UK SEO Consultant / Expert Steve O'Brien SEO Chap Interviewed by Qamar Zaman Grand Cayman PR & SEO Expert

Hello everyone, this is Qamar Zaman. Welcome to Brand Story Show once again. I'm your host. For the show today. And today we have a very special guest from Brighton, England. My guest is Steve O'Brien. Steve is an expert with 18 years of experience in SEO, or what we call search engine optimization. Besides being an expert in SEO, Steve has passion in motorsports, having raced in the Alfa Romeo Championship. So sit back, relax. Let's get to know Steve. Hello, Steve. How are you?

Hi. Hello there. Yeah, good. Thank you very much.

So Steve, tell the audience a little bit about you so we get to know you, and then we'll get into the complex subject of SEO and, you know, what people can learn from your subject matter expertise.

Yeah, certainly. Well, where to start? So yes, I'm sort of a competitive person by nature, as you've alluded. I've sort of spent a long time sort of in and around SEO and marketing, always had a passion for motorsports and competitive sports and pretty much anything that would challenge me, challenge me to do things better or change the way in which I'm doing things. So over the past, well, 20 years, I've worked in different industries, including a strong phase in pharmaceutical industry, learning a lot from businesses of all sizes. And To where we are today, where you suddenly realize you know quite a bit, even though opinions may differ. Yeah. Yeah.

So I have a bit of background in England. I grew up in Hong Kong and then for my school, because my dad was in banking, he traveled. So he put me into a boarding school in Shrewsbury. So I'm familiar with the English area. I've also worked in Channel Islands, Guernsey. So help people understand that are listening, because most people that are listening usually are in the US or anywhere in the world. Help us connect. Where is Brighton? Because Brighton is known for a couple of things. You know, Brighton is Kind of like the beach or the ocean, I guess. And then there is the brightness here. So help us, you know, help tell, because we can't see it, right? So help us tell that story a little. Okay, sure.

So I'm just about 10 miles away from Brighton itself, but Brighton is on the very south coast of England, almost smack bang in the middle. If you can imagine. So next stop, if you go south, is the north of France, and then quite literally about 100 miles north is London. So quite centrally located, but on the very south coast. Brighton itself is a beautiful seaside town, quite a balance actually between historic Victorian England, as many other seaside resorts would've been, that's real tourist centers from the cities. And Brighton has quite a modern twist as well. And as you mentioned, actually today I've been lucky enough to spend the day at conference at Brighton SEO, which is a biannual conference we have Um, quite close to home. So that's my, uh, no answer look for me.

So what brought you to living there? Have you lived there? Were you born in Brighton? What, tell us a little bit about that.

Yeah, sure. So I actually lived in the north of England, um, uh, close to Liverpool and Manchester. Um, and then 23, 24 years ago, It was, it was, it was different times and all the work was down in the south of England. So I traveled down and started work just, just outside London and yeah, stayed here ever since.

Fascinating. So now that we know Steve, you know, he lives in a beautiful town. I can picture it now myself. Steve, Like he said, he has been dabbling into multiple things. Finally, he got his passion. When you do something for 18 years, you are doing it because you love it. It's not like you're doing it because somebody put a gun to you. So tell us why SEO? Well, because is SEO related to speed and driving? So you like, you know, like the Championship with the Alfa Romeo, you know, like what, what was the connection? Tell us that story. How did it start?

Well, it started actually, I was working, um, for, I was working for a marketing agency, digital marketing agency in the, in the early days of digital marketing. Um, when people still used Yellow Pages to find things, not Google. And I was working there and realized that people were talking about search engine optimization and not really understanding it, perhaps not too different from today, but people that perhaps should have known better were really not able to conceptualize it. And I actually realized that it was an untapped market back then. And I was helping a few agencies with some, what would now be described as technical SEO. So, you know, helping align their site and their backend to reflect what it was meant to communicate and be intended to say. And that's how it started. So it was a very slow progress. It was a slow build. And SEO was different then. When I started my first consultancy, we, we were paid on results. You know, people wouldn't pay retainers. They would pay when they got to page 1. And we were so confident, we were happy. We could do that. We were paid well when we got onto page 1. Um, obviously it's a lot more competitive now, but that's how it started because it was a real challenge. I noticed commercially there was an untapped market. And just like now, marketing agencies, some of them really didn't want to know about it, were quite happy to sort of offload it to someone else. And we did a good job. So it was a constantly evolving marketplace, which is, you know, constantly challenged, constant changes. And that's what for me attracts me to SEO, much like motorsport. You know, we pull it into my elbow all the time because for us, it's constantly, how can we do it better? How can we go faster? How can we rank higher? And these are the challenges and questions. And just like, you know, making a car go quick, you've got so many components to it from your engine, your driver, the wheels, the brakes, the track, the weather. All these things are changing all the time, and that is so like SEO because there's so many things that we aren't in control of. We have to manage the things that we can control. And that's what brings me to it.

