How to Leverage the People Also Ask (PAAs) Questions for SEO Benefits

Hi everyone, it's Olga Zar from SEO Sly. This is SEO Podcast by SEO Sly. Today I have a special guest. This is Mark Williams-Cook. I have been following Mark for a long time. I've been using his tool Also Asked also for a long time, so I'm very happy that I have Mark today here to hopefully share his SEO story in detail and talk more about his, his tool and his, uh, agency. So Mark, how are you doing?

Really good. Thank you. Excited to be here. Thank you for having me, Olga.

That's awesome. So for someone who may, may not know you, can you like briefly introduce yourself in addition to what I've said?

Yes, certainly. So as you said, my primary role is I'm director at an agency called Kanda, which is based in the east of England. I'm running a SaaS tool called Also Asked. And as part of Kanda, we have some other businesses as well. So we've got like a UK e-commerce pet business we run. I've been doing SEO for around about 20 years, give or take.

Cool.

Most of that's been agency side, although the roots of that were kind of like, I think many people that got into SEO that long ago, building my own sites, affiliate stuff, all that kind of stuff. So Yeah, lots of agency things over the years. Um, but now pretty diverse in what I have to do day to day.

Uh-huh.

Uh-huh.

Okay. Okay. So let's go to the very beginning. So your SEO story. So 20 years. So you started doing SEO like as soon as you were born or something? Yeah.

Well, unfortunately, unfortunately I'm 40, so, oh, are you? So yeah, so 20 years ago.

Yeah.

Um, I was, very much out of school. So I didn't actually go to university or anything like that.

Uh huh.

So in the UK, we have a thing called A-levels, which takes you until you're about 18, which I did, didn't particularly enjoy, and kind of left and just got any job, like kind of many people that age. I had been building websites, though. I think the first website I put live was when I was about 12 or 13. So that would have been around 1996, maybe 1997. So I'd learned some HTML and put— I think it was like a joke website live.

Uh-huh.

And then I was always interested in computers. So when I got to— I think it's around 18, I actually built a website for the city I was in. Around local music. So there wasn't actually that many kind of bands that I wanted to see in the city I was in. So we built this website to try and essentially organize bands to come and play in Norwich, where I grew up, as well as local bands. And back then it was really hard to even do simple things like have a forum. You needed to be quite technical to set up a forum. So what I started doing was all these local bands that had their own little website, sites. I was offering them space on our community site and giving them a forum where they could come and talk. So without realizing it, I was doing things like building links from all these relevant sites that were linking to me and were getting more traffic. And where the SEO thing started was this website had like an Amazon affiliate store plugin. You could just basically put everything that was Amazon onto your website as a store. And I would ask people to support the site if they shop on Amazon, just to shop through our store. So we got commission. And then one day I noticed we were earning like £40, £50, £60 a day commission through the site, which for me back then was a lot of money. And I was like, how is this happening? And we are actually selling one particular DVD player every single day, or like 3 or 4 of them. And then I had a friend come and help me look at analytics. I think it was AWStats at the time I was using. It was pre-Google Analytics. And we saw the traffic was coming from Google. And what we discovered was we were actually ranking number 1 in Google above Amazon for a product on their site for this DVD player. So people were coming to our shop and buying it. And that really started my questioning of, huh, how does that work? Why did Google choose my website over the others? So that's when I then started to learn about search engines again. Around then, there wasn't really any courses, there wasn't really any books. So it was spending lots of time on forums like SitePoint, Digital Point, forums like this, just learning from other people. And then Started actually building my own sites, you know, found out about things like Google AdSense that you could make kind of money that way. And that's kind of what started my own investigation, if you like, my own learning into SEO, which was just building lots of different sites. And then I started doing affiliate marketing as well. Started an SEO blog, not existent anymore, and actually released some, some of the, I think were some of the first kind of SaaS SEO tools. So I had like a link building SaaS service that was fully automated.

Yeah.

And all that happened in about 4 or 5 years before I got my first agency job, which was a brilliant move because I was surrounded by lots of people that were basically smarter than me and really knew what they were doing. So I had some kind of structured learning, really started from the bottom there, which was the first agency I was at just had me sitting there doing like directory submissions, just hundreds and hundreds and hundreds on a spreadsheet. Which I suggested maybe we should just get someone else to do them.

Uh-huh.

Because that stuff really worked at the time. But then yeah, just kind of worked my way up in that agency, got more experience, got to work with lots of clients. And one thing I really liked working agency side was getting an insight into how all these different businesses worked, you know, because again, I didn't really have any experience. So suddenly seeing kind of behind the curtain of quite big companies and how their website operations were running. was a massive learning curve. So I was really lucky that I think I made that transition to be around those people because doing the affiliate stuff was great. I had a period after this that I kind of supported myself again doing just affiliate stuff and ad sites. And to be honest, I got really lonely doing it.

Oh.

So I'd be sitting at home like, oh, I hope that pigeon comes back. And all my friends were kind of at work In the time I was free and I was working a lot in the evenings and night. So yeah, I went back agency side just because I think it was just healthier for me in all kinds of ways.

So how many, in how many agencies have you worked?

