Search Marketing Academy 06: Mark-Williams Cook on why his agency is stepping away from PPC

Welcome back to Search Marketing Academy. Thank you for joining us today. I have a very special guest, one of my favorite marketers, Mark Williams-Cook, who is the director of Cander in Norfolk in the UK. Mark, welcome.

Thank you, Ashwin. Thanks for having me. Likewise as well. Really enjoy everything you put out there on Twitter. One of my favorite Twitter people. So excited to be here and have a chat with you.

Awesome. Why don't you tell us a little bit about who you are, what you do? Doesn't have to be marketing related necessarily.

Yeah, sure. So starting from the marketing bits, because I guess that's what people are interested in as well. As you said, I'm director of Kanda. So we're a digital agency in the UK specializing in search marketing, as we'll talk about now, primarily SEO. We also run a couple of other kind of sites and tools. So alsoasked.com, keyword research tool. an e-commerce business and some content sites. I think we'll chat about that as well. So we've got a D&D content site. Outside of that, I've got really weird different interests. So I play D&D as well. So I go and meet up with my fellow nerds, roll some dice at the weekend, and I do a bit of amateur boxing as well. So I'm in an amateur boxing club, and those 2 people apart from me do not cross over. At all. They've never seen each other, and I doubt they ever will.

Does your D&D character have any boxing aspects? Like, do you just use your fists?

No. So I try and get out of that thing where I'm using D&D to basically kind of resolve my own issues and be myself. So I've tried to make a clear difference between this is a fictional character that I'm going to roleplay and think about, and it's not It's not me stuff coming out sideways.

I mean, that's what it is ideally about, but I think a lot of us struggle with that and try to, try to keep facets of our personality out of our characters. But yeah.

Oh, for sure. I definitely did that the first time around and had a bit of a realization.

I know you've got an amazing new website, fantastic content for anybody who's interested in D&D. Not the latest, I mean, it's not the greatest time to be a D&D fan with all the stuff happening with Wizards of the Coast, but I think your website is a great way to take people's mind off that. So what is DeathSave really about?

Sure, so as I mentioned, we, we obviously primarily— Candor is an agency that, that works for clients, but we have tried to diversify what we do, um, both from a business kind of safety aspect of it, you know, sometimes it's safer to have several different types of of income, especially as, you know, I'm sure lots of people learned that during COVID when lots of things changed very, very quickly. And also we got to a size where when you're running an agency, you're trying to obviously make people's time kind of billable and fill up their time with work people pay them for. And you can't obviously run people at 100% because they will burn out and you need to kind of stagger them. And as the agency gets larger, if people have 10 or even say 20% time that isn't going to be allocated for, all those chunks of time as you get 5, 10, 15, 20, 25 people stack up. So it's like a lot of time, right? So this is why we started exploring different projects that we could run and own, where we could use that kind of downtime as like a catch. And also the great thing as I'm sure lots of people know from if you have your own sites, is it's a nice kind of playground to test different things and to learn, especially if you're training. Because if it's yours, at the end of the day, if you make mistakes, it doesn't really matter. You could just learn from them and move on, and kind of nobody's there to complain about it. So Death Save was picked— so D&D, I should say, was picked kind of as a topic during near the end of lockdown in 2020. So I was just doing some research because I was spending so much time at home in front of my computer, like everyone, about different niches we could get into. And, you know, going through that process of what's got search volume, maybe what's got interest and what isn't massively competitive. And we came up with several different ideas. And the reason why we ended up settling with D&D is just literally because we have quite a few people within the company that that's an interest and, you know, they would enjoy that content, which I think is a really great thing. It's always advice I've given people when they've, they've they've wanted to start their own sites. They say, what niche should I pick? And my advice is always pick something you enjoy writing about because that's what's going to make it great and that's what's going to make it easy for you and you can keep going. So we had already a core team of people that was super knowledgeable about the subject. They were very interested about it. And having only myself, I've only started playing really just before lockdown. So I'm still relatively new apart from the kind of video game versions, which I are many, many years old. So I was doing lots of Googling and trying to find answers for things. And actually I found a lot of the time there weren't places where I could find great answers or I was ending up on Reddit. And again, kind of a litmus test for me is if you're getting lots of search results where the only answers are on Reddit or Quora or something like that, there's probably space for another website. So it's, again, it's more of an experiment. We're using it as a training tool for the team. just on how to do good keyword research, content briefs. We're having to play around using AI art for it as well, teaching people how to use schema and just seeing where we end up really with it. It's not even monetized at the moment. Just want to see where we can get to as an interesting kind of side project.