Yeah. Very well, um, very well put together. Now tell me, when you started this, when you said, you know, people were looking at Yellow Pages, there was no SEO, they didn't even know what was SEO. What year was this?

So this was 2005, 2004, 2005. Um, you know, SEO then was, if you had AAA blazing, you know, you get to the top of the yellow page.

Yes. So I'll tell you, uh, it's around the same time I had just finished my work at Oracle, and I moved to Cayman Islands, and I started a web agency, and I built websites. And after building the websites, obviously website is, you know, once you get paid, there's no money, money coming in. So I said, well, let's do SEO, you know. So I could rank somebody in 1 hour, okay, because it was one-dimensional. SEOs, meta tags, you know, and copy didn't even matter as long as your title tag was keyword spam and you could rank. And I was doing that. So, and obviously it now became 3-dimensional. So I, I can feel the challenge that you've gone through. So you also, um, mentioned, and we are going to talk to about the technical SEO. So since you started the SEO, um, how has that changed the landscape? Obviously you were helping people on consulting basis. Tell me about the current SEO, because the history, you know, we can't talk about the history because everybody pretty much knows it through the algorithms and the updates and people Went through pandas and penguins. All of those that are listening probably know that. But tell us today, what is SEO from your perspective?

Well, you know, it's actually a really good question and I'll sort of highlight that, you know, we now do probably 4 to 5 times more work for the same results than we were doing just 2, 3 years ago. We're having to work so much harder. The reward isn't 4 to 5 times.

Yeah.

But there's so many key elements. And from our point of view, you know, we have, the landscape's changed totally. It's changed because people are expecting more. People want to see the inputs. And there's a lot less trust in the market than perhaps there was. And maybe that's because SEO has had a bit of a rough reputation over the years. You know, we still have clients joining us these days that will turn up and say, well, we've been paying for something for 12 months, we're not sure what's been happening or what they've done. And then quite frankly, we'll have a look and go, well, we're not sure what's been done either. And this is a, you know, a monthly conversation with different people that we're having. And it's frustrating, but people tend to work with people they trust. And one of the reasons I started The SEO Chat, which is my consultancy alongside Woia Digital, which is the agency I'm a partner of, is that people were looking not for junior account managers, They wanted to be able to speak with someone who totally understood their business, had some commerciality to them, as well as ability to do the job. Now, that's not to say I do everything, but certainly from my client's point of view, it means that they're able to connect with me, and that's something they really value. As part of our—

I like— yeah, yeah, I like Your brand name, the SEO chap, because knowing and living in England, people use the word chap a lot. You know, like the in the America they use SEO guy or SEO expert. But I feel that this is my own assumption that you know if I'm going to search, if I live in England and I'm going to search in Google, I'm going to say well who's the best SEO chap in my neighborhood? So you definitely have a great brand name. So let's talk about SEOChap. You created, you are a partner in a digital marketing agency, which you have been working with, Volia. SEOChap is your new brand and help me, you know, tell me the structure of how SEOChap is different, or are you competing with the other digital marketing agencies?

Actually, it complements, they complement each other. So, you know, very open to the fact that I'm the SEO chap consultant and I'm a partner at Wooya Digital. So the 2 things go hand in hand and what it's allowed us to do is to really, as I've said before, tap into the market that's actually looking for premium consulting. You know, some larger companies who are really looking for trusted knowledge. For some of them, perhaps we're not doing the work, we're advising their team or giving a second opinion. For others, we might be managing the whole piece. But often we found a little shift away from agencies because as some of the agencies have got bigger, naturally, You know, one person can only handle so much. Okay, so there's the caveat, there's a cap on what I can do. But actually, it means I'm involved in all the campaigns. And it's, for me, much more rewarding to be able to literally be hands-on on all of the projects.