That's a good question. Not that many. I think 5 is 5. So I joined one now defunct First one was called ZoomZoom, and then I've worked at a couple of the larger UK agencies. I was really lucky. I joined an agency in Norwich fairly early on in my career called Further. They got acquired by Gravity Global, but within a couple of years they took me onto their director team, and then I learned a lot there from their leadership about just running an agency. So essentially it was a really good skills match because the people running the agency had come from a more traditional marketing agency and didn't actually know that much about SEO, whereas I came just knowing loads of things about SEO but nothing about business and actually nothing actually about marketing.

Mm-hmm.

So I was really fortunate that I got to work with very experienced marketers, which kind of rounded off my skill set because I think it's very easy to if you grow up in SEO, if you like, for want of a better phrase, to not actually think that much about marketing. Um, but of course the, the lines between the two, especially now, yeah, are, are very, very blurred. You know, that SEO kind of is marketing, whereas again, back then it was kind of like there was the marketing people and then there was the SEO people over there and they didn't understand really what each other did. Um, so yeah, that, that was a really good start for me. I was there for about 5, 6 years before I left there. Had a little break to become a scuba diving instructor in Egypt.

Nice.

And then came back to the UK, tried out a couple of other agencies before I actually joined Cando, which was 7 or 8 years ago now. So there's 3 of us now leading Cando, which is a team of 26 currently.

Uh-huh. Okay, okay, okay. I thought you were the one who created Candor.

No. So, um, what happened with Candor— so Candor was originally called Applin Skinner, um, and it was run by a couple of chaps that I knew anyway through— I'd actually previously worked with them both, and they were just a design and build agency. So like doing really good designs and, and web builds, and they wanted to do some digital marketing. And I was at an agency where I'd been given a leadership role, but it wasn't really panning out for me. They weren't kind of giving me what they said they were going to. So they actually approached me and just basically said, do you want to come on as an equal partner and essentially build the kind of marketing function in Appen Skinner? I was like, yeah, sounds like a great deal. And I know the people, so I trust them, which is really important for me. So I set up kind of the SEO, and initially we did PPC as well. side of the business. And then after, I think, probably 2, about 2 years, we completely rebranded as Kanda because our shift focused. One of the directors decided to leave, so it was me and John. It's now me, John, and Jessica. So we had someone else in the team that we took on as a director, but we refocused and were more upfront with our, you know, we're doing search engine marketing and design and build. So you could say, oh, I founded Candor in that sense of the, you know, um, in terms of the new brand, but technically the legal entity of the company existed, um, before me and I, I came on to build that side of the business.

Mm-hmm. Okay. Okay, cool, cool. So when was it? Uh, for how long have you been in Candor?

Uh, Candor's about 7 years now.

Uh-huh. And can you talk about some of the, like, changes you brought, like, more, more in more detail about the changes you brought to Kender and why, why, why the name Kender?

Yeah, right. So, um, the main thing was obviously we didn't have anyone doing any kind of SEO or anything when I joined. So that was originally just me. Um, and it's actually a really similar job to that I'd done twice before. So the 2 previous agencies I was at, the one directly before that was a design and build agency that had bought an SEO agency and was trying to squish them together. And further, the agency I said I joined quite early on, again, when I joined that, I was the first person doing digital marketing. So I'd had quite a lot of experience with building that. So it was really the first thing was making operational processes that work with the design and development team and SEOs. So it's making sure that they both like each other, they both understand what they're doing. So you're not building websites and then having someone on the other side of the room going, well, we're going to have to redo all of this. This is terrible. And again, not having SEO people essentially get in the way of people doing a quick, efficient development job with things that aren't really important. So there was a whole kind of education piece around that and realigning our kind of offering. So we've actually— we're about to launch our new website like every agency always is, but we talk about making beautiful, effective brands and the SEO digital marketing side is kind of the effective part of that. So obviously you have a design and a user experience and design perspective, which is everyone wants a nice looking website and for it to extol your brand values and tell people what you're about. But at the same time, people don't care about that, or business owners certainly, unless it actually does what you want it to do and brings you leads and customers. So that was kind of the effective Um, side of things. Um, so yeah, made those processes and then set about trying to hire a team as well to be able to do that. Um, as an agency, we've grown, um, very slowly, I'd say, and very purposefully slowly because of the experience I've had at lots of agencies. I've tried to avoid what I think are some of the main mistakes that they make. And one of those is definitely growing too quickly, taking on kind of any client that shows an interest in what you do. So we specifically looked at, you know, I don't really want to work with clients that come to us asking us what SEO is and kind of, you know, saying, convince me I should need SEO.

Mm-hmm.

I want to work with people who say, we know what this is, We've come to you because maybe we've heard about you, we've been recommended. What do we need to do? They're already on board because the former are sometimes very hard to please. Yeah, totally.

Totally. I have the same approach. Exactly.

So that led to very steady, but I would say slow compared to some companies' growth, which I was super happy with. It also gave us time to make sure we hired the right people and that they had time to do a good job and understand what they're doing. And like any company, when you grow to 5 people, to 10, to 15, to 20, you need to start changing processes because processes with 5 people don't work with 20 people.

Mm-hmm.

