Making SEO Less Scary, More Fun with Andy Allen of HikeSEO

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Now I'm pretty sure that when you hear the term SEO, you think, yeah, yeah, yeah, I know it's important. I know I need to be doing it, but I don't know when to do, what to do, or how long it's going to take. So you just don't do it. Well, if you subscribe to that mindset, this episode is for you. I sat down and spoke with the co-founder of Hike SEO, Andy Allen, and we discussed what they built in their platform to help business owners just like you and agencies just like me get better at SEO. Andy, thank you so much for joining me on today's show. We're going to be talking about SEO, but not in a traditional sense. We're not going to be teaching a lot about it, but we want to get people to understand why they should be doing SEO and then switch into the platform that you guys have built, Hike SEO, and where it all started. So thank you again for, for joining me today.

No problem. Thanks for having me.

Now, most of our listeners are entrepreneurs, small business owners, many of which manage their own websites. And they know the word SEO and they know the term, but they don't know too much about what it can do for them or why they should be focusing on it. Tell me a bit about, you know, what is the importance of SEO in today's world?

Yeah. Yeah. I think when I first started in SEO like 11 years ago, part of selling SEO was selling an SEO product— I was an agency— was trying to tell people what SEO is. It's back then, no one even knew. Most small business owners didn't know what SEO was, right? They knew of Google, but they didn't know what search engine optimization was. I think these days the great thing is people know what it is, and probably a lot of your listeners have been through some kind of experience with SEO, you know, whether that's trying to— watching some videos, learning, you know, reading some blogs. Perhaps using an expert, perhaps using a friend. So I think people know what it is. I think people have come to appreciate just how important it is for small businesses, because ultimately Google is just the go-to for everything. Or should we say search engines, right? Like, for, for service-based businesses, small businesses, Google, it is really the, the, the place where you need to be active, and it's what powers And the SEO, the organic part, still powers a lot of Google's main products and still drives the majority of their clicks, right? So the majority of Google's clicks, you know, to people's websites that it gets, and obviously it has loads of different channels, whether it's its ads, its shopping, its organic listings, its voice search, etc., the majority is still powered by organic that gets the most clicks through to people's websites. Um, yeah, it's super important. Um, and I think a lot of small businesses probably— I think they probably appreciate that more now than they've ever done it in the history, especially I'd say, but like post-COVID, right? Small business had to go online and people now are much more used to searching online, trying to find what they want. So it just means that it's even more important now that the organic visibility for small businesses to be there in the Google Maps results, to be at the top of Google to be there as a voice result, etc., etc., is more important now than ever for a small business for sure.

And I mean, a lot of times businesses are creating content, blogs, updating videos on YouTube and linking it on their website. And, you know, from the people that I've worked with before I started working with them, there's been really no intent around the type of content. They're just like, I need to put content. So they're just forcing themselves to put it out. Now, your platform that you created is very intentional in helping you understand what type of content that you need to put out. So I want to talk about that platform because up until now, until I found what you guys do, there's been nothing out there that's really done it in this whole kind of 360 approach. So talk about why you created Hike SEO. Like, where did this come from?