Right. And I concur with you, because 20 years ago, I would do all the SEO myself, and then I hired people. But when I got to becoming an agency, the challenge was that I started seeing the work was getting not good because obviously because I was doing everything, I knew how to control it. But the moment I handed off to my assistant, he couldn't do what I was doing and the client was not happy. So that kind of had attrition because of that. So, but how do you then grow if you are the single person? Do you take on physical work or do you teach people and say, okay, I'm gonna be your consultant. I'm like a personal trainer. I'm gonna come and help you lift heavy weights, but you do have to do the lifting. What is, I guess, what's the answer in your experience? There's no perfect answer. Yeah.

Yeah, it's, no, it's, and it's, it's a great point. So, you know, as I said, one of the key differentiators is myself, uh, Woya, my business partner Natalie, you know, we're the key difference. However, we have a team of 14 sitting behind us, and out of those 14 people, we make up the full wheel of, of, of our, our own algorithm, if you like, to ranking success.

Right.

And, you know, each part of that is an integral part of the wheel, but nothing goes out without coming through us one way or the other. Ultimately, from our point of view, I mean, everything from research, which is, you know, incredibly time-consuming, but good research, you know, we can teach. And then we can analyze results and dig down and pass it back. But competitor research, keyword research, the tools are there now, but actually you need that human strength. There's no AI tool in the world that can, you know, get into nuances and niches of industries and sectors and geographical areas.

Right.

You know, competitor analysis, you know, really digging deep to find, You know, maybe where those gaps are, what they've done that's worked. Um, we're working in an era right now where there's more content hitting the internet than ever before. You know, it's, it's, it's a frightening and alarming amount of content. So that's not a perfect strategy anymore. You know, we've got to work in all of the areas. Technical SEO, you know, this is incredible skill. It's an incredible skill. I won't even go into detail.

Yeah, I will chime on that. So I used to always tell my clients that SEO is not a one-dimensional or a single-person entity anymore. It was a long time ago, but you have to think of SEO, and I'll put it in your perspective in the market. So imagine If you are running a business and you wanted the business to be, you want a bookkeeper to do your bookkeeping, you want an auditor to do your auditing, you want a partner to review those audits. So if you're running a chartered accounting firm, there are many people that do different things, but the sign-off has to be done by the chartered accountant. So SEO has become like that. You need somebody to do the, you know, the grunt work. You need somebody to use the tool, but then you need somebody who is very qualified, like an SEO champ like you, who then puts it together and communicates the vision and the mission of the company. Because there's branding, there's brand keywords, there is, you know, voice of the brand. So one has to use all of that to build that in SEO, because what could easily happen The SEO can do something, but the brand marketing team can say, well, that's not how we say things, you know, even in keyword anchoring. So it's becoming a big agency business, but having many SEO chaps in the business are now important, not just one.

Do you know what? You, you, your analogy's perfect. You've hit the nail on the head. You know, I deal with my accountant probably 3 times a year. at the senior level. And he, you know, we talk about strategy, we talk about, you know, tax savings and other areas, you know, and he knows my business very well, but he isn't sat there with a calculator going through and doing each and every invoice into the system. Of course. You know, so I think the accountant analogy's perfect actually for, you know, the model in which we're working.

Yeah.

And the difference is, perhaps the main difference is accountancy may have one way in which you can do it, whereas with SEO comes the opinion. So what do I think works? You know, what do we believe is the way to rank? And that can vary. You have people who talk about backlinks being the devil's work. And you have others who say that content's just content, content, content all the time. Um, and sometimes both work. We like to think you need all the elements to make it a company.

The problem, the only problem in our industry, accounting, you want to be a chartered accountant, you become a chartered accountant, there are books, you go pass the exam, you become a chartered accountant and you can say, I am an ACCA, then I'm an FCCA, et cetera. Right? And people know if you're ACCA, they were willing to pay you that billable hour. If you're FCA, they can pay you if you're a tax expert. In our industry, there are no recognized credentials. People are still making up their— they can say, I'm a Google Certified Partner. Now, what does that mean? You know, because Google does not certify SEO. It's a certification for ad agencies. So that's where— and Because of that. And then there are guys that are in India that are charging like $5 for SEO. So how do you compete? Because the client doesn't know. So it's still in infancy, I believe. And that's been a frustration, but you know, that's what it is. So let's talk about, yeah, let's talk about, we'll get into the technical side of the SEO, but To run a business, because you are a business person first, you got into SEO Chef, you have the agency, so you are an entrepreneur. The one thing about an entrepreneur is you have to have a certain mindset because if you don't have the mindset, you can easily, you know, go wrong. And my podcast, the principle or the core Nucleus of my podcast is the Napoleon Hill's 13 principles. One of them is desire. So I'll ask you a question about what was your desire to get into a business of— obviously you're doing SEO, you could be selling lemonade, you know, but what was the reason behind— what do you think about the desire, principle of desire? In running a business.