And you need different software and different levels of management. And growing at that speed helped us to do that with the minimum amount of pain inflicted on us and clients. So the result of that, I think, is that firstly, we've had really, really good staff retention over the years, which is, I think, one of the most important metrics for how an agency is performing, right?

Yeah.

Are people choosing to stay there? And as a knock-on effect, if people are generally happy in their job, and generally not stressed every day, they tend to do a better job for clients. And clients obviously like having the same team working with them over a long period. I think it makes clients uncomfortable if the team working on their account has changed and then they need to explain everything all over again. It feels like you're not making progress. The name Canda, I found it's really difficult nowadays to name an agency. to find a domain that's not taken, that makes any sense, that hasn't got like a color in it or, you know.

Uh-huh.

So we— the name Calendar actually popped up because in a lot of the presentations we were doing to clients, when we were telling them about us, our pitch was essentially around being, uh, frank and open and honest, which is the definition of candor, uh, because you've, you know, you've probably seen on my like LinkedIn and stuff, I spend a lot of time trying to squash myths about SEO and challenge people when I think they're saying something that's damaging to businesses. Because the fact is there is no bar for entry to be an SEO. Essentially anyone could just say, yeah, I'm an SEO.

Yeah.

So naturally it means there is a high percentage of people that don't know what they're doing and either know they don't know what they're doing and don't care and just charge money for it, or arguably better or worse, people that don't know they don't know what they're doing that carry on anyway.

Totally.

But this just fit very well with us in terms of when you come to work with us, we'll try and be as upfront as possible about what we think we can achieve. And as I said earlier, I think that expectation setting is critical because there are some people that come with just expectations that aren't possible, but someone will say, yes, I can do that for that amount of money and that time, and it's fine. Go to them and see what happens kind of thing.

Yeah, totally.

Having those kind of painful, if you like, conversations early on Um, and just being very real with clients about what we're doing. So we're very transparent, like we don't outsource or white label any work. It's all done by our team. You can speak to them directly. We've got tools that clients can jump on and see who's working on what and when. So it's just this approach of like, you know, you can speak to us, it's, you know, it's us that's doing it. We're being realistic with the goals. We're very open about what we're delivering. You can see links that we've built because I've heard all kinds of things about agencies who won't even show links that they've built for clients.

Yeah, totally.

So this has been the whole kind of approach and it's worked, I think, well for us because again, we've just continued to sort of slowly grow and haven't had to do any kind of advertising or anything like that over the years.

Awesome. Awesome. So one more question about the agency side. So for people maybe who are thinking about starting an SEO agency, what are your main kind of takeaways, insights, the things you learned maybe the hard way over those last 7, 7 years?

Yeah, so I think most people start agencies accidentally. Because they start freelance and then they get lots of work and they work with someone and then suddenly there's 3 or 4 of them and they're like, hey, why don't we start an agency?

Mm-hmm.

So my advice, just in terms of where I've seen other people have issues, would be firstly, always pay someone to write your contracts that you have with clients and make sure you have contracts. Again, because I've seen all sorts of things about people not being paid for doing good work. So just having a contract will pay for itself. And if you do go into business with someone, and touch wood, I've been incredibly lucky. I've worked, as I said, with John for like 7, 8 years, and I don't think we've ever really disagreed on anything in that whole time. But we still have a shareholders agreement which very clearly kind of sorts out if we have a disagreement, what happens. So remember, you only need contracts for when things go wrong. So the rest of the time you can do whatever you like. You don't have to go by the contract as long as you're both happy. You can do whatever you like. Same with clients. But I would definitely pay to get those things sorted earlier. I made a mistake once of, we had paid for a contract early on and our services and some bits changed, so I decided I would amend the contract to reflect that. And then there was an issue early on with the client who decided they weren't gonna pay, and I'd essentially found out I had basically invalidated the contract because of my edits. So it didn't kind of add up to what it needed to anymore. So it wasn't actually enforceable. So always pay someone who knows what they're doing if you're going to mess around with contracts. Apart from that, I think it sounded, Olga, like you're in agreement with this, which is even early on, it pays to be a little bit picky about who you're working with. If you do get red flags, around expectations or things like that, I would listen to them because in basically every instance where I've had kind of a bad feeling about, I don't know if this is going to work, it's never worked. So I would always listen to that and just pass. Something else will come along.

Yeah, totally.

And you'll find you can spend more time on good clients then, because if you get bad clients, you'll spend 80% of your time trying to satisfy the unhappy 20%.

Yeah.

And then the, the 80% you want to keep, you don't have as much time to kind of give them what they deserve.

Yeah, totally. Great insight. Okay, so let's switch to also asked. So when did the tool start? Like, how did it all come into being? Like, was it you who created that? Or like tell me everything.

So, um, we've been using People Also Ask data in our SEO campaigns for years and years and years because it's awesome data for a whole bunch of reasons. I think it's probably one of the most overlooked, or it has been until recently, sources of keyword data. Um, so for, for those maybe that aren't, um, kind of haven't used it before, it's, you know, you do a Google search and around 50% of the time you get Google. They've been calling it other things recently, but it's normally called People Also Ask. And then you get a list of normally around 4 questions. You can click on them and then it will show more questions related to that question, right? The reason why we found that so valuable was firstly, it's actually one of the fastest updated source of search data we can get from Google. So when something happens on the news, for instance, you can see those questions reflected in the search results in PAA, sometimes within an hour or 2, you know, because there's been a shift in search intent, which firstly I think is really interesting because lots of other tools, it's like there's months of delay. Like when ChatGPT launched and had a million users, you could go to most keyword tools and put it in.