Yeah, yeah, sure. It's quite interesting. So Kieran and I— he's the other founder. He's like the technical one. He's like a coder. I'm the non-technical one. Um, we, we actually started with a software before this called The Web Shed. You'd never have heard of it, Shaun. I think we had about 30 customers, right? It took us about 2 years to get 30 customers. Um, and that, that was just like an SEO software, like all the other SEO software on the market. It was like an SEO software that was built for SEO agencies, for SEO experts, for people that knew what to do with SEO data. And that's what SEO software gives you. And we got into this startup accelerator program. And the really interesting thing was all the other startups, so they were very small business, they were new, and they'd come up to me and Kieran and they'd be like, oh, you're the SEO guys. And I'd be like, yeah, yeah. And he'd be like, can you, we've just launched our website, you know, can you SEO it for us? And we were like, no, no, no, we haven't got time. We've got to run our own startup, right? We don't have time to do freelance. And they were like, oh, okay. They were like, well, can we use your software? Like the Web Shed. And we were like, that's a bit complicated for you. They were like, yeah, but all software seems like— they're like, we've tried Moz, we've tried SEMrush, these are big SEO platforms, and they're all too complicated for us. And like immediately, like, you could just see a little light bulb, if they, you know, go above Kieran and my head, just like, oh, it's so true. Like SEO software is such an affordable way for people to, to do SEO if done right. But there was just— there was nothing that was made for people that don't know SEO. All the SEO software was made for people who know SEO. So then we pivoted, basically. We changed the platform, and at first it was almost like a rebrand. We just used what we had and just displayed it a bit more user-friendly and called it Hike. But then over the years, we've changed everything, and now Hike is just— yeah, every feature is built for someone that doesn't know SEO at all. Or with very, very little SEO experience. And because it's the 360, right, you know, we have to cover all areas of SEO, and there's a lot of areas of SEO. So we set ourselves a massive challenge because, you know, Google looks at so many different things when it, when it decides where whose website should be at the top for a keyword, right? It's not just looking at your content, it's not just looking at your page speed, it's looking at like those plus another 150. I think it's like 200 ranking factors. So the Hike platform has to help our users across as many of those ranking factors as possible. So yeah, we bit off a lot in terms of the platform. But yeah, we've got 1,600+ customers now, mainly English-speaking countries, but all over the world. And it just really helps small businesses who just before didn't know where to start.

Yeah, I mean, that was a big undertaking to take a, you know, a software that primarily in the industry was complicated for people to understand. How did you approach that to figure out, like, how do we simplify this for the average person who doesn't understand the technical side?

Yeah, yeah, sure. So it was quite simple actually, like, in its core basis, because As an, as an SEO expert, I would use these other software and they would give me, they'd give me all this data. So they'd give me, you know, maybe might be a spreadsheet of data, um, about the website crawl, competitors, search results, or it might be within their platforms. And I'll be able to look at that data and I'll be able to get— and I could basically take the data and infer what changes I need to do on my website. You know, and that's what you do as an SEO expert. You learn over time how that data should be interpreted to what changes to make on your website. But then more than that, over time you start to learn, okay, because this bit of data, I need to make this change, and because this data, I need to make this change. But I know historically that making this change is better than making this change, and that this change usually takes 10 minutes whereas this change takes an hour. So we were like, well, we do that in our heads And SEO isn't complicated. Like, people think it's complicated, but it's not. You're just taking data and you're creating processes based on it, and then based on your experience, and then based on what Google's doing, you then prioritize it and you, you know intuitively what to do first, how long something's going to take. And this is something small business owners have got— they don't know what to do because they haven't got that experience. So we were like, well, if we— Kieran and I can figure it in our head, look at the data these other SEO tools were pumping out and figuring out what to do, I was like, why don't we just create a software that just gets that same raw data. So, you know, and we got that raw data with our old tools. That was the whole thing, right? It was a data collector type tool. But instead of giving the user the raw data, we just did the process of what me and Kieran did, which was, you know, based on this data, you need to make this change, based on this, you make this change, and just show the users the changes they need to make in a prioritized ordering, uh, with time estimates next to it. So we just removed the data but just told them what they should do with it. Yeah. And that's what forms really like the beating heart of Hike, which is like that actions page, which is, you know, you log in, let's say you've got 8 hours, you tell Hike I've got 8 hours to do, and then it gives you 15, 20 things that you need to do, but it doesn't give you the raw data really. It just gives you the actions you need to take off of the raw data the platform's collected itself.

