Being a digital marketing generalist with Tom Marriott
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Show notes
This week, Jack Chambers-Ward is joined by Tom Marriott, Digital Marketing Director at Ina4 and also known as The SEO Punk.
Tom joins Jack to discuss something they have in common, working in SEO, and the digital marketing industry as a whole, as a generalist.
- What does it mean to be a generalist in digital marketing?
- Why does it seem like there are fewer generalists now than ever before?
- What is the most effective role for a generalist in an agency?
Links
Transcript
Jack:
Intro:
Welcome to this week's episode of the Search With Candour podcast. I am your host Jack Chambers-Ward, and I'm recovering a little bit. I think you can probably hear by my voice, I'm still recovering from my winter sickness, but I'm soldiering on, still recording a podcast and this week I am joined by the one and only, the Digital Marketing Punk and Digital Marketing Director at Ina4, Tom Marriott. Tom and I are going to be talking about basically being a generalist in the SEO industry, something, funny enough, we have in common with each other and something that we feel is becoming more and more rare in the industry as we head further into 2023. So stay tuned for that conversation.
Sponsor - SISTRIX:
But before we get to that, and before I have a chat with Tom, of course, Search With Candour is supported by SISTRIX, the SEOs toolbox. You can go do sistrix.com/swc if you want to check out some of their fantastic free tools such as their SERP Snippet Generator, Hreflang Validator, the all-important Google Update Radar and if you want to check your site's visibility index for free. That's sistrix.com/swc and you get a free trial of some of their fantastic tools, courtesy of our sponsors SISTRIX.
And speaking of SISTRIX, I've been speaking to Steve and the team over at SISTRIX recently and essentially they're seeing some successful AI content. From their data, they're extracting from a few different domains. They are seeing some AI-generated content, which as you probably know is a hot topic in SEO at the moment. Making some real waves, making some big progress, getting some traffic. They're currently looking at some pretty big publishers and pretty big domains who have kind of quietly released some AI content. I know it's been covered a couple of times by a few other places, but SISTRIX are using their unique way of diving into the data and their incredibly huge amount of data in their database where they can really get a nuanced picture of what these domains are doing, what's working and what isn't. So we should have an update for that in the near future as well.
They're also reviewing the current winners and losers across five countries, though the Annual Index Watch report will be published on the 17th of January. So later on this week, if you're listening to this on Monday. Trend Watch will be back next week, and we'll also have a Sector Watch coming up later on in January written by the fantastic, Charlie Williams. So please stay tuned to SISTRIX on Twitter or go to sistrix.com/blog to keep up with the latest updates.
Tom Marriott - The SEO Punk
And without any further ado, we have the Digital Marketing Director of Ina4, DM Punk himself, Tom Marriott.
Jack: Thank you very much for that. I appreciate that.
Tom: Thank you so much. That was an amazing intro. I really appreciate that. Thank you so much for having me on.
Jack: So if you don't already know who Tom is, as I mentioned, Digital Marketing Director of Ina4, may be known for your podcast, the Digital Marketing Punkcast from a little while ago. And you're working on a new podcast at the moment. You just tell me just before we start recording, so for the listeners out there, what you're working on at the moment in terms of podcast stuff, before we get into our topic and broader discussion?
Tom: Thank you. Well, yeah, so I literally just started. I used to do Digital Marketing Punkcast and I loved it. There was an idea which I had since my radio days from years gone by and I said, "I'm going to do a proper podcast about digital marketing." Then there was this gap of seven years where I just sort of sat on my hands, hummed and things like that and then thought, "Oh, I should do this thing." So I started it and I loved it and the amazing thing about podcasts is you just get to meet people and network with people and chat with people, which is great.
Jack: Including our very own Mark Williams-Cook who was on the podcast a few years ago.
Tom: Including... Yes, I did an episode with Mark Williams-Cook. I think it was about... It was Google IO, if I remember correctly.
Jack: It was. Yeah. I went back and checked.
Tom: It was Google IO. So I think we probably both watched it and then both... It was like the first reaction show I've ever done, and which that was when Google IO used to actually do search information. They don't do that anymore. So it became a bit pointless after a while. The actual main event of Google IO used to be, it used to about search and they'd announce stuff but it's more wishy-washy nowadays, isn't it?