Zero. Zero.

Yeah, it's like it's not zero, but the PAA data was there within days. The other thing I find interesting about it is a couple of things. Firstly, the questions are kind of clustered by Google. So someone's doing a query and Google is essentially telling you these are likely the next things this person wants to know. So when it comes to intent, and again, Google's written a lot about this in terms of how many searches it normally takes for someone to answer their kind of full intent. It's a way to enrich your content and make sure you're covering those points. I see it misused a lot where people just take PAAs and just use them as like FAQ, question, answer, question, answer. That's not how I use them or really how I've ever used them. It's more been we need to cover this in the content in a kind of human way. And I think that approach is actually what's We've seen some sites hit by the recent helpful content system update. And I think one of the patterns I've seen is a lot of that content is very like question answer, question answer. They've just been matching up search terms rather than writing it in what could be a more helpful way for users, but still answering those questions. I'm interested to see how that pans out, but that's just a pattern I've seen. Um, when I've been looking at, at sites that are generally pretty good, but they've, they've, they've taken a hit. Um, so we've used that data for a long time. Originally, um, there was a chap named Alessio that had a, had a Python script that you could like locally scrape PAA data. And I did a conference talk where I'd covered keyword research. And I just demonstrated this command line tool because I assumed that most people use this data. And I had a huge reaction after the talk of, wow, where is that tool? How do I use it? And I was like, oh, this is interesting because I just assumed more people were doing this. And I was helping a few people out with it. And then I started getting questions about, you know, basically how to use Python and install packages. And I realized there's quite a it's actually quite a high bar if you're not like a programmer type to get command line stuff to work. That, you know, you have to set up this virtual environment, you need to install requirements, and no, it's Python 3, not Python 2. So I had a chat with our devs, and essentially we got one of the developers at Kanda to make a very MVP, minimum viable product, like online version, which we launched. in November 2019, which was also Ask Alpha, which is essentially that tool but online. Um, it was free and we kicked it out there. And as far as I'm aware, that was the first tool that did that. There wasn't anything else that offered that data, um, online. And it was more challenging to do that as a SaaS tool than I expected because unlike Google suggest data. So Google suggest data is like what tools like Answer the Public, uh, Answer Socrates, I think it's called, use.

Yeah.

Um, Ask Socrates maybe. Um, there's an API for Google suggest data, so it's really easy to get hold of. There's no API for, uh, People Also Ask data.

Huh.

Um, so it's a lot more challenging to get that data at scale because Google doesn't like you, um, obviously doing that. And the other thing that we did that a lot of tools weren't doing was when we were doing this search, we were simulating the clicks on the questions rather than re-Googling the question. And there's a couple of reasons for that. And something interesting came out of that research, which was if you click on a question after doing a search, the subsequent questions that you generate will be different to if you just re-Googled the first question.

Oh.

And I think that's got to do with Google understanding where you are in that kind of knowledge journey. So if you're, um, say Googling how to change a car battery and it shows a question around, is it safe to connect this terminal first? And you click it, get some answers. If you start with that question, is it safe to connect this terminal? I think again, from Google's data, they can see you're maybe kind of further along in that journey. So you want to see different questions that if you started with more basic knowledge, um, and it gives you more questions with, with clicks. So that was a lot more, um, expensive to build it in that way that it could interact with search results. Um, and like many people, so this was our first SaaS tool, my first SaaS tool really. Um, that had any scale to it. And like everyone I've ever spoken to that's got involved in SaaS tools, it was way harder than I expected it to be.

Mm-hmm.

Um, so we didn't release the paid version of Also Asked until March 2023, I think it was. So it took 2 and a half years of development to get it from an MVP that everyone could use to an actual beta. And we had to shut down the free kind of tool to begin with. Well, not to begin with, after about 9 months because we were getting hundreds of thousands of searches a month and it was costing us like thousands and thousands of pounds to run a month.

Mm-hmm.

So it was completely like, it's great, people want to use it, but I can't afford to just keep paying for this. So that's when we launched the subscription models, which essentially paid for us to have a developer to keep adding features. So since then, we've done stuff like today we launched Google Sheets integrations. We've got the only— we've built an API now for Also Asked data, and it's the only asynchronous API that exists for this data. So what that means is if you have your own kind of tooling, your own platform. You can now send us API requests for People Also Ask data in, you know, for like 1,000 keywords if you want, and it will send a response back to you when it's done and then deliver the data. There's a synchronous version as well, but it means essentially you can integrate PAA data now with any web tool, web service, any sheet you've got, which, yeah, wasn't possible before. So it means we can Now we're starting to partner with some other tools that need that data. So that's essentially given us the funds we need to pay developers to do that and pay for obviously the infrastructure that's needed to run Also Asked. And it's been really great seeing— so it was really popular when it launched. We've seen kind of continual growth over the year, had really, really lovely feedback. from people. And again, apart from— we sponsored the Women in Tech SEO group this year, so we came on as a partner. Apart from that, we haven't really done any advertising again, but I've seen it being used in presentations at Brighton SEO and things like that, which is really great because there's no better, in my opinion, advertising or marketing for us than if SEO specialists are like, I'm using this tool, it's really helpful.