Hey there, small business owners. It's Shaun Whynacht, the founder of Blue Cow Marketing and host of this podcast. You know, we've identified 5 core areas that every successful business has and has optimized that has made them successful. They are branding, assets, lead generation, strong relationship building, and referrals, or fans like we call them. And it's these 5 core areas that we work with, with our clients to optimize and streamline. And we do it in a very effective way. Now, how this all begins is with a free marketing review. Now, you might be like, hey, Shaun, I don't know you yet, and that's okay. And that is why we've created this free marketing review, because it is 100% no obligation, no sales pitch. We'll gain some knowledge about what it is that you're currently doing, what's working, what your goals are, and we'll make some recommendations. And if at the end of the call you're open to hearing how we think we could help you,, then we'll tell you that. No pressure, no obligation. Like I said, it all starts with a free marketing review consultation. So go ahead, go to bluecowmarketing.ca/start to learn more. And that's one of the things that stood out to me when I, when I got access to the platform and I'm using it on, on my site and a couple client sites now was even the ability of asking how much time can you dedicate to SEO tasks in a month. And have that progress bar there was so phenomenal. And, and like you said, I mean, as a business owner, like maybe you have, you know, 15 minutes before a meeting and you can log in and be like, oh, there's a 10-minute task. I can do that now. And you can just pick away at it.

Yeah. Right.

Exactly. I want to ask you, how is, in your opinion or what you've seen, how is AI impacting SEO from your viewpoint? Is it positive or negative?

Um, I, I think at the moment you have to view it as positive. It depends who's— which point of view you're taking it from. Um, so Google made a huge, a huge announcement a few months ago, which I don't think people really understood the magnitude of it. So up until a few months ago, I can't remember the exact day, at some point this year, AI computer-generated copy was deemed as spam, right? So if you would have used any form of computer-generated copy before, then Google would have, would have treated as spam, and therefore, um, your rankings would have suffered if it would have identified it as that. But then Google came up this YouTube update and said, we're changing our rules in terms of this. And they're no longer treating— now they call it AI-generated copy. They're like, they no longer treat that as spam. They just treat spammy content as spam. So it doesn't matter who wrote the content anymore, whether it was a human being writing a piece of content or whether it was an AI writing a piece of content. Google essentially said that content has to be great, right? And it doesn't matter if it's written by a computer or a person, the best content will rank. And they had to do this, right? Because, hey, I mean, AI-written content at the moment is still better than, it's better than me, and it's better than probably the majority of people that are writing content. So if Google want to give their users, you know, like my auntie, for example, goes to Google and searches how to make a cup of coffee, or what running trainers should I buy. Now, if she lands on, you know, a piece of content that's written by a human that's worse than the piece of content written by an AI, then my aunt— and, well, let's say, right, lands on the one written by the human, goes, this isn't very good, then they might go to Bing, right? Or you might go to, I don't know, DuckDuckGo, whatever. This is always Google's fit. So if the best piece of content is written by a computer, then Google's going to show you that. But, but this was so important because suddenly now it's like, okay, right, you can, you know, this AI-generated copy, you know, you can use it. So it's, it's having a huge, huge, huge impact in terms of, um, content creation when it comes to SEO. Because now you can get AI to write your content and then you just have to review it, make sure it's great, and then, um, and then you can publish it just like you would if you outsource to a freelance blog writer, right, or a freelance content writer. So that's huge. But what it does also mean is that AI's content creation is like so infinitely scalable, right? You know, like anyone could just now create a website, just get GPT-4 to just constantly spin out blog titles and blogs, push them live. So the, the, the, the threat of suddenly just having these huge websites, they're just going to target everything and they're just going to be overwhelming. It's going to be so many of them. I think that— I think we've yet to see that, or maybe we're starting to see that creep in, but that's going to have a huge impact. I think it's leveled the playing field, you know, because now people don't have to hire really expensive content writers to have really great content or to build up really big websites because, hey, I can just use GPT-4 and just run it constantly and just upload it. So, so yeah, so that's, that's kind of like one of the things where I guess there is a risk, but that's for Google to just kind of, I guess, understand what to do there. But in terms of a small business owner, it's fantastic because, you know, most small businesses don't have time to write SEO content, right? You know, landing page copy, blog posts, etc. The metadata for SEO. And we do all this in Hype to help them as well because we connect up with GPT-4. So we help with all this because small business owners haven't got time to write themselves and they don't have a freelance copywriter they can rely on, you know, or someone in-house who can write it for them. So yeah, it's a huge deal. It's a huge deal for small businesses. It's leveled the playing field loads and made it a lot cheaper for them.

