Mastering SEO: Overcoming Challenges and Adapting to Change in a Dynamic Digital World

Hey, hi everyone. Now, welcome to your show, E-Coffee with Experts. This is your host, Ranmay here. Today we have Martin Woods, who is the SEO Director at Indigo Extra, and who specializes in international SEO consultancy handling building. Hey, Martin. How are you? Great. Martin, before you move any forward, let’s get to know the human behind the mic. Why don’t you talk us through your journey thus far? How did you land in the SEO or digital marketing space? And more about Indigo Extra, what has been your journey with that, and we’ll take it forward from.

Sure, Well, I’ve worked in SEO for 20 years now. So I first got involved through… Basically, I started creating websites for… First for myself, we had a holiday home at the time, and then for friends and family and so on. Gradually, we’ve done enough. My wife’s a graphic designer, so she does the web design side of things, that we decided to turn it into a business. I think over the years, it’s gone from being less the mom and pop business and shiatsu practitioner or whatever, to more and more towards the enterprise SEO side of things. We recently helped RealAdvisor, who are a real estate site, moved from 50,000 to 270,000 traffic. And we worked for a A major graphic design company. It’s on an NDA, so I can’t give the name, but we increased their traffic by 700,000 in just under a year. So they’re the clients that we’re more likely to be working with these days.

Lovely, Amny. Those are some fantastic numbers there. Martin, we hear a lot about SEO strategies, but what’s the most unexpected challenge that you have faced in real-world SEO campaigns? You have achieved some great successes there. Talk us through those challenges.

Oh, that’s a good question. I think that whenever we get a new inquiry, it’s always a new challenge for us because it People come to us for all kinds of reasons. I mean, one of them was this is quite a while ago now, it was a removal company, but they just migrated to WordPress, and they decided that they didn’t need their blog, and they used to have maybe 50, 60 pages on their blog, and they’d deleted the entirety of it, and they didn’t have it backed up anywhere. They weren’t in touch with the person who had written it for them and so on. So that was a bit of a challenge. But luckily, there’s a website called archive. Org, where you can go and see a history of websites over time. So we basically just fall a little bit managed to get the majority of it and just, yeah, built, copied them back over, wrote some new blog posts for them and so on. I think it’s surprising how often little things make a big difference in SEO. With multilingual sites, there’s a lot of, particularly in WordPress, there’s a lot of add-ons which will give you the same URL for every language.

And people will spend a lot of time optimizing websites for each language. But if it’s the same URL, Google can only index it once. So I’ve probably had that situation five or six times over the years where people have come to us. They’ve been writing content in French, German, Dutch, whatever. And yet it’s just not ranking. And you just have to fix that one simple thing and suddenly they rank. So, yeah, occasionally it’s… I love it when it’s like, okay, there’s that one button I can press thing. There’s that one little thing I can do that makes a huge difference.

Absolutely. And the SEO landscape has changed so much. I knew you have been there for 20 years, right? Would have seen enough summers and winters and all those Google updates through, right? And it has changed dramatically in the last decade or so. So according to you, what What has been the biggest shift that you have witnessed during your tenure in the industry? And how did you adapt to that particular shift that happened?

Okay, well, I think, I mean, Google Panda and Google Penguin were certainly major shifts, but they’re old news these days.

Yeah, there’s so much coming up. Yeah.

I think one of the more recent ones was probably the helpful content algorithm update. And that was a couple of years ago that it came in, but they’re still working on, as with most of the algorithms, it keeps on getting refined. And the reason that was such a big shift is it went from focusing on a single page. It used to be that if you got high domain authority, good trust flow, good backlinks and so on, that was it in terms of what Google looks at, in terms of the overall site profile. It helped Content is one of the first algorithm updates where they actually have said that it’s… Sorry, just got a cat going crazy here. Come on, then. Settle there. And they It’s one of the first updates where they looked at the site as a whole and they started to say, Okay, if you’ve got a helpful blog, then that will make your commercial pages rank higher. It also meant that they’ve started to look at. So things like keyword clusters. So it used to be that if you’d got a page all about socks on a car sales website, then that page might still rank pretty high, even though it was the only page about SOX on the entire site.

These days, they’ve made it, as I say, it’s a much more global perspective. Are you targeting this cluster of keywords? So that you’re trying to rank high for In my case, it’s like enterprise SEO solutions, enterprise SEO audit, enterprise SEO based international SEO, website translation, all of these terms that link together to create a universal whole.

Absolutely. And you got in a multi-lingual SEO. How did you get into that? Was it a client initially for whom you had to do it, or it was just it happened out of design or it just happened? It just happened.

It just happened. I mean, we’d moved to France and we’d got our holiday home and we were marketing that. At the time, we were managing to rank high for the sites that some of the property portfolios had with hundreds of holiday homes on them. And so Then as I say, we’ve got a friend who’s, well, she still is, is she actually practitioner and we’re still looking after her site. The other one who was an interfaith minister in Scotland. It started off as doing website for us, then for friends, and then we set up a business and started to attract clients. I did work in web design initially, but I realized that I’m not a I’m pretty good at technical SEO side of things, but I’m not a programmer. And I realized that I really needed… We took on some jobs in the early days where, yeah, we invested quite a lot of money in creating a website for two different clients at the same time, and neither of them we could finish. We just didn’t have the skills, so we had to refund the money we’d paid and made us a significant loss. And since I said, okay, we…

So when my wife does web design, she’s working with our smaller clients who come to us. They say, I want an attractive website. I want it to rank high with search engines. Perhaps it’s got some basic e-commerce functionality. But if anyone comes to us nowadays and says, Okay, I want this bit of functionality, and I want it to do this and that and the other, then we actually just turn the job down because I think I learned We decided, you had to specialize in something, and we chose to specialize in the multilingual SEO side of things and in sites that just look great.

Lovely. You have a background in psychology, which is fascinating. How does It would help you in creating SEO strategy, considering the fact that whatever SEO that we do, I mean, whatever AI and all the technology that we talk about, the content is going to get consumed by humans to make that decision to to buy a product or use a service. How that psychology degree comes into play there?

Well, I think there’s a lot of… Obviously, I can’t apply everything I learned in psychology. Some of it was about mental health and so on. But I think there are a lot of things that marketers use. Things like the law of scarcity, where if you make something, I don’t know if it’s a law exactly, but you make something seem like it’s in demand. It’s why when you buy a flight or something, it always says, Only four tickets left at this price. That’s a marketing strategy, paradox of choice, where actually if you give people too much choice, they’re more likely to not choose anything and that thing. But one of the models that I particularly like, but they’re a bit gimmicky. They’re a bit like you can apply them in a certain situation, but they don’t necessarily give you a rounded view of it. Do you mind if I just share my screen? I’ve actually got a…

Yeah, I’ve got to share that. That’s great. Can you see the… It’s just a single image. Yeah, okay. There’s a model in psychology and it ties in closely which is the stages of learning. It’s sometimes called the four stages of learning, but there’s five stages. I don’t know, they added an extra one at some point. It ties in closely with the journey of awareness. It’s one of my favorite models of psychology, and it’s one of my favorite models of marketing, because I think it really helps to understand how you pitch consumers at different stages of the journey. I’ll with through it as quickly as I can because as I said, I could talk about it at great length because I’m a big fan of it. Basically, the stages of learning, it starts with unconscious incompetence. That means you’re not good at something and you’re not aware of it. I’ll use the example of marketing your website. That might be you’ve just launched a brand new website and you don’t even know it needs marketing. You just are waiting for the customers to come to you, which is quite common. It’s what some people think.

They’ve got the website out there, they’ll sit back, Wait for the phone to ring. Start offering their service or whatever. So conscious incompetence is when you start to realize you’ve got a problem, But you don’t know what to do about it. That’s a bit of a painful phase because even though you’ve actually grown, you’ve developed in your learning, you can’t do anything about it yet. It’s the same whether you are learning a skill, you’re learning how to ice skate or whatever, or you’re building a website or whatever. This can be applied across a broad range different things. So conscious competence is okay. You start to, let’s say, you’re marketing your own site, you start to learn how to market it. You’ve got to really concentrate on it though. You keep on researching, you keep on looking things up and so on. Unconscious competence is sometimes the final stage of the process is basically it becomes automatically. Perhaps ice skating is a better example than building of this. Once you get really good at ice skating, you’re no longer thinking, Okay, I’ve got to hold my arms out like that. I balance and I position my body just like that and I lean slightly forward.

I don’t know if you lean forward in ice skating or not. I’m definitely not at the unconscious competence stage myself, probably at the conscious incompetence stage. Then the final level is metaconscious competence. That’s a global awareness of it. You’re not just able to do it, but you’re to explain it to someone else, to teach it, you understand why it works the way it does, and so it’s another level. That’s the unconscious competence model. It mirrors really well with the levels of awareness, which is a marketing concept. Unaware would be people who aren’t aware they’ve got a problem. That’s like I said, you’ve created a website, you’re not actually aware that you need to market it. You You’ve just sitting back. Problem aware, that matches with conscious incompetence. That’s the thing where you’ve started to become aware of the issue. If you’re targeting, so from a marketing perspective, you’re targeting people who are problem-aware, you’re thinking about, Okay, how do I define the issue? Empathize with their needs, reach out to them on social media, do some research on Reddit to find out what problems are. And so it’s in each of these stage, from a marketing perspective, requires a different solution, and it’s why I like it so much.

And solution-aware, okay, I need to market it. I’m starting to investigate what the options are. Do I use social media? Do I do SEO? Do I do PPC? Do I go to the local village and put leaflets out? Whatever. There’s so many different potential solutions. You’re becoming Most aware of the solutions. At that stage, if you’re marketing people’s solution, you need to provide proof. Like proof of why this works. Why does this solution work? Product aware is people are narrowing in on your specific solution, your specific product, and you want to show, Okay, how does my product shine compared to the competitor’s? Most aware, they’ve already You’ve sent them a brochure or whatever, they really know it. At that stage, actually quite a few customers drop out at that stage. The reason for that is because people often oversell. 15They take them back to one of the earlier stages and they start to say, Well, this is why you need marketing for your… Well, they already know that. At that stage, you’re really… It’s not a lot of content involved. Maybe you’re saying, Well, if you sign up for three months, we’ll give you a 10% discount.

Or you’re saying it’s free delivery, or you’re offering them a gift of some sort often, some little incentive to say, This is why you should go with us. It’s a very useful model when I’m thinking about my own learning and my own growth, and it mirrors a marketing model that is about how do I sell to people at the different levels of learning. It’s why I like this mirror image. There’s a surprising amount of things in marketing and psychology that do that, where there’s two different theories, depending on what your perspective is.

Absolutely. Absolutely. Creator Martin. I’m talking about AI, which has been there for the last close to 16, 17 months now. At Indigo Extra, with the recent experiment with ChatGPT, you have highlighted the importance of human touch, right? Yeah. So how can AI best be used to complement rather than replace human expertise and crafting as your content?

Okay. Well, I think that it’s… I think AI is very useful at certain things. It’s useful at research. It’s useful at taking large amounts of information and distilling it and summarizing it and organizing things. It’s good at things like keyword research, competitive research, and so on. It’s also quite good at editing content. If you’ve written a document, you can ask AI, How would you improve this? You can even say, How would you improve this? And please explain to me why you would make those changes. That way you’re also developing your own skills rather than just copy and paste. But I think you mentioned the experiment we did. We got a page of 8,000 words, and it was completely original content. We’d written most of it quite long before AI came on the scene. We tried an AI-generated meta description and an AI-generated intro of about 50 words. It used to get, I forget what it was, 2000 visits a month or something. It was quite a successful page. It disappeared from the search results. Google literally dropped it from the search results. It still had 7,950 words of original content on there. I think anyone…

I mean, this was just ChatGPT. With the way AI, you might have better results. But I know one of Google’s recent algorithm updates, the spam algorithm update, there’s quite a few spam algorithm updates from Google, but one of the recent ones, they did target sites with a lot of AI content, and there were sites that just, again, were wiped off the map that were doing pretty well before. I think Google, they have AI themselves. They have AI that detects whether something’s written by AI. I think if you over-rely on it, I would just encourage people to proceed slowly. Do a test like we did. See if it works. Don’t just go, Okay, optimize these 100 pages for me, change your site, and so on. But AI is here for the future. It’s here in the long term. I also think it’s worth remembering at the moment ChatGPT and stuff isn’t actually intelligent. I asked a question recently. Basically, it’s a word predictor. It predicts what word is most likely to come next, and then it rattles off. It’s got some pretty cool features. You can do it like a pirate or Shakespeare would or whatever.

It’s good fun. But I recently asked the question, it rained on Tuesday and Friday, What days of the week was it sunny or something? It came up, it wasn’t quite that. It was like, Well, it was definitely on a day between Monday and Friday, but we can’t deduce that from the information provide. It came with one of these long, technical answers. But a problem that a six-year-old could solve. Luckily, we’re not there yet. I’m quite glad of that because I don’t think we live in a society that is quite ready to have computers take over just yet.

Absolutely. I mean, if you are implementing it as an enabler in your system, it is absolutely there. But if you talk about that being a final product, I mean, that there is some distance to travel for any AI tool for that matter. Yeah. Gideon Martin, this has been a lovely conversation, but before I let you go, let’s play a quick rapid fire. I hope you’re game for it.

Yeah, sure.

All right. Your last Google search.

Oh, your last Google search. I think it was on the steps of awareness because I wanted to make sure that I’ve got what I was talking about earlier, I got it on.

Really honest on your part. Great. Your celebrity crush?

My celebrity crush? I don’t really have a celebrity crush, but I’m going to say Johnny Depp, but that’s more like I wish I could be him than…

No, I get it. All right. How was Martin as a child? I was very shy.

I was very reserved, and I towed the line and just worked hard at school, followed the instructions. And yeah, very different how I am today.

I can’t concretely imagine you being that. Okay. All right. Where do you find you on Friday evenings after office or after work? After work, rather, because you guys are remote. So yeah.

Okay. Well, I’m currently, as I said, I’ve got a holiday home. I live in South France in the summer. So you’ll probably find me swimming in the river. I’ll take two minutes walk from a beautiful river swimming spot.

That is lovely.

I’ll either be playing ball with the neighbors or I’ll be swimming in a river.

Lovely, lovely. Great, Martin. All right, so Martin, for our audiences, if they want to reach out to you, how do they do that?

So if they visit indigoextra. com or they’re welcome to send me an email to martin@indigoextra. com

Lovely. Great, Martin, once again. Thank you so much for taking our time to do this with us. Really appreciate it. Cheers, man.

Yeah. Cheers, one mate. It’s been a pleasure.