Yeah, totally.

Here's the context. So that's been really great. It's bootstrapped, so we haven't had any kind of funding. And again, that's probably reflected in the fact that maybe we could have grown faster if we had funding and we could do loads of advertising, but I'm quite happy with kind of where we are and staying involved in the tool. It's actually just 3 of us from Canva that run everything on Also Asked.

Uh-huh.

So if, if you ask support questions on live chat, it's usually me.

Yeah, yeah. I think, I think, yeah, I think, uh, some time ago, yeah, I was using and I think that something popped up like with your name. I'm not sure if I remember correctly, but yeah, that probably, yeah. Yeah. Awesome. And, uh, can you share how many users there are?

Uh, that's a really good question. Um, I believe at the moment we do around about 100,000 searches a month. I couldn't tell you off the top of my head how many users, there are no— I'm guessing that probably equates to in the low thousands of accounts.

Okay. Okay.

I should probably know things like that, but I've, again, I've taken them. We've also asked, you know, we've focused all of our effort on making the tool as good as possible. So although I'm a marketer by trade, so I I maybe should be more interested in, like what's the conversion rate of the site, things like that. I don't actually worry too much about that at the moment because I have limited time to work on it. And so the rest of the team, we just focus on, you know, we use our own tool day in, day out. So what features do we want? How are they best integrated? I talk to people in the community. We've got a Discord with like the API people and it's really just All of my effort is, as long as it's reasonably easy to understand what it does to sign up, all my effort is make the tool as useful as possible, which I think is kind of a similar approach like Ahrefs took. I think I saw them saying they haven't looked at conversion rates and analytics for a long while. They're kind of more product focused.

Uh-huh.

Again, that would have to change, I think, if we had taken funding, because then we have stakeholders that want to hit specific targets and you have to spend then on marketing. Whereas we've just been, my time on it is just, is it working? Is it stable? What features have we got? What do users say they need? What have I been asked on live chat? And growing it that way.

And can you talk more about the features?

Yeah, certainly. So when we launched, it was essentially You do your kind of search and then you get a, um, kind of map of the questions, which is normally your original question, the first 4, and then it branches out.

Yeah.

Um, and you can download that just as an image, which people I think have found really useful to give as additional information to like content writers to help them, cuz it kind of gives you a hint as to what the structure of the content should be and how important and related those questions are. Um, since launch, we've added, um, ways to export that data so you can get it as CSV, or you can, as I said, you can now, uh, get it straight onto Google Sheets. We've added, uh, what we call a deep search, which is essentially, um, taking that tree one step deeper, which is pretty mad now. So if you do like one query, you can get around 150 questions. now from, from, from one query.

Wow.

Um, so if you are like, if you are starting higher up on a, on kind of a, a topical level, it can be a really good way to get a bird's eye view of this is probably what we need to be writing about. And there's, you know, in that probably gonna be 20 different articles you can go on and research. Cuz that's the interesting thing. I, I think again, I've discovered about intent, which is that intent is not objective. Meaning the same search term can mean different things to different people. And that's really obvious when you do these deep searches and you zoom out and you see, oh, actually people searching for this mean something that's not even related to us. So this is the part we need to, to, to focus on. Apart from that, we have a bulk search. So if you are using tools, say like SEMrush or Ahrefs Sistrix, if you export your keywords, you can upload up to 1,000 keywords in a zip file, in a, in a CSV to AlsoAsked, and it will just churn away in the background and give you a zip file which will then contain the CSV exports for every single, um, keyword like, like I just covered. So again, you upload that, you can get 25,000 questions back from, from your upload. So again, if you're doing You know, and we've had quite a lot of interest from sometimes some of the kind of larger companies with big content teams that just want to chuck it into the tool and then essentially they can divide out all of these pretty much like worksheets for everyone to put into their briefs. And then as I said, the API is something we launched about 2 months ago now. Again, that took a long time just getting through like security and stuff like that because there's lots of ways to abuse an API.

Mm-hmm.

I also found out.

But the API is there.

So we're working with a few people that do like keywords in sheets. There's a few of the larger tool vendors that we're talking to to integrate the data now into their platforms as well. It's actually free to try as well, so you don't have to even make an account. If you just go to Also Asked, you get 3 searches a day. So if you're just kind of like a casual user You know, you're maybe just a like hobby blogger or something. It's there for people to use as well.

Okay, cool. And so what's the pricing for the paid version?