Yeah. You know, and it's really interesting. I mean, I'll talk about the reason, you know, why I ended up with, well, why I believe I ended up in SEO shortly. But, you know, my, I always giggled at my first business. I was still in junior school and I had one of my friends who was good at drawing to draw comics by hand. And then I would go and, and buy some sweets and sell these little hand-drawn comics for like 10, 10 pence. Um, and, um, give him a couple of pence. I'd get a couple of pence and a few pence on the sweets. So, um, I, I always giggled. It didn't last very long because he got a bit tired of drawing comics.

Yeah.

Um, but, um, I, you know, It starts off, and I believe with lots of these things, for me it started with my parents who both ran their own businesses. So I was brought up in a culture of that's how you work. It's not 9 till 5. It's, you work and you control your own destiny. For myself, it's never been about the money, although money is of course important and nice. It's about the challenge. And as soon as I'm bored, then the challenge wanes. And although I've worked for firms over the years, I talked about pharmaceuticals, you know, it's quite difficult when you are playing to someone else's rules, when you're playing, you know, to a very set structure. And I was perhaps always considered the maverick in these big firms. So if they had a new idea, they'd always bring it to my team and, you know, let us trial things. Change management didn't really exist in my teams because we were so excited for a bit of change and challenge and something different. So my desire is always to be Excited to go to work. I love my work. I love my job. And, you know, the moment that stops, something's gotta change. So, and it's being in control of your own destiny. My businesses have had, you know, different focuses over the years and some left turns that haven't perhaps been quite right, but you've gotta try them. And likewise, you know, it hasn't always been just SEO. Over the years, it's sort of refined into being only SEO. When, you know, when you start, obviously you'll take business. Oh, okay. You want some social media? Okay. We need some. You need a website? Great. We'll make it happen. So, but now SEO provides me that constant challenge because Google's the one who is saying, this has changed now. How are you going to make that work? And we're constantly being challenged to, to, to be the best that we can.

Very inspiring. So one question, and, and I love the principle of desire in your life because if you have no desire, you, you don't have a purpose. Um, in terms of the coming back to the SEO subject of SEO, What to you is an SEO? Like to an expert who— when I am on a call, I get these telemarketing calls or I get these emails rather, a lot of them. They've seen your website, you don't have the right title tag, you're not ranking for this keyword. Here's a video that I've done for you. Go and call me and I'll do this for you. And then I'd like, I'm laughing out loud. You don't even know, you know, and, but that's what they're trying to do. They're trying to get my attention.

Yeah.

And I'll tell you my opinion about SEO today and even 20 years ago, my opinion of SEO, what it was, because I learned from a guy that ultimately passed away. But I want to know your opinion. So when you are in front of a client and they say, well, do the SEO for me. What, what to you is SEO? Obviously people know SEO is search engine optimization, but what is SEO?

Well, and, and, and, you know, we, we, we've, we've touched on this 'cause it, it's actually so important to understand. Um, it's, it's, it's, it's everything. So if I, if I take it back to our wheel, um, because When that client says, I want you to do our SEO, he's looking for trust. He's looking for confidence, someone he can connect with almost always, almost always. And, you know, it's easy to be, you know, to inspire confidence. You know, doing the job is the hard bit. Um, but it takes different mindsets. So even as simple as monthly reporting. Yeah, the detail, the level of detail that's needed to be able to prepare that information, regardless of how good the software is, to check that it's right across multiple campaigns and multiple clients, you know, is an incredible job. That's not me. Because, yeah, I am able to sit above and look holistically, and then direct campaigns to come up with, you know, with strategies. and new ideas. The person in the detail can't do that. So already we've got 2 people there at opposite ends of the spectrum of detail, you know, top overview right down to the spreadsheet. We then look at a technical SEO, you know, that's effectively a programmer, you know, some real technical knowledge and able to, you know, to really dig down deep and get, you know, with, with Core Vitals, you know, right now that's so important and that's a real piece for all websites regardless of how well they've done in the past. On-page optimization, you know, making sure that the words are all pointing in the right direction, that it's communicating what it needs to communicate. There's a, you know, so there's a bit of content needs that wordsmith. It needs someone who can really understand the client and speak in their tone of voice. Then we look at, you know, yeah, content writing in itself. You know, it's, we're competing with AI that's knocking out, you know, millions of words a day across your competitors. So we've got to be even more powerful and clever. And then backlinking, you know, whether it be through digital PR, guest posts, directory submissions, organic backlinks, You know, there's, there's 2 or 3 roles just in that, to have the right people to be able to do the job. So what is SEO? Well, SEO is a fundamental collection of a group of skill sets that come together. It's not one person, it's a team. And to do it even on a small business level, a small website, I believe Takes many parts, right?

