2008. We went from there, started out as a copywriter, and always kept that mindset of creating content that people really want to use and continue continued from there. And that’s really been the thing that I wanted to keep all the way through my entire career.

Lovely. And like you mentioned, you started your journey as a copywriter writer. So today’s data-driven world, Ben, how do you see the role of content marketing evolving alongside SEO best practices?

I think the great thing about content is that It continues to evolve. I retrained as a data analyst around about 10 years ago as well. The point of data is there to inform what you’re working on and the amount of information that we have now. If you can analyze that and leverage that for content, you’re going to be way, way ahead of the curve. It’s really been what I’ve been trying to work on for the last 10, 15 years is really being able to write, but being able to bring the data that we have and being able to understand what people are looking at, what people are working with, you can’t beat it. If you’re able to understand the data that’s available to us from all of these different platforms and work that into your content, you’re going to do some really great work. And that’s really why I hope that I’m able to pass over to my teams.

Absolutely. You have been in the space, like you said, in 2007. Since 2007, you have been there. For quite some time, you have seen enough summer’s inventors in the SEO space and all this Google algorithm updates. So which one do you feel was the most significant one which had a long-lasting impact on the space?

Wow, that’s a big question. I would say probably Panda, actually. I think Penguin hit a certain grade of people very hard. But I think Panda was the one that made a lot of people sit up and take notice. And the fun thing that I’m seeing with a lot of people now with the helpful content update is that we’re seeing almost a response or the same thing again. People are people who have been blasting out content in the same way that we were doing back with Panda back in the day. I feel like some of those similar behaviors are showing up again with the help of content update. I really like that people are having to redo the work and tidy up. Then we’re seeing big uplifts again for those people who have done the cleanup work. With the latest core update, it’s quite interesting.

Absolutely. And then talking about content. What is your take on how AI or any tool, let’s say, ChatGPT, can be leveraged for content? How it should or should not be, rather.

I’m a huge fan of AI tools, but we’ve drawn a line in the sand at Harvest. Basically, the line is we don’t use it to generate content, but we can use it to generate frameworks, and we can use it for research purposes. For For example, I’ve recently built a tool for my team at Harvest called Stratagizer and a one called Summarizer. They’re all built in R, hence why they’ve got R at the end of it. They are basically tools that you give them a keyword or you give them a URL, and they let you know what the intent of all of the ranking pages is or give you a summary of those pages. And that really helps us make sure that we’re aligning our content to what Google wants and also gives us a summary of how our content is performing for a keywords content, what people are targeting and what people are looking at. So I think AI is fantastic when it comes to building up a platform, building up a resource, helping you build up a brief for content writers. I personally don’t think that using it to generate content is the right move.

Great. And looking back at your earliest CEO career, Ben, what are some of the biggest wins throughout the last 17 years that you have experienced? We can also take a reference of your client story or your favorite client story that is, whichever way you want to put it.

That’s a long one. I’ve had some very happy wins over the years. I’ve had clients or client platforms that have just not been working. Something like we’ve had, let’s go way back. We had a client that was at a university, for example, and they had a form, and this leads into CRO. They had a form, and you could buy your textbooks and you could buy the things that you were selling at a university, even like pencils. They had a whole e-commerce site via that form. But they were asking for a landline number. I don’t know about you, but when I was at university, I didn’t have a landline.

So did I. I did not have it as well. Yeah.

So that was a huge dropout point. So we tested it and we eliminated that landline Line number and our e-commerce conversion rate went up by 142%. There’s been quite a few out of the years.

Lovely. And talking about SEO, it is no more about, at least I would like to imagine in fact, where that it is not so much anymore about clicks and those impressions. The client has gotten mature and educated as well. But talking about CRO, how do you ensure strategies that the CRO actually happens, ensuring websites not only attract those visitors and clicks, but also convert them. So how do you ensure that?

So we’ve got a… We really like to think about the entire user journey. We don’t just think about a lot of SEO and CRO offerings, which is the landing page. We like to think about what happens before the landing page and also after. It’s great that we can create landing pages and content that ranks, but what do we do before that? How do we create trust and how do we create user intent before somebody actually lands on that page? That comes down to creating content, creating ad copy, creating metadata. That starts with zero moment of truth. And then how do we follow that up with the landing page experience? And then how does that whole experience follow through to the checkout process or lead process or however it is? And then what do we do afterwards? So what do we do with a follow-up email? If somebody maybe didn’t convert, or even if they did, what do they get afterwards? And how do we keep people in that loop? So it’s really about creating a whole holistic experience rather than just a lot of… Seo in a lot of cases, Same with PPC and the same with email.

We put it in a box of, We got you to the landing page. What next? That’s a U problem. What I’ve always tried to do with my teams is build that whole holistic experience of how do we get people to the landing page? How do we start building that experience? Then how do we keep that experience all the way through? And then after they’ve purchased or after they’ve converted, how do we continue with that experience? So it really starts with that, what we call the zero moment of truth, which is people see you in a search result, or they see you in an email, or they see you in a out-of-home ad, or something like that, and all the way through to, Okay, you’ve purchased. What does your final email look like?

Yeah, great. And then talking about the overall user experience, how do you ensure that it is aligned while obviously you’re targeting your audience to make that sale happen, make those conversions. But at the same time, how do you ensure that it is aligned to the brand’s voice? And how do you position yourself as an organization in front of the of your target audience as well?

Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. It very much depends to a certain degree. I honestly did promise myself I wasn’t going to say it depends, but I failed completely there. I generally depend very much on the client and the brand as to how they position themselves. But what we try to do is we try to make sure that And again, ties back to custom software that we built that links up the intent of a keyword to the intent of the landing page content. Landing page, yeah. And I find, personally, that works a lot better in terms of driving conversions because the great thing about CRO is small things can make It’s a huge difference. Very similar to SEO. But as long as what you tell people aligns with what they’re reading, so what they’re searching for is aligned with what you’re serving them on the landing page, that works really well.

Lovely. Great, Ben. This has been a brilliant conversation. I’m sure our audience would love the insights which you have shared today. For our audiences, if they to reach out to you, Ben, how do they do that?

You can drop me a message on… That’s a very good question. You’ve got to imagine I don’t use Twitter anymore. But you can check me out on ben-johnston. Co. There is a contact form on that site, or you can sign up to my email list, or you can check us out on. Com, or you can drop me a line on LinkedIn, which is linkedin. Com/ben-johnston-seo.

Lovely. Good idea. Once again, thank you so much, Ben, for taking our time to do this with us. Really appreciate it. Cheers, man.

Thank you, man.