So it starts at $15 a month, which is then basically you can do 100 searches a month. So we operate on monthly, like a credit allowance. So that means rather than 3 searches a day, you know, the typical workload if you're working in SEO is you'll be doing your keyword research and you might do like, you know, 20, 30 searches and then that's it for the week. So that's basically then just a package designed for that kind of person. So maybe like a freelance SEO. The reason we have to charge for things like that is, and the, the common question I get is like, why do credits like not carry over? month for month. And we did experiment with this, and it basically is down to when we get new users sign up, we have to expand our, like, infrastructure to kind of keep querying Google. And if we allow people to sign up, say, get some credits, and say they never expire, it basically means we have to maintain this infrastructure that could serve everyone at once, should they all wish to serve.

Yeah.

Um, but obviously if they don't want to spend those credits and they don't want to stay subscribed, we still have to pay to maintain that. So it just doesn't work. So we essentially just have a monthly allowance that people can use, and that goes up with the tiers. So then there's, uh, Lite, which is $29 a month. Um, you get some more features with that. So you get the deep search I talked about, you get all the CSV exports, and you get more searches a month. And then there's a like a pro version, which is $59 a month. That gets everything all the other accounts have. You get 1,000 searches a month. You get API access as well, which is the main thing, but you also get access. So we just launched for the API. We do have for the API pay-as-you-go credits. So if you have a pro account, you get 1,000 a month, but if you've got a particularly large project and you've got 20,000 keywords you want to go through, you can actually in the backend just buy a chunk of credits upfront and they'll never expire. Because again, we appreciate the way API usage normally happens is there's like a massive spike where someone wants to process tens of thousands and then they won't use it again for a while. So they've got that ability now.

Yeah.

And again, there's an API sandbox for any account to use. So you can test how it works for you and get dummy data back. So if you want to make sure, you know, you've got the ability to do it and it works nice and easily, that, that's there and it's all documented as well.

Okay, cool. So maybe now let's switch for a second to affiliate marketing. Are you still doing affiliate sites or was it something you were doing in the past?

Yeah, uh, no, I left my affiliate days long behind me now, apart from the odd link I might drop onto I still have a couple of little content sites that I play with that have a bit of affiliate stuff, but I'm not— my old mindset was essentially, how can I build a website to make as much affiliate money as possible? And now my mindset—

Usually the mindset. Yeah.

But now the mindset is, I might have this website because it's something I enjoy writing about what I'm interested in and I'll put the odd affiliate link in where it's relevant. So I wouldn't say I do affiliate marketing now like that. I think for me, going way back, it was like the Penguin and Panda updates that made me shift out of that.

Oh, wow.

So Panda obviously was focused a lot on thin content. So before that, a lot of the affiliate stuff I did was essentially just kind of like comparison-y scraping other data and pulling it together and doing comparisons. So it was just like volumes of pages of programmatic content that I had no, you know, I wasn't manually doing any of that. And it provided like razor-thin value, arguably, but it worked really well at the time. And then obviously Panda came along and Penguin, like Obviously that destroyed lots of people's sites and certainly I think affiliate marketers particularly. So I think there's always that divergence in SEO. You see affiliate marketers talking about specific tactics that work and you see maybe brands and agencies talking more about strategies that don't use those tactics because at the end of the day, the affiliate sites I ran were websites. They weren't brands. All I wanted was the search traffic. I didn't care if anyone knew what my website was called, you know, and they didn't seem to really care. So if my website got banned, it was like, that's annoying, but it's absolutely fine because I can just buy another domain and do the whole thing again. Whereas if you have a brand that you've worked on for 10 years, you know, it's absolutely tragic if it got penalized in Google because there's a lot more in that. So I think I saw that shift of Google. I think at the time they said Brands are the solution to like search quality. I'm not sure how that panned out, but but I could certainly see like the wind was changing and it was probably better longer term. And I'd say that's been a trend in my SEO career as well, which is that when I started, it was very much like what technical trick can I do to win and how can I rank as quickly as possible? And now, you know, over the years I'm spending a lot more of my time thinking about, is this the right strategy? Does this align? Well, am I not getting in Google's way of making money basically?

Yeah.

So I'm kind of aligned with what they're doing and then placing long bets, which, you know, again, we didn't have any client at Kander that was adversely affected by the last core update, spam update, and helpful content update. Um, they've just kind of continued to march along upwards. One of my own sites was completely decimated by the helpful content update, again, showing these tactics probably aren't the, the, you know, things to be doing long term.

Okay. And so I need to ask this because like we've been hearing, SEO is again going to die this time for real. What's your take on what's going on with AI, with Google Search Generative Experience, ChatGPT, and all that stuff? How do you approach that?

Yeah, it's interesting, isn't it?

Yeah, indeed.

So I think Google's got, um, Google's got a big problem because, um, when Google talk about kind of good content, I think firstly, as searchers, even people working in SEO, I don't think we realize how much spam content is out there. Like I think the majority of the visible web is probably actual just low, low, low, low quality automated spam content. You see it in Google's figures. They normally release annually how many like trillions of bits of spam they kill. We never get to see it. So I think our view is very much the tip of the iceberg of the web. So it's very easy to judge what Google's doing, not realizing there's—

Yeah.

you know, several miles below the waterline, the stuff that they're, they are actually dealing with. The problem I think they've got now is that they're really good at telling the difference between good and bad content. Google, I think, yeah, generally really good at it. You can always find edge cases. What I think Google is not good at doing is telling the difference between good and great content, which is maybe the difference between, you know, GPT-4 can generate in a lot of cases, good content.

Yeah.

Like it reads pretty well. If you have an expert write something, you can probably generate or generate, you write, you know, good or great content. And a layperson reader might not even be able to tell the difference between those 2. If you are, if you are not an expert in a subject, you know, you've probably had it, Olga, where you've read something about SEO And then you read it and you're like, that's not quite right. That's not how that works. But obviously if someone read it that didn't know about SEO, it's just kind of like, oh, okay, that's, that's fine. And I think that's the problem Google has now, cuz there's no feasible way at the moment that they could, um, in a way that's computationally financially viable, make that assessment. And there's obviously lots of AI content, so that I think is an issue, which is why they're maybe leaning now more heavily into other signals about how content is maybe produced and by who and by brands.

Mm-hmm.

And again, apart from the pattern thing I mentioned earlier, which I do think exists, I think some of the HGU stuff is around links as well and whether you are kind of known as a brand and an entity and kind of what that footprint is. So how it affects SEO, if we break it down to technical SEO, kind of content SEO and say links, digital PR, how well you are known online, that digital PR kind of links side I think will probably be the least affected and maybe actually become a bit more important. So that's magnifying who you are as a brand and person. Essentially. So it may not even be around links per se, but digital PR I think might become more important as a signal.

Yeah.

Skipping to the first bit because it's the easy one to talk about. Technical SEO I think is going to remain just as important. So 10 years ago I thought technical SEO would become less important because I thought Technical SEO is essentially just the gap between what search engines can understand, right? So we're having to help them out. Like, oh, you don't understand this, have an hreflang tag. Oh, you don't understand this, poor Google, have a canonical tag. Oh, you don't understand a trailing slash is exactly the same page, poor Google, have a 301. Like we're helping the systems.

Yeah.

Um, but all I've seen over the last 10 years is technical SEO get more important as the web's become more complicated. There's more front-end JavaScript stuff going on. Um, you know, the technology's got more complicated and actually the search engines struggle to keep up. So I think there's always going to be an element of technical SEO, especially around, um, the structured data stuff, possibly. Um, I know Google always says structured data is not kind of a ranking signal. Um, and that makes perfect sense to me because again, because what percentage of all websites have structured data? It's probably very, very low. It's just a few people doing SEO and whatever gets generated automatically by CMSs. The content thing question I think is a lot harder. So we have started using— so Kanda as an agency has never produced content for clients, right? We give kind of research, we give briefs, and we either get clients who we think are experts to write or we find other writers who are qualified to do that because otherwise it's just us Googling stuff and rewriting it, which is essentially a really slow, inefficient version of ChatGPT. So there's not a lot of point in doing that. We have started using AI tools though to streamline that process. So large language models are good for some things, right? You've probably seen I've been quite critical sometimes when people use LLMs for things they're not good at, like high-level strategy. Like in lots of cases, if it's a generic language model, like anything to do with maths or logic, they're not using logic. It's a probability model. It gets stuff and it's generative, so it has a randomized element, so it gets stuff wrong. What they are good at doing is large-scale text comparisons, Summarization of text, translations. So there is lots of stuff you can do with them. Like I've seen people getting them to like read the like quality rater guidelines and try and apply that to web pages at scale, which I think is a useful thing to do even if it's not 100%. Otherwise it's a very slow human process to do. I think it absolutely can help you shape your content. I think you have to give it information as well. So feeding in like keyword data with what you're trying to achieve is important rather than relying again on its probability model. 'Cause if you rely on its probability model, you are by definition gonna get middle of the road content. You're gonna get all the questions everyone else has asked and answered already. Whereas if you wanna start branching out, you need to give it something fresh. I saw Google's AI chief said there's a 50/50 chance we're 5 years out from AGI as well, which, you know, yeah, if and when that happens, I think all bets are off on everything. You know, SEO doesn't even become a concern anymore. Um, but yeah, we'll have to see where that goes. But yeah, it's, um, I think there's definitely, it's another inflection point where there is big opportunity to just speed up. what you're doing. I don't necessarily think it threatens people's jobs. To me, I see it in a way, well, in terms of SEO, I see it as a way of how we change from mailing letters to email. It means you can get more done. It certainly doesn't mean, oh, AI can do the job, we can all go play frisbee now, because unfortunately that's not how capitalism works. It just means they'll be able to grind more out of you as a human.

Yeah, totally.

Bleak outlook. That's my hope. You know, if, if we do get artificial general intelligence and it can do all the work for us, we can just go and play frisbee. I would be completely happy. That would be—

I'm, I'm fine. Yeah. Yeah, me too. Yeah, me too. Okay. So one of the final questions, what does your normal day look like?

That is a good question.

Normal SEO day. Yeah.

Yeah. So because I'm between a few different companies, so I normally, um, have a couple of meetings, um, with some of the teams at Kanda. So my main involvement now at Kanda is with SEO strategy. So we've got a full SEO team. So I normally talk to clients, get an idea of what they want to achieve, and then with discussion with the team, help them form, this is the approach we should take, this is what we should be doing. Help answer any kind of questions, development stuff within the team, do their training. I do most of our kind of social media stuff as well, helped by Jack, who I know you know within our team.