But anyway. Yeah, I did an episode with Mark, which was really fun. So now I've decided I'm going to, as a common trend, kind of lot of more micro-podcast happening at the moment and I wanted to do something that's a little bit more accessible. The idea behind the Punkcast was to try and make digital marketing a little bit more accessible for the layman. So I wanted to do the same specifically with SEO because SEO is still this really confusing beast that people seem to have real difficulty. And our own fault, most of the time as an industry because we make it super confusing. In certain quarters, we make it really difficult to understand. And actually, when we tear it back to its real roots, it's quite easy to do. So that's the intention behind SEO Q&A. People submit their questions, if they're confused, they can do it anonymously and I will try my very best in really short episodes to try and answer them as best I can or get a friend who's smart to answer it instead.
Jack: That's what I've got into the habit of doing on this show. It's not a micro-podcast, but I do get smart people on to actually talk about stuff and then I get to learn along with the audience. It's lovely.
Tom: Exactly, and that's one of the great pieces of value that I personally take from doing podcasts is most of the time it's just me sat there learning from all the other people that are much more intelligent, which would be an ongoing trend of this episode, I'm sure. Just all these people that are much more intelligent than I, and I just suckle off the nipple and wean the milk of all of these beautifully intelligent people.
Jack: Yeah. I describe myself as riding the coattails of many people, more successful and smarter than I.
Tom: Exactly. As Newton said, I merely stand on the shoulders of giant.
Jack: Exactly. In my case, that giant is Mark Williams-Cook.
Tom: Perfect. In my case as well. Yeah.
Jack: So let's dive into kind of an intro to the topic. We're going to be talking about the fact that both of us, weirdly enough, are generalists in digital marketing and SEO, which is, in my opinion, I think you agree as well, Tom becoming rarer these days, right?
Tom: Yeah.
Jack: We're seeing kind of the advent of a lot more specialist. Before we get to that, let's dive into your career a little bit and understand about how you became a generalist, how you got here, how you became digital marketing director at Ina4 and all that kind of stuff. So where did you first start getting into digital market? You mentioned a background in radio as well. Is that kind of tying into everything or was that a side gig?
Tom: No, it does. It kind of does, outside of me learning, going into the whole digital marketing world, because I think an ongoing trend of what I've done in my career is, and going into this sort of generalist role is I love to teach and convey that message and talk. And that's what, I just love the sound of my own voice. That's the big problem. So I started in radio when I was at university. I did it completely by accident. I had a really bad day at university, went to a bar and got ridiculously inebriated. And I had started having this conversation with this person next to me who was clearly, this is before I was married, trying to get my number at some point, which is all very lovely. And clearly this person, bless her heart, wasn't extremely intelligent, started telling me that she thought the Milky Way was just a chocolate bar and things like that.
So I started having this very, "I couldn't be bothered with them." I started having this conversation with them. And it was quite entertaining from the person that was sat to my other side who turned around and said, "Oh, by the way, we are all here because we are launching this new radio station. I do the breakfast, so do you want to co-host with me?" And I clearly took this person's number, I'd had a few drinks at this point and then I got a phone call at 5:00 AM the next morning saying, "Hey, where are you? We're about to go live on the air." So that was my start into radio. And I kind of developed from there and I just loved it. I got a real bug for the audio world. I'd always loved weirdly things like Radio 4, I still listen to Radio 4 to this day and I kind of love that audio world because it's all very, you can build it in your imagination. So I love that storytelling. From there, I went and worked into a very low-level agency, and I mean, low-level. I mean, it was more a sales company. This is where I get into this CD underworld of sort of SEO, and because that's where I started, where it was just a case of it was packages of SEO, which were of no value whatsoever on charging milkman and driving instructors and poor souls and an inordinate amount of money to do nothing with their website. And I used to have 500 clients, which I just have to cycle through on a year. And it was horrible, it was horrific and I just learned so much of the horrible world that SEO could be. I knew that it wasn't, but I knew I was in the depth of what it could be. And then I moved on and started making my way up this ladder from agency to agency, started... So I always had the very low-level clients in that first agency up to getting the largest sort of clients in my next agency, really cutting my teeth. And I moved out of SEO from that world and I'd started getting into more contact with Google Ads and social advertising and organic social and email marketing, sort of absorbing all this stuff. And you are probably the same as me. We're of a generation, particularly as we're on this curve of technological internet advancement.
Jack: Definitely. Yeah.
Tom: So we both know the embryonic stage. We both remember the embryonic stage of Facebook.
Jack: The olden times.