And SEO is a marathon. It's not something you can do it quickly because there's no such quick fixes. What you have said is what I agree totally. And one thing that I'll add that's been my experience for the last 20 years is that SEO is not about Google. Google is never going to buy anything. So make your website attractive for the user. Make sure the words are understood by the user. You can put the keyword anywhere you want, but if the user doesn't understand, so let's say if they click on something and they're jumping around because you just wanted to pass the juice from homepage to internal page, but when they go to an internal page, they don't understand why did I come here? So if your user is confused, Google is confused too. So make it for the user and then all these links and everything, those are all technical things somebody has to explain to the client. So to me, SEO is all about user experience and don't chase Google. If you chase Google, you will never get there. Make it happen. Let Google chase you because Google will rank you if you did a great job, but Google will not rank you if you keep buying links and burying links, hide links, and, you know, and people are still doing that. I still see, I see people come to me and says, can I get a dofollow link? So why is dofollow important to you? Says, just because I need it. I need high domain authority. I said, yeah, but what if there's a high domain authority link, but nobody visits it? What is the value? So I think people are stuck to what they're being told, you know, but it's not the truth. So I think you're right. What's your experience on it?

Yeah, no, it's really interesting. You're quite right. Conversation we're having today, and actually there's a train of thought that says, dofollow, nofollow, doesn't matter. Google follows everything.

Right.

You know, it really does. You know, I see nofollow links and Articles ranking all the time, you know. So honestly, I think that that is more of a vanity metric. And sure, a spread is good.

But it has to be organic. It has to be organic. My mentor, Eric Ward, who passed away, but if you Google him, he was a guy who did Amazon SEO and some big company SEOs. He told me that if I was standing behind you and Google was watching and you were manipulating keywords, anchor text, you know, uh, would Google rank you? And I said, you're right, no. So he says, every person uses differently, so you have to just use your brand as your anchor. So I stopped using any anchor text techniques. Like, you know, I used to use brand as an anchor. So SEO Chap would be my brand name. And if I really want somebody to go to a page that has learn more about, you know, technical SEO, then I'll have learn more about technical SEO, but I won't have technical SEO hyperlink because now I'm doing keywords, keyword anchoring. And I'm, first of all, telling my competitors, that's what I want to rank for, but I'm also telling Google, Hey, come here, you know, and penalize me because every other keyword that I'm trying to buy the links for are technical SEO, you know? So I think it has to be organic. It has to be what a user can understand. That to me, that is great SEO.

Um, and, and you're right, and it follows through as well to, to on-page. And, you know, of course, conversations these days, a client comes to us because he really wants us to rank his site ultimately. But the reality is, you know, is it really about ranking or is it about conversions? Is it about leads? Is it about inquiries? And it's a shift change to really thinking about that. And then it goes beyond, you know, ranking and where does SEO stop? So does it, does it, if I look at my wheel, We need to put a new segment in there, which is conversion rate optimization, you know, because all the people in the world could join your site. And if they bounce away because it's maybe not communicating with them how they thought, or it's desktop optimized, not mobile, you know, there's a whole new avenue sort of opens up there to being that user experience.

Totally. Talk to me about SEOChep. And I know one of the key focuses is reputation SEO, which is really, really important. SEO has a big role in reputation management. And what does— what's your experience? And I know you are big about reputation management. So tell us about SEOChep and The things that you do to help people improve their reputation on search results?

Yeah, it's quite interesting. I mean, to be fair, it started almost by mistake in many ways when a client came to me and had some negative comments on forums that he was unaware of that actually started to outrank him. For his own brand name. And, you know, when this happens, it's incredibly personal to a client, regardless of whether it's a larger firm or an individual practitioner. And so when, like, Google reviews and these kind of people do take it very personally, more often than not, as it was in this case, it was actually defamatory. It was not real competitor or someone with a grudge. And once we start to understand the sort of the depth of the problem, we'll look to really do what we do well, which is ranking. So we'll look to promote positive content about the brand. We, by pushing it away, you know, there's a good old saying of You know, where's the best place to hide a dead body? Crude, but it's page 2 of Google. Yeah, exactly.

Yeah.

So we need to push it down. And this is, you know, this is what, what we work to do. We suppress that negative sentiment, we promote positive content, and we make sure that all the avenues open to us are pointing in the right direction. You know, make sure all their social feeds are accurate and up to date in representing the brand. Clever use of the press, digital press releases to really make sure that we can communicate what the brand is about, you know, the positivity around it and really bolster its online reputation. Sounds easy, but it can take time. But it does work.

Yes. Yeah.

Yeah. I mean, you, it's, it's, it's, it's, it's a powerful tool, but often it's crisis management, right?

It is. Uh, and usually people do crisis management after the crisis. So one thing I tell my clients that if you are starting a business, then focus on, I mean, obviously if you're doing SEO, great. But there is a certain percentage of your marketing that you have to allocate to crisis management through reputation and brand building. Because if your brand is there, then Google is going to rank your brand on the first 10 pages of Google, you know. So if somebody talks about you or your brand, you know, you have pretty much cornered your own market. You won't allow anybody else to come in in that space. And that's what has helped a lot of brands because if they even try to do negative SEO to them or they try to talk about bad things, those pages will appear, but they disappear because the brand has become so strong that we can publish some fresh content and we remove that page. That's another advantage. So a lot of people can take advantage of that.

And you're right. I mean, For a lot of the work that we do now is supporting people to actually be ready for, you know, something that's perhaps the bigger you get inevitable, you know, strategy, what's your strategy around your online reputation management? You know, how can you be ready for it when it happens? So we aren't entering into that crisis, we're actually pre-prepared and, you know, Let's not let this get out of control. Let's respond to negativity, you know, and harness it. Take control of the metric. Yeah, don't let it, you know, swamp you. And I think if certainly for the larger firms, they have some kind of strategy in place that's ready to roll out, then they're ahead of the game.

How is UK In speed with other places that, like the US, since you're in there, I thought I should ask you, because a lot of people that I've talked to, they say that, you know, SEO is very advanced in the US compared to people that are still not there yet in UK. But I thought maybe I should ask you that question.

Actually, again, this is a really interesting conversation we had today at the conference. And one of the core differences that if you've been lucky enough to visit or to live in the UK, you'll understand it's actually quite a small island. England's probably the size of a US state.

Yeah.

And there's a lot going on here. So what I think from my perception is the US is much more advanced in this, what What you would describe as local SEO. Yeah. Um, you know, we're in a state, whereas, you know, that's, that state is our country. So our local SEO is just one of the cities in that state. Um, so there's actually quite a bit of difference just from a geographical, um, uh, and landmass situation. And which, which can be, so I think in some areas, the competition here can be very high. Because you can have lots of providers in a city, whereas they wouldn't really be looking in the UK to push out beyond that city. Whereas, you know, you may have providers that will work statewide quite happily. And I think that local SEO market is much more advanced in the US than it is here. Because it's—

But even though the search pages are less, It's hard to rank in Brighton, for example, since you're in Brighton. And if you were to rank a solicitor who came to you, a lawyer who came, and he says, you know, I want to be ranked for Brighton commercial solicitor. Okay. It's pretty, pretty hard, harder probably because everybody's trying to do that. What's your thoughts on that?

Yeah, I think, I mean, so of course the more the competition raises, then the more difficult the task will be. And that's a fact, isn't it? So, you know, if everyone's going to a great agency and everyone's doing a great job, then, you know, where else can you go? And certainly within that local arena, we see age being a massive, one of the biggest factors all the time, you know, and that can be quite frustrating to people. Yeah. Age of the business, age of the sites.

Yeah. Yeah. And the age of the entities rather, right? I mean, yes, there's several sites, but if they have an entity which Google knows about, so, you know.

And everybody knows exactly, exactly that.

Yeah.

Right. No, exactly right. You know, And there's very little you can do about that.

Exactly.

That is a given.

And that's what I tell people when somebody comes to me and they said, you know, I'm just starting off a new website, what should I do? And I said, do my recommendation, build your website, do a press release, announce your website and let people find you, you know, and then build other entities. And don't go aggressive because if you have never done anything and you buy 1,000, not buy, but if you get 100 links coming to you, that's not natural. And so go slow, obviously holistic approach, you know, like you would do anything. If you go to a gym, you're not going your first day run 100 miles, right? So why would you get 100 links in one day?

So, you know, and this is another great reason behind It's another great reason behind, you know, using a good agency or consultant because it isn't about once a month going, oh, I need to, you know, get some Google reviews or I need to do some trying to earn some links or I need to add content. It's actually about every day consistently doing a little bit, you know, and that's the methodology. Like you say, it's that consistency and build up over time. That really, you know, others can't compete against. So the more often we do a little bit, the stronger your position will be in whatever market you're in.

What you just said reminded me of an old client who was a lawyer, and he told me to come one day, come over to his office. And we were just going to have a meeting. It was not even related to SEO. It was just, I knew the guy and he said, let's go for lunch. So we went for lunch and on the way back, he said, can we just stop? We were walking. Can we stop at this Hallmark store where they sell these cards? He went inside and I was just, you know, in those days I was using my BlackBerry and I was using my BlackBerry while he went inside. He bought 100 cards. He came back and then he walked back. So I said, Steve, what did you— why did you buy 100 cards? And he said, let me tell you. So when we went to the office, he put the cards and he started to write one card. And then, uh, he would write about 5 to 6 cards, and these cards were for his wife. So he would have pre-written cards, and he would then take one card in his briefcase because he was working, was a lawyer working till 11 o'clock at night. So when he goes home and she's sleeping, he would leave one card for her in case he never met her that night. So he says, my principle is if you have something to say, say something good and say it often. And I learned that. I kept that in my heart. So what you just said is like SEO is like, you know, content, say something good, say quite often. And that was the key takeaway that I learned from this 60-year-old lawyer. Well, thank you for your time. It was incredible sharing your knowledge, incredible journey and insight, and great for our listeners. Obviously, they're going to learn more about the SEO CHEP. We'll put the links in the bio and For closing, any closing thoughts?

Yeah. Do you know what? You actually reminded me of something that I was taught very early on, and that it's amazing how the core principles of business have remained with us and actually remain incredibly poignant even in this digital age. And for me, I was on a course with the Prince's Trust, so they funded one of my very early businesses when I left school and supported me with mentors and some grant funding back in the day. And the chap stood there at the front and he said 3 words, and we all know them in business: location, location, location. Right now, it's exactly the same. The location is just page 1 of Google for the right keywords. So your location is making sure that you know what your customers are looking for. And you're there when they, when they're searching. So location, location, location, one of the oldest adages in business, one of the oldest pieces of advice there are, is as relevant now in the digital era that we're in than ever before. And I think that sums it up perfectly.

And that brings us to the next topic, we will interview you on since you've talked location. We'll bring you back because, uh, now with this location, there's something called geofencing that a lot, a lot of people don't know about, or if they know, they don't understand it. So going back to locations, um, listeners, we're going to bring back Steve again. He's an SEO with incredible experience on the other side of the pond. Uh, great journey, Steve. Uh, thanks for Sharing all the tips. One thing that I would ask you that I always ask my clients, what is your favorite book that you can recommend somebody to read so they can take advantage of what you know from the last— it doesn't have to be an SEO book because they get old really fast. So it could be something else.

You know, I love to read a book and I think you actually touched on Napoleon Hill. Napoleon Hill, sorry, earlier, Think and Grow Rich. It's always been something I've sort of fallen back to in times, in difficult times, to refer back to. And there's also a book as well that is not a classic, but again, an incredible inspiration. And whilst the author escapes me, It's a collection of stories from very successful people who were told to come up with a scenario of what they would do if they had 30 days, they had no money, how they would start making money within 30 days. And I think there's a great story that we could each write in that arena, falling back on what you know and realizing how you can survive for you and your family very quickly.

Totally. I do agree. 30 stories from 30 different people is definitely going to solve something. Thanks for attending the Brand Story Show podcast. This was Steve O'Brien from the SEO Chap. We'll have the links in the bio of the show. You can find Steve, obviously do Google search for SEO Chap. We'll also put the links for his Instagram. And LinkedIn. Thank you, Steve, for attending the podcast.

Thanks very much.