Now, what I guess what's on the roadmap for Hike? Like, what's, what's the goal? What's the vision of this? I mean, what we've got as of today and what we're using in your platform is phenomenal of what's there. But, but obviously you guys are probably not satisfied with staying at that level. You want to, you know, up the game. What can we expect from the platform?

Yeah, yeah, I guess some of the, some of the more kind of like upcoming, um, new features we're helping. Um, you know, we, we're a DIY SEO platform, and you know, whether that's a small business who does it themselves or whether an agency who does it for their clients, you know, more like yourself, um, it's, you know, the, the Hike platform enables them to to deliver an SEO service. Um, but we still have users who just run out of time. So, you know, like I'm saying, they, you know, they have 8 hours a month, but they just run out of time. So we're, we're just gonna soon launch a new feature where we have almost 1,000 agencies who deliver SEO on the platform, and then we've got all these users that run out of time to do it, and we've got these agencies who do that as a living, right? So we're gonna, we're gonna make it a little bit easier for our for our customers to connect with one another if they can support one another, you know. So agencies that can support other small businesses or even other agencies that don't have the time to do it, to do their SEO actions, we're going to start connecting those users together in a much better way. So it becomes a bit more of a community in terms of completing SEO. Um, we're working on, um, a bit of a top secret project, but a an easier way for our users to implement SEO changes on their websites. Because at the moment, it's, you know, as with all software, the software gives you information, you have to go to your website, make the changes. We want to bridge that gap a lot more and make that a lot more of a seamless experience. And then really, I think, just to touch upon what we touched before— AI, right? Now, there's probably not a software owner in the world that isn't thinking about how they can integrate AI into their platforms. I think, I mean, GPT-4 is obviously the big one, but there's others out there and they're all these large language models, all perform very similarly. Where they're very good and where I use it in my day-to-day life, right, in GPT-4 is as a personal assistant. You know, I get GPT-4 to help me with everything. Whether it's I've got, you know, an issue with staff that I need to figure out a solution to, or getting it to help me interpret a lawyer's letter, like whatever it be. I get to do loads of things. Now, it's actually— if you use GPT-4, it's very good as an SEO consultant. It knows a lot about SEO, right? So that consultancy element, we've touched upon how good it is in terms of creating content, writing blog posts, writing landing pages, etc.. And yes, we have that in Hike and that really helps. But getting— using the AI to be more as a consultant to help you whilst you're on your journey in Hike in terms of, hey, this is the strategy I've built. Is this the best strategy? Here's some backlink opportunities. Which one should I reach out to first? You know, like, just like we pay for an agency to kind of give us expert advice. I think that's where GPT can be very effective. And that lends itself very well to, to the Hike platform because our users are typically, you know, people that aren't experts in SEO and they need that whole hand-holding and that guidance. So I think that's going to kind of be where we integrate AI more within the platform over time, as more as that, that, that SEO expert that helps you across all features of the platform.

Now, you touched a bit on your agency model. We're one of the agencies that signed up for that. But there may be people listening to this, this episode that also have a marketing agency. Talk a bit about why, why you put that in there and also kind of the features that you give to agencies.