Tom: Yes, exactly. We both remember those and we remember when things were really developing quickly on the internet and it was really kind of weird and exciting and we didn't know that. And because we were both part of that, I suppose that sort of excitement that we used to get... Things like AOL chat rooms, perfect back in the day and things like that. They were all really cool, exciting things. So that enthusiasm for stuff like that just really stuck with me. So when I came into this world of Google Ads, and I think this is where the generalist sort of started, I'd just love to learn these new things. I remember, I don't know if you remember Shoutcast or Winamp. Do you remember Winamp, the music player?
Jack: Yeah. Absolutely. Yeah.
Tom: Yeah. And I remember having huge excitement building this Shoutcast radio station because I could, and no one was listening, but this idea that someone could take a link and listen to me over the internet airwaves was just mind-blowing to me. So I loved getting involved and learning stuff like that. And that's where it kind of spilled over into my marketing world, because I went into Google Ads and just wanted to learn and I wanted to learn about social ads and email marketing and all these things.
And then like I said, I was kind of a dying breed at that point of generalists, but we both were because now we move into this very specialist and I built a team of specialists around me now, and there's me this sort of pointless generalist in the middle that just points and says, "Go do this. Go do this. Who made this happen?" But that's kind of the world that we're in at the moment. And now I've got clients, I've got a couple of FTSE 100 clients, which we work with at the moment, which is super exciting and in this world. So I've very much come from the very bottom all the way to not the pinnacle by any means, because Mark Williams-Cook above us, so I've got to a certain level.
Jack: Yeah. I think it's an interesting thing where I think a lot of people have a similar kind of story starting off with that horrendous first agency everybody works for. And it's just like, you're taking advantage of, like you said, you're working 500 accounts at once and you're not spending enough time on any of them to actually make a difference. And I've heard many horror stories from guests in the past and similar kind of stories there.
Tom: Sorry, my favorite story from those days, because I always tell it because I always love it, was they used to have a package, which was a money-back guarantee package. I'm hoping that I never mentioned the name of this at some point, but so they had a money-back guarantee package. It was like, "What we will do is you give us a thousand pounds and if we get you to the first page of Google, if we fail to get you to the first page of Google, then we'll give you your money back." And you try, you go out and sell that to Doris and to Ken, the driving instructor. And then that's a really easy pitch, isn't it? But obviously we just find the most obscure keyword that made no sense.
Jack: I was going to say, yeah, you're not benchmarking that for like, yeah, we're going to, as particular higher value keyword, just pick some zero volume thing and just... Yeah.
Tom: Yeah. That's it. "Your money is now mine because I've got you on page one of driving instructor, as supercalifragilisticexpialidocious or whatever." Yeah, it's just completely pointless. And that was the way that they kind of just did things and it was dirty and it was icky and I hated it at the time and I needed really hot showers, but I'm so glad I came out of that world. But I just took that forward with me because I knew that there was that CD underworld there and I just knew that it could be so much better.
Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think we encounter that a lot in SEO and digital marketing in general because there is so much of that. There's so much of that chaff, so much of that kind of... People just are straight up lying about stuff, or maybe not purposefully lying, but misunderstanding stuff and then selling that onto their clients and things like that. Even some of the bigger names, naming no names in particular in the SEO and digital marketing world, don't really know what they're talking about if you actually analyze their clients that they work with, the things that they talk about on social media and all that kind of stuff. And I think that's something when I gravitate towards the people we've had on the show before, including yourself, Tom, when you see people like you, people like Mark, people like Chloe and Myriam who I've had on the show before, what they're doing on LinkedIn, what they're doing on Twitter, what people are now doing on Mastodon and all that kind of stuff. And you actually see them talking sense. You're able to filter through all that and actually pick out like, "Oh yeah, I should take the advice of this person and follow that person." And they're clearly doing things that are pushing the boundaries or testing something new or putting their money where their mouth is and actually saying, "We are trying this new technique at my agency and here's how it's going. Here's results." All that kind of stuff, or giving legitimate advice that is provable with data and not just doing the big like, "Line, go up. Big graph on LinkedIn, yay. Client make money." There's no Y or X axes on that graph. That's very interesting, isn't it? Yeah, 5,000%.
Tom: Exactly. That looks very similar to just a clip art graph that I can pick of, yeah. No, it's exactly that. And by the way, I mean, I'm unbelievably honoured that you'd put my name in front within any of those people, all of which are very much smarter than I am. But it is true. But we've kind of all tarnished. I mean we've not as a community. The SEO community is so much better than it used to be. There used to be an ethos of that we'd have this dark SEO secret locked in the back room of our agency that if you pay us money then we'll go and consult the crystal ball of SEO and make your website go...