Speaking of diversifying and income streams, Kander recently decided to discontinue PPC services for new clients. Really don't hear a lot of companies exiting the PPC space, particularly agencies. What drove the decision behind that?

Yeah, lots of things really. So we are still a Premier Google Partner. So we've been running ads for close to 10 years, it will be. And it's always been a core part of our offering. We, well, personally, I've seen a lot of changes over the last decade with Google Ads. So winding the clock back many years, it was providing PPC services essentially to teach people how to use the Google Ads system and kind of have very fine-tuned detail on what people we're connecting them up with and finding them the right customers. And there's been I think a series of changes that Google have made, and I just want to be clear, this is obviously just my opinion on this. But I think there's been a series of changes which to me hints that Google really doesn't want agencies involved if they can get there, because obviously there's lots of money spent on agencies which could otherwise be spent on media spend. And this started way, way, way back when, you Google removed exact match, was one of the first things that springs to mind, and they replaced it with the kind of close variant. And the line was, well, if you're using exact match, you're missing out on lots of kind of slightly tweaked search terms. So this is a great thing for you. It's really going to help you. And it was kind of like, okay, I did feel more comfortable around certain expensive terms being able to exactly change it. So I've seen that cause issues where, for instance, I've seen people bidding on cafe terms and Google deciding that a close enough match to that was pub. And obviously those are 2 very different things, but you can get around things like that. The kind of things then that all came very quickly were again tweaks in the setup. So things like if you wanted to, you know, as a, as say you didn't have anyone managing your PPC, you set up your account, you say, I just want to geographically target ads to my city. They very quietly changed, say, geographically targeting to Norwich, my city, to the default of the definition of that, meaning if they're in Norwich or if they have shown an interest in Norwich. So I'm sure lots of people know you have to go into the kind of advanced and change that setting. So that felt like, I was like, that feels kind of sneaky because, you know, That's not what you would assume geographic targeting is. Then, you know, we had all kinds of little strategies using accelerated bidding to try and pick up like unpopular terms when they appeared that were super cheap. You know, we're talking like pennies a click, set it up on accelerated. And essentially you can build a campaign that was aggressively finding all the gaps in Google's inventory where there wasn't much demand and you could pick up lots of keywords very cheaply, lots of clicks very cheaply. And then we had things like Google kind of artificially setting minimum prices for keywords that they just kind of think, yeah, we think it's kind of worth this, which again moved it away from this true second price auction model. And obviously it changes with what you do with accelerated bidding. And this all led to stuff like the optimization score, which again, I feel is something we have to talk to clients about when we're first on the account with them, because obviously The optimization score is not any real reflection on how well the campaign's going to run. You dismiss recommendations and your optimization score goes up. It's like, obviously it's not gonna work like that. And you can improve your optimization score by increasing budget. So they're very aligned to obviously Google's revenue optimization, it feels, rather than the client. Then we've gone now we're deep into this heavily Google heavily wanting you to use lots of automated features. And, you know, on some of these new automated accounts, I found it staggering that you couldn't yourself like exclude brand. I was having to get people to email account managers to get them to do this. Because again, if you have someone managing your PPC as a client, and then you try and automate a campaign because lots of brand stuff is mixed in there, when you just look at the headline figures that directors, managers, owners are interested in, which is how much did the sale cost me? They look on the surface way better, like they're performing way better and they're way smarter. So I think again, that can be very misleading for clients. And lastly, I think the cherry on the cake for me was the experience that we were having, and I know other people were having with account managers. Which were, I think, quite aggressive in trying to get you to apply recommendations without necessarily understanding the client's business. And then when you don't do those things, we've had this before, and I know for a fact other agencies have experienced this, where the account manager is hopping over the agency and contacting the client directly. And essentially misaligning you by, you know, it's a powerful thing for a client who's maybe, you know, quite naive about Google Ads. If someone phones them, it's like, we're from Google, your agency won't make the recommendations, you know, that we're providing with our great technology to help you be successful. Obviously, the client's going to be like, oh, well, that doesn't sound good, you know, because if anyone knows about Google Ads, it's going to be Google, right? That wasn't an issue. wasn't a huge problem for us because we had these conversations with clients and actually it became part of our onboarding process to talk to them about account managers and what to expect and why that was gonna happen. And that kind of got to the stage where I felt, you know, why are we having to do this? You know, we offer, we've been offering again for the same amount of time SEO services and we've had loads of success with SEO with our clients, excellent retention and Looking, you know, kind of at where we got to, again, my opinion, it felt like PPC was more like trauma management now of, okay, you're going to do Google Ads, we're here to protect you to stop you hemorrhaging money, right? And to be clear, I don't think there's anything wrong with agencies doing PPC. I think businesses need agencies and professionals more than ever now to protect them. Because I feel that the default kind of way Google wants you to run the campaigns is not aligned as well as it used to be to the success of that business. And it just got to a stage where, in fairness, it is a luxury that we've been able to do this because we're super busy for SEO. We have like a waiting list for people wanting to do SEO with us. And the way the team ended up, we've got a couple of people, very experienced people who are running PPC accounts who are also good at SEO. So we just came to the decision of, well, if we can just do SEO work and this makes the team happier and it's easier for us to manage with clients because they understand what we're doing, we're creating value for them. Whereas with— I'm aware I'm going on here on quite a monologue, but with Google Ads, of course, you're renting that space, right? You're rarely with the management creating additional value for the site. You're just managing that rental, if you like. So it just came to a point where we said, well, from the numbers point of view, our SEO retention is better. The team seem to enjoy managing SEO campaigns with clients more because there's less what I call trauma management. So we've decided now as an experiment for new clients to essentially just refer that to other people for now and encourage them if they want to do SEO to come to us. Not that SEO is right for everyone.

Yeah.

To be very clear, a lot of clients that came to us who just say wanted more leads, a lot of them I would end up recommending PPC first because they wanted them yesterday, the leads. So SEO is not right for everyone, but it's where we are finding success. I don't know if you've got any thoughts on that. I did rattle through quite a lot there.

You're far from the first agency leader to vocalize these thoughts. I hear it all the time. Google doesn't want agencies anymore. They're trying to divert all of the management fees over into ad spend. It's a very common theme. But, and I wanna be super clear, I'm not saying this in a disparaging way. In fact, it's admiration. You're probably the only agency that I know of that has the courage not to play the game and say, we're just gonna do what we're really good at, what makes us really happy, and what we're able to create business opportunities for not just for our clients, but for ourselves as well. And I think I'm a big fan of people who don't trod the same path, who don't tread the same path, but they have a reason for it. So it's not contrarian for the sake of being contrarian. I see a lot of adherence to values in your decision and I just, I really respect it. Even though I do work for a PPC tool, I think every agency needs to do what's best for them and their people. At the end of the day, it's all about Keeping your team happy, keeping your clients happy. And if you're not happy running Google Ads, then it just doesn't make sense to keep doing it.

Yeah, I mean, that has always been from an agency point of view, my number one priority has actually been keeping the staff happy with their jobs. And I put that above clients, which may seem weird, and sorry if any clients are listening, but there's a good reason for you, which is that if people are happy, generally they'll do a better job and 2, they'll stay. And one of the main complaints I hear from clients that come to us from other agencies is essentially people leaving. So people that were learning about their business, learning about their PPC, their SEO, and then leaving, and then they were getting someone new, and they felt like they had to start again. So putting that first has always been a priority. And not even from a, you know, values point of view, I think it's good business sense as well. It's great that those 2 things align. And I wouldn't say they're— again, to be clear, I wouldn't say they were unhappy doing PPC. It's just that the SEO stuff for us was working better. And we were getting a good enough quality of SEO lead to kind of lean into that a bit more. And also we've got stuff like Also Asked, which naturally puts us again more in that space and probably has increased our visibility a bit. So again, like you say, it's not necessarily right for everyone. And I do think clients need help, cuz I'm still referring clients depending on their size to different agencies and different freelancers. Cuz I still think it's worth doing.

So doubling down on organic search, part of that play is AlsoAsked, like you said. So full disclosure to anybody listening, I am an AlsoAsked customer. I fully endorse everything that Mark is about to say about AlsoAsked. It is a fantastic tool and it doesn't make a difference if you are an SEO or a PPC marketer, it is useful, period. We use it in everything. We use it for content, we use it for social media, we use it for PPC campaigns. It informs pretty much everything that we do. So Mark also asked, what is, what is this all about?

Yeah, so for, for those that haven't seen it before, Also Asked is a tool that can help you mine, collect visualize and understand Google People Also Ask questions. So if you do a search in Google, there's around a 50% chance you will get those set of 4 questions in the SERPs, right? Also Ask data is something we've actually used for content for SEO for many, many years. And originally we just had like a little Python command line tool that scraped what we needed. And how Also Ask came about was I showed this at a small conference I was at. And I was overwhelmed by the amount of people who were like, can you send me the script? Can we have this? This is really interesting. And it occurred to me, wow, not as many people are using this brilliant source of data as I thought would be. And the reason we put it online as a SaaS tool was despite there being free scripts to do this, the kind of command line interface programming stuff can still be quite a big barrier to entry, especially if you're in like a non-technical content role. If you're like a content writer for a living, you don't wanna maybe be messing around making sure like, PIPs updated and, you know, you're installing the requirements and stuff. So we put it live online for free and we ran an alpha and a beta online for about 18 months and it got really, really popular to the point where before we did the paid launch, we had to close it down because we were approaching like a 5-figure-a-month expense in running the tool, which obviously didn't make me very popular in the agency. But how much money is this making?

None.

How much is it costing? Loads. And as you said, what I think is sometimes missed is it's not just for SEOs. If you're trying to get a better understanding of consumer pain points, what they feel about a brand or a product, a competitor, it's a really good way to kind of mind map that. And the reason I'm so interested in People Also Ask data is there's lots of talk about kind of clustering now, especially in the SEO content space, right? So what questions should be on one page, what topics should be covered, and there's loads of great tools to do that. The People Also Ask data is essentially a window into how Google is doing this. And I think that's sometimes overlooked the power of that data. So the big platforms that give you People Also Ask data, what they're providing is lists of People Also Ask questions that they have seen and scraped. And then when you put in a keyword, they just essentially return the ones that contain that keyword or similar. What we're doing is whatever the root query is, we're getting what Google is saying is the closest intent proximity. So if someone asks this, they're very likely to then ask these questions. And I think that's vital when it comes to, at the most basic level, what should we include on that page? Because if you've got 2 pages and they both answer that core question, and then one of them answers what Google knows to be the next most likely questions, it seems very obvious to me which one Google would prefer to rank highly, right? The one that's going to satisfy the user the most. And again, the kind of most common question we get about the PAA data is, what's the search volume of this? And this is something I've kind of done videos about. I try and talk to as many people as I can about it, which is that almost all of those people also ask questions, when you put them through these search volume tools will come back with zero. And it's not because they're truly zero. It's just because there's a gap in how most tools can collect and show that data. By their very nature, those questions tend to be 4, 5, 6, 7 words long. Once you start dealing with query strings that are that long, they have an exponential amount of ways you can rejig the query to mean the same thing. So there's only a couple of ways, for instance, you can search for car insurance, you know, insurance, car, car insurance is very limited. When you start one, you know, asking, you know, which is the best car insurance when I've got points on my license or something like that, you can probably rewrite that query to mean exactly the same thing in 30, 40, 50 different ways. So even if you've only got 10 searches a month for something which has gone under the radar on most tools, it may well have a few hundred searches a month. And this is really common. You see people, you know, posting stuff from Search Console all the time being like, hey, I was told this had zero searches a month and then they published an article and they're getting like 100, 200 visits. And that's the same concept that we're going to prove as well with like the DeathSafe website. So if you look at that, pretty much every article on that site is going to have zero search volume. And I guarantee you in 6 months when some of these, you know, we've got some links and some of these are ranking, we're not going to have zero search traffic. I can already see stuff coming in through this. So It's a really nice way, especially for smaller websites to break into different verticals because I've seen too many companies, especially in the more competitive sectors, they start their first SEO plans with, okay, well, we want to rank for these insurance terms and it's just kind of like, you're not going to, like, that's not going to happen, right? And unfortunately, there is normally someone that will take their money to try and do that. But This zero volume approach, I'm a big fan of it for these kind of websites. We've done it in that exact insurance niche where we've beaten national, very well-funded competitors by getting loads of featured snippet results. So I love featured snippets. You don't have to battle for position 4, 3, 2, 1. You can just leapfrog to the top. So that's really what AllSaaS is designed for. It's a huge time save. You can get up to 25,000 questions in the bulk search and it only takes a few minutes to run. So there are some other similar tools you can get. So to give them a shout out, someone like SEO Minion, it's like a Google Chrome extension that will mine People Also Ask data. It does it in a similar way. So if you want something totally free, that's a good shout. The difference is just really the speed. To do 25,000 questions on SEO Minion, it would take literally days. And we can support other languages, regions without having to set up VPNs. And that's what a lot of tools really are. When it boils down to it, they're about time saving because most things you see in tools you can do manually. It's just that it would take hours, right? So especially if you are an agency, you'll know 90% of your costs are people time. So anything that can save you an hour, a week, a day, it becomes very valuable very quickly. The visualizations are quite powerful and I'd recommend anyone, if you are pitching SEO to a client, One thing I sometimes do is look at some of their content where I know they've got gaps and you can just pop in what they've written about into Also Asked and then include in your deck that mind map and just say, look, this is what you've written about and these are all the questions people are asking and you're missing like half of them. So while we're getting some traffic here, there's like a super easy way we can give you data at scale and load up your kind of content team with here's how we can improve your content. And I think without that data, that easily gets missed. So I know we've had great feedback from clients seeing that in proposals and being like, okay, this is gonna be really helpful.

And Kander, obviously you're doing well if you have a waiting list for clients. And I know that one thing that's very important for you is to share the good fortune with other people. I know you've been doing some work with Hamlet Trust and some other charities in the UK. Talk to me a little bit about that.

Sure. So we had a little discussion before we started recording and I made a joke about being in marketing. And to be very honest, while I enjoy what I do, it was always at the back of my mind that kind of my job, unlike my wife's job, which directly helps people, doesn't necessarily help improve people's lives. If I'm very honest, a lot of our client work is about making businesses more money. And while we select who we work with and we only try and work with kind of forward-thinking companies that are doing no harm, it does play on my mind. So one thing we've committed to since 3 years ago is while we used to do bits of charity work, now we choose a charity partner for the year. This year was a charity called the Hamlet Trust. So we tend to work with local charities for the biggest impact. And the Hamlet Trust in Norwich runs 2 centers, one for children and one for adults with complex needs. So disabilities ranging from everything from kind of physical disabilities to autism and where children cannot go into kind of mainstream preschools. And it's the only one in Norwich pretty much that can deal with children with this level of needs. And like many services in the UK at the moment, they have come under a lot of pressure with funding and just don't have enough money, basically. So while obviously building websites and stuff is helpful for people, we started off this year with a £10,000 donation to the Hamlet, and they've decided now that they're using that money to essentially replace all their lighting in one of their centers to LED lighting, which I thought was really smart because the reason they're doing that is because we've obviously got huge increases in the energy costs, which they're having to pay, and the LED lighting is way cheaper to run for them. So it's kind of smart they're doing it, and then it's going to save them money kind of ongoing. And then at the end of the year, we normally top off the donation based on how we've performed that year. So obviously we'd like to give some money at the beginning of the year, but we can't predict exactly how everything's going to go. So we try and give a bit more. So really, really pleased we've been able to do that.

I mean, thank you for the work that you've done and best of luck for the work that you're going to continue doing. And I hope the agency does fantastically well so that you can continue to give more. How do people find you? What are the websites, social media that you want to plug? Anything?

Well, I think I'm quite lucky in a way. Lucky, maybe cursed. I'm pretty sure I'm the only Mark Williams-Cook on the internet. So if you Google Mark Williams-Cook, you'll pretty much find me everywhere I've been, for better or worse. But if people want to talk to me, the platform I'm most active on is probably Twitter where I'm @TheTafferBoy. But again, just search for Mark Williams-Cook Twitter, you'll find me. Secondly, I post quite regularly on LinkedIn, kind of SEO tips. I talk less on LinkedIn in conversations. So if you want to chat with me, then probably Twitter's your best bet just because I get so much spam on LinkedIn, I tend to miss genuine messages. But unless you're trying to sell me something, I'm generally very friendly. So I'll always have a chat with you if you've got kind of questions, you know, or things you want to run by me in terms of SEO. Yeah, always happy to chat to other people.