Yeah, yeah, sure. So when we launched Hike initially, we, we didn't really— and this was like 4, 4 and a half years ago— we didn't foresee the demand from an agency. We knew small businesses struggled to do SEO, but then it became very, very apparent very quickly that agencies have the same issue. You know, there's lots of agencies who deliver other digital services— web design, PPC, social media, email, etc.— who don't deliver an SEO service because that's not their area of expertise, um, but their clients are asking them for SEO services. And that's a great position to be in as an agency, right? Because the client's got the trust to come to you for these services and doesn't want to go find another agency for their SEO, just wants to use you, right? So what we found is actually the agencies were just using Hike as well, right? They were like, well, I can just use Hike, it tells me what to do, and therefore I can sell an SEO retainer to my clients and I can deliver it myself, or I can get my juniors to deliver it. And therefore it becomes a very cheap way of delivering SEO as opposed to hiring a $50K a year SEO consultant or $50K plus a year SEO consultant, right? Um, so we, we, we started to acknowledge how important the, the agencies were as clients. So we started to build out the agency features and we've got quite a few. Probably the biggest one is our white label feature set. So a lot of the small agencies that we had were saying, hey, we want a way to be able to send non-branded reports, give our clients access to a platform that looks like it's branded within our colors, it's got our name on it, etc. Give our clients access to a dashboard and We even launched at the end of— no, I can't remember what month, but we launched the Merchant Center, which now means that the agency can connect Stripe to Hike and just sell it directly, just have a checkout page. So all the subscriptions handled within Stripe and Hike, so they don't even have to set that up themselves manually. So yeah, we've really built out the agency feature set just based off whatever the feedback we get from agencies. Um, because they all typically say the same thing. And now what we're doing is we're introducing this feature where agencies can start to provide fulfillment services for other Hike users who don't have the time to do SEO themselves. So it's going to be like a lead generating, um, platform as well for agencies, which is great for us because we have customers that leave because they don't have the time. Um, so they'll stay because they'll have access to Hike-approved agencies. And it's great for agency customers because it's hard to find customers, right? It's hard to build leads. So if we can just push leads in your direction, then it means that you've got more of a source of leads coming through for your agency.

Well, Andy, I mean, what you've produced, what you've put out into the market, you know, serves a massive need that was there. I've already seen improvements just in our site, you know, just in the suggestions. That I was not thinking about. So I'm excited to see where it's going and I'm excited to see where the platform is going to kind of head us towards.

Yeah, yeah. I mean, it should be an exciting time. We were fortunate enough to get a bit of investment, raise a seed round at the beginning of the year, which means that we're on a bit of a hiring spree and a bit of a product push. So we will be rolling out things, bigger things more frequently.

That's for sure. Absolutely. And I mean, your advertising works. That's how I found out about it, through your retargeting ads. So I was like, there's something about this because it's showing up everywhere.

So we hound, we hound people until they sign up.

Yeah, for sure. Excellent. Andy, thank you so much for sharing that and with our listeners. And again, from all small businesses, thank you for helping us out.

No worries. Yeah, thanks, Shaun. Thanks for having me.

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Hey, it's Shaun Whynacht back again. I hope you enjoyed this episode about SEO and my discussion with Andy Allen from Hike SEO. If you want to get a free SEO report for your business and see what Hike can actually do, we We are a partner with Hike, so if you go to bluecowmarketing.ca/freeseo-report, you'll be able to put in your website and your information there, and it will generate a free detailed SEO report for you. Not only just telling you where you currently stand with your SEO, but giving you actionable items that you can take today to improve your position in search. Hope you enjoyed the episode.

Looking for a CRM that's more Canadian than apologizing for apologizing? Meet Client Connector. Imagine HighLevel's genius now with extra Canadian politeness and a dash of maple syrup smoothness, courtesy of Blue Cow Marketing's decade of wizardry in business automation. This is where tech meets Canadian charm. For just $97 a month, you're not buying a system, you're getting a hockey team a team's worth of support, minus the ice. It's all the CRM power you need with the personal touch of your favorite local diner. Ready to make your business as smooth as maple syrup and as efficient as a beaver dam? Paddle over to clientconnector.app and let's get your business saying sorry for being so awesome.