How PR + SEO Drove 200× Growth

The first questions he's always asking clients is, how do you make money? So this client was essentially about getting referrals.

Rehabs UK went from under 300 visits per month to 60,000. That's a 200x within 12 months. This is Mark Williams-Cook, director at Kanda and founder of Also Asked. Now I know what you're thinking, but can they outrank the NHS in rehab? And today Mark is going to break down the exact system they used to outrank a giant like the NHS, the content structure that made Google confident, and the authority players that actually survived. If you're in a tough niche, you need this. I'm Shaf and this is Ask an Expert. Welcome our guest, Mark Williams-Cook. Could you paint a picture of like what the before looked like?

Sure. So when we first started working with Rehabs UK, From the organic perspective, the traffic was very low. We're talking sort of in the, in the hundreds, mainly brand searches. In terms of missed searches, I guess just a lot was the answer. And in terms of visibility, you know, there wasn't really much there outside of people specifically searching for, for that domain.

What did you identify that made you think, right, actually, we could dominate within their targeted search terms?

Yeah, so I mean, some of their main competitors, were actually businesses that were very similar to theirs but had been around and investing in SEO for like a decade. Um, because the other tricky thing about their sector is, at least with Google Ads, you can't buy ads for a lot of the keywords they're targeting, right? So that makes organic even more competitive. The things you can do to optimize a site compound each other. There wasn't, I say, necessarily one glaring thing that we found looking at the site where we thought, hmm, yeah, if we fix this, that's really gonna propel us. It was just these different layers. Um, and there's a lot of nuance there and it takes some experience. So for instance, from a, just a user experience perspective, when I was first looking at their site and thinking, okay, if I came here for help with alcohol addiction, there's a page called alcohol addiction, there's a button that says get help, there's a button around, uh, alcohol or rehab. And immediately I was like, well, which one of these would I actually click on? Because they're all different things, they go to different pages, right?

Yeah.

And One of the things we discuss with clients is when they're talking about things that they would like to rank for, my question to them is always, okay, well, if someone typed that into Google or Bing or wherever, which one page would you want to send them to?

Yeah.

And if they can't answer that, then I'm kind of like, what hope does a machine have of determining if you're— you, the person that is in the business and has, you know, written this content, can't decide? So One of the first things we actually recommended was we spent a fair amount of time like restructuring the site in terms of making it very clear, this is the page for this intent. But the first thing we need to actually do is let people know you exist and get your voice out there on this subject because it's being talked about, right? Addiction, drugs, all over the media. And actually, In almost the opposite to the question you've got here, we told them that for their things they really wanted to go for, which is like the alcohol addiction stuff, that they can't compete at the moment. So the first year, I was basically like, that's got to come off your list because you're not going to rank for that in that time span. And actually, the strategy we took was to focus on other types of addiction, other things we can help people with that weren't as competitive. Obvious gaps that we saw and where I thought we could help was the previous people they had worked with hadn't done anything in terms of digital PR, link acquisition, which to me, for over my whole SEO career, has been one of the things that really moves the needle. And there's so many opportunities there to do that. You know, our pitch was, well, because the content is— was pretty good. Um, I think there was some, you know, ways, as I said, we can improve how that people's experience of that, which is important in the long term because Google is looking at how people interact with sites. So I've worked with enterprise and big companies before, and I've worked with tiny companies as well. And there's all kinds of advantages you have as a, as a small company, and it's normally being able to get shit done a lot quicker than big companies. Um, when I've worked with big companies, there's just endless bureaucracy and sign-off, and things need to be planned and submitted and reviewed by legal. And, you know, there's a 6-month queue in the dev cycle if you want to get something implemented. Whereas when you work with small companies that have, you know, developer in-house and stuff, you can normally make decisions very quickly. So it gives you a big advantage for if there's, um, new opportunities, new features, you know, okay, they're not, they're not optimized for like Google Discover. Um, they don't have this schema, you know, anything you can do to get the edge, or there's something, um, there's a breakout search term that's related to us. They're the things you can jump on that big competitors will struggle with because they, you know, generally as companies grow in size and responsibility, the decision-making becomes safer.

Yeah.

So one of the kickoff digital PR campaigns that we ran for rehabs was actually a reactive campaign. And one of the ones we came across early was that the makers of the game Fortnite, which I'm sure many parents will know, were being sued because of how addictive it was by the parents of children that were addicted to it.

Wow.

And obviously this isn't really related to anything that Rehabs UK do, but it's a story about addiction.

Yeah.

And the team thought, well, wouldn't it be really interesting to see outside of this which games are the most addictive, what's the most searched for, and actually relate this even to drug substances? How do the searches balance up there? So we managed in the space of half a day to turn around a data campaign that looked at Google search volumes for all these things. Wrap a narrative around it, and then we sent it to all the outlets that covered the original story. And immediately then I think we won like 50+ links from big news sites. The general aim with digital PR is to get links that are, or get coverage and links that are difficult for for competitors to replicate is always kind of top of the list. And from the obviously PR perspective, try and communicate what your client is about and what's good about them and why they exist and show their expertise. So from a data point of view, I think as we mentioned earlier, turnaround is really important. If you can have internal data, which so many companies actually kind of sleep on and don't realize how interesting or valuable it is. That's something that becomes very difficult, difficult for competitors to replicate. If we know journalists like using this data and you have this data on a monthly, yearly basis, why don't we actually just make a page where we serve that data live? for them. So every year it updates, we can make it filterable. And essentially, you end up becoming not only discoverable in search for when people are searching for that data, which journalists obviously do as well, but you'll become known for, oh, okay, well, if I want the data to go with this story, I know I can just go to this website and change the filter I want and get some nice facts and figures for the story I'm writing. The subject line should be what you envisage them having their headline as. Because the headlines are meant to be attention-grabbing, right?

Yeah.

So if you've got a story and you can send it to a journalist with the subject that's captivating that they want to write about, they're obviously motivated to get, generally, to get clicks and reads on the stuff that they write. Internally, we have the very abruptly named So What test, which is the, if you can pitch the subject line of your story It should be interesting to people. If they can kind of answer like, yeah, you know, so what, I don't care about that, then it's probably not fit for general news consumption.

Why do most campaigns and like the data flop? Like, but like, why do they flop when the data is good? Like, what's like the key things that could, you know, you've got the data, they've got the vision, but somehow the campaign doesn't doesn't work out? And I know you mentioned time and irrelevance, but is there anything else that's specific that would like, this is a foundational thing that could really change?

It's honestly the story. It's the narrative. Yeah, you can make great stories around bad data. And you can make bad stories around great data. It's about getting people's attention and making them want to read more, which is, which is debatably good or bad. Because if you look at, for instance, my Google Discover feed, it's full of clickbait and false promises and those headlines that really irritate me where it's like, uh, you know, oh, the most brilliant travel fact you need to know is this one thing. And obviously, yeah, obviously it's just like, you could have just told me what it was in the headline and then I can see it's actually a massive letdown and everyone could have saved themselves some time. Um, so I'm being clear here to differentiate between having a good story narrative, a good hook, and just being clickbaity. Um, because I think being clickbaity will eventually bury you.

I think especially leading on to the next question, uh, you kind of touched upon it, um, with, you know, LLMs. And it's good that you've got that background, that you've studied the field as well before it was mainstream. Um, but before that, like, everyone's talking about like LLM or Geo, AI SEO, and AO. There's many, many terms. Which one, like, are you labeling in certain categories? Or is it just all one thing? Or just rebranding?

I think so. Geo seems to be the most popular term. But it's the one I kind of have the most issue with just because I've spent many, over many years, I've spent time in boardrooms, Trying to convince people that SEO is a thing and we need investment in it and how it aligns with businesses, etc. I don't want to have to have those same conversations now with a different acronym. Geo, I think, is unhelpful because geo already means something, you know, to do with geography. And it's, you know, if you type geo into a search engine, it's not going to tell you about generative engine optimization. I think there's too much motivation for agencies to rebrand what they're doing because there's lots of investment money, as we know, going into AI stuff. Wave hands vaguely. There's been a lot of SEO, I would classify them, things that have been essentially relabeled as geo things, um, which I think is unhelpful.

Yeah.

You need to accept that the paradigm of how people are finding information is, is Shifting rapidly. You need to accept that the way we report and measure in an AI world is very different. Influence has shifted from being inferred after a click to it can be done at the point of the search. So whether that's on Perplexity, ChatGPT, the goal of marketing is to influence people, right? You can have that desired influence within the answer the LLM system has given. It doesn't require a click. But then obviously, it's very difficult to measure what kind of scale of influence you're getting there. Now about your one site ranking in the top 3, it can mean your brand, your product, your proposition being mentioned in the top 20 results as many times as possible. So it becomes a multi-site kind of issue. Now this means You know, how you achieve that. For instance, if we're talking about multi-site presence, one of the best ways to do that is digital PR. Is digital PR SEO? Well, it's certainly been a facet of SEO for a long time, so I certainly wouldn't label it as a geo thing. I've seen conversations around things like llms.txt and saying we need to put these files on to allow LLMs to understand our content better, and that, that's definitely a thing for geo. But there's no documented evidence anywhere that any LLM is actually using llms.txt. I've always been very much of the mind, like, part of your job as a professional is to, you know, be honest with people about, okay, yeah, we can do this, but there's no evidence this is the thing. But we know these things are worthwhile. And by, by that, I can give you a very good definition, which is pretty much for everything we do for SEO with the exception of very few things like technical stuff like hreflang or schema, everything we do for SEO, we would still be doing if search engines didn't exist. So we'd still be writing the best possible content for users, we'd still be making clear internal linking navigation, we'd still be doing digital PR. All of those things build the equity of your business. And the last thing I'd say on that, I have a lot to say about geo.

No, it's good. I think it's obviously trending. There's a lot people desiring knowledge on it. So continue, Mark.

Yeah, I think it's just this matter of working out what is actually having an impact. So chunking is a method to enhance your visibility within AI search by having these self-contained chunks of text about, you know, that succinctly cover one topic or whatever topic. And I'm kind of like, yeah, that's what a paragraph is. And that's what we've been doing for years. And that's how people, that's how people scan read web content. You know, we've known for many, many years that people don't read websites like a newspaper and just start at the beginning and read down. That's why for years we've talked about using clear headers to say, you know, these to demarcate different bits of the content where the sub-subjects are changing. And then within that, we make a nice— little chunk of content that someone can kind of understand. And then we use a well-labeled anchor text to take them if they want to go deeper. The best way that I've seen it approached, and they do do, in fairness, prompt tracking now, is a tool called Waikay, which is what AI knows about you. So waikay.ai. Io. And essentially what this tool looks at doing is you can put in your website and it builds, um, so it's, it's by Dixon Jones who built InLinks and was involved in Majestic. It builds like a knowledge graph of what it believes your company is about, and it will explore the different models, um, and essentially see what they understand about your brand. And it will list like brand entity Yeah, and it would list essentially facts, if you like, or what the model believes are facts about your company. So it might be things like, you know, where you're based, where you're founded, how much you charge, what kind of clients you serve, what kind of reputation you have. Why I think that's so important is, for me, brand's the gold standard of marketing. You don't want people Googling running shoes, you want them Googling Nike running shoes if you're Nike, Right? Yeah, that's what you want. Brand 50 years ago would be what people put on billboards and what people— what you would just tell them. You know, you'd pick your kind of slogan and you put it on TV, put it on billboards. That's what people know you as. When we had the internet, everyone got hyperconnected and brand became more fluid and what people said about you. So now before you interact with a new company that's maybe expensive, you'll probably look on Trustpilot or you look for some reviews or some forum things, right? Um, to see what people say about it. And is it any good? Is it trustworthy? Does it work? And that's what brand became like, this living reputation online.

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