Mm-hmm.

sometimes do the podcast with him, uh, look at Also Asked, what we need to change with that, help with the planning there, um, get feedback, uh, help with the e-commerce business. Um, we've got the internal team working on that as well, um, but again, I'll normally be doing something on the site there. We run other content sites and experiments as well that I oversee that we try and feed back into the team. Um, and then just all the stuff that comes with running a company. So it goes from looking at financial forecasts to, you know, where strategically we should be heading as an agency, like what we just discussed with AI and how we should be changing what we're doing, um, to making sure staff are happy, which is probably actually my primary goal at Candid. Like, my primary thing above everything else is, um, are people working here happy? And if not, why? Are they getting training? Are they being able to kind of do the things they want to do? Which is really important. So I encourage people to look for other jobs based on the fact that I say to them, if you see another job and you think, oh, I would quite like that job, come and talk to me about why you like the look of that job. Is it because you're doing something else there? Is it because of pay, anything like that? Because normally, because it's our company, we can do what we like. There's normally a way to weave that in. So we had, for instance, someone that was doing SEO for us for quite a while, and actually they said they wanted to get more into development. So we looked at changing their role because we didn't have an official person doing it between the developer and SEO team. So when we're doing new site builds, they're in charge of the communication of when stuff needs to happen between those. We've also got, um, like SEO plugins that we built for some CMSs that need coding. So there's always like a way to, to help people fulfill that. And, you know, I understand it's not a cult, uh, people will leave and that's fine. Um, and so if someone does, you know, decide they want to go somewhere else, um, again, if they let me know, I can help them. get the best possible deal with their new company, give them a good counteroffer or something. Yeah. And it's just good for both of us cuz then we can plan for it. So yeah, it, it's pretty random what I do during days. Great interviews like this. It's always fun talking to other SEOs, people in the industry.

Yeah. Cool. Okay. So where can people find you? I know you publish Unsolicited SEO Tips on LinkedIn, right?

Yeah, so I mean, that question would've been really easy a couple of years ago because I would've said Twitter. I think Twitter's changing now, apart from the fact I got banned from it.

But you have a new account now, right?

That's the word on the street. I mean, technically I'm not allowed to do that, but there is someone called Mark Candre on Twitter who's really similar to me that you can follow. But yeah, I'd say I'm mainly on LinkedIn now. I'm the only Mark Williams-Cook, I think, on the web. So if you just Google me, you'll find where I'm currently, uh, speaking.

Can you share why you have been banned?

Um, I don't know. Uh, I got, I got an email, um, from the, uh, Twitter team saying the account was suspended for breaking their spam policies. I don't know what I would've done to do that. Um, you can like lodge an appeal and I did that twice. And then at a 3-month interval and never heard anything back. And I've heard similar things from other people. I think they had like a wave of algorithmic type bans, but the account I think was like 16 years old. So however they weight their algorithm, my advice to them if they're listening is maybe if an account's been going for 16 years or something like that, could maybe weigh against maybe it's not a bot. But yeah, they never told me why they were upset with me, but I'm kind of okay with it. Twitter, like the SEO community on Twitter, I think it's changed quite a lot now.

Yeah.

And I have seen more people moving to LinkedIn, which is okay. It's got its pros and cons. Yeah, I'm in a few Slack groups as well, which I've got quite a lot of friends in, and that's a nice place to kind of keep up with the industry now as well. Um, cuz it, you know, social media can be really noisy.

Yeah.

So having a few more focused conversations with smaller groups of people has been helpful, especially if you want like some, uh, second opinion or advice about specific things.

Mm-hmm. And on Discord, do you also use Discord for SEO?

Uh, so I don't use Discord really for SEO. We set up, um, an Also Asked Discord.

Yeah.

Um, and that was just because, uh, I really hated Slack's pricing. if you like start getting loads of users, it becomes like incredibly expensive. Um, so we just put it on Discord. But no, um, apart from kind of Midjourney and some video gaming stuff, I don't use Discord that much.

Okay.

Is there, is there some Discord stuff I should know about that's going on?

I don't know yet. Yeah, I was, I was just like thinking about it. Yeah, because I don't use Slack and this is also something on my to-do list and But maybe I should start using it, but I, I don't know if I have time for that.

Yeah, right. That is it. That is the other thing. I mean, yeah, there's a few like Slack servers I'm in that I've just muted. Um, it can be pretty destructive of your time cuz it's so asynchronous. So you'll be doing something and you get a notification and then you get sucked in and you've lost another 20 minutes.

Yeah. Or an hour.

Or an hour. Yeah, right.

Yeah. Totally. Okay, Mark, so thank you. Thank you so much for being my guest. This was a really insightful conversation and, um, yeah, and I hope I can have you on again in the future. I also was, uh, was a guest on, uh, on your podcast a while ago with, with, uh, with Jack, from what I remember. So I will put a link to that in the description and To the end, to where people can, can follow you and, and follow your tool.

Brilliant. Thank you so much. It's been a pleasure.

Yeah. Thank you. Thank you everyone. And see you in the next episode. Bye-bye.