That was the culture of SEO at that time, at least there was a subculture of it at that time and we just exploited it. And everybody, now we're kind of struggling with this idea that people have the perception, that was the word I was trying to go for, the perception that of SEO in this greater community or out there in the world of business that we're trying to entice and do good work for, we tarnished by this brush. And part of what I try and do is first of all, like you say, I'm very much of this, I will not give out this... As DM punk or the SEO punk, I will not give out this advice, which is just throwaway, doesn't really mean anything, not actually conclusive on any hard evidence or anything like that. I try not to do that because there's so much misinformation about SEO out there. It is crazy. Even to this day, you might be looking around and not see as much, but certainly I still see it so much about misinformation or SEO and what I try and do is just to first of all, demystify it.
So strip back all of this rubbish technical talk that can sometimes go around it, that doesn't even mean anything. It's the same kind of talk that you'd get in other marketing meetings, I suppose, in other cases, those kinds of business meetings where it's all clichés and doesn't really need anything. I try and strip that out a little bit and just make it as clear as possible. And that can be difficult because some concepts are difficult, but if you strip away and look at SEO in its rawest form, really super simple.
Jack: Yeah, I totally agree. And I think it's something interesting that again, you and I have that kind of parallel where we've ended up being generalists. I'm very much an SEO generalist. I have very little PPC experience or paid social or anything. I did a little bit of it in previous roles, but I really, really gravitated towards SEO far more. And I think it's interesting, you're the digital marketing generalist, whereas I'm, in a weird way, more specialized but still a generalist in just SEO. And there's layers to this where you can see, oh, I'm a technical SEO. But some people focus on a very specific part of technical SEO and they are incredibly good at a couple of things but don't know the wider picture. So do you think that's kind of where we're losing a lot of people being generalists and learning a bit of everything because of the way career paths are kind of carved these days and the way people are churned through different agencies and stuff like that? You get people who are like, "Okay, we need one person to do one job" because like you said, if you're building a team, it makes sense to have... And I think, we do here at Candour as well, as much as you do in Ina4, we have specialists who cover certain areas and then I think a couple of other guys on the team are kind of generalists but do tend to specialize in either content or technical or PPC and that kind of thing. But do you think there's a particular reason for the whole industry to move towards specialists or was that kind of inevitable in a way?
Tom: I think, it was inevitable as digital marketing matured and became more complex and became more convoluted. And it did, simply because, I mean the basics of marketing have never changed. Not really. We just want to grab attention and make people think that's essentially it. But because we have more channels and because those channels have further depth and we have to create specialists. However, that being said, I think the position of a generalist is really valid and valued because what can happen is that you can cause, if you just put a series of specialists in a room, I'd think about an old British sitcom, Yes Minister. I used to love Yes Minister when I was a kid. And I think about when they were talking about this grand transport manifesto that they were putting together and they said, "Oh well, let's get all the great civil servants of each sort of type of transport, put them in a room, have a conversation." And obviously there's airport, air transit in there, there's rail transit, there's road transit, and there's just a room full of people saying, "Well, you should take money away from there, but you should give it to us." "No. Well no, you should go and take money..." That can happen. And you need the generalist, the marketing 101 person in the middle, which is what I try and position myself as, to be able to take that top level view with a business sort of knowledge on top of that and go, "Okay, well no. It makes sense to push this further for this client for X, Y and Z reason, push this further for this channel in this direction for X, Y, Z reason." So I think that generalist position is still really, really necessary with that level of digital marketing knowledge that isn't an expertise in any what such field. And I will never say that I'm an expertise in any such field. I'm the same as you. I actually moved my expertise around a bit because although I started in SEO, I kind of left, I turned my back on SEO for a bit and looked at Google Ads and focused more on Google Ads and social media more because at the time the demands required it when I was in clients. And so I learned quite a lot in there, certainly in the Google Ads space. And then I turned round one day and said, "But I love SEO and I want to be part of that again." And so I turned back into it and faced it a little bit more and wanted to try and engage more. So I think it's still important. I think our position should still be there and there's still a position for generalists out there. I really do.
Jack: Do you think there's an advantage to having a generalist in every team? And specifically, you mentioned yourself as a director, obviously you are pretty senior in Ina4, whereas I'm far more junior here at Candor. Comparing that to how our kind of roles balance in an agency, is there value for generalists at every level? Or do you think the generalist is most effective when you're in that kind of middle manager, senior role where like you said, you were able to have a kind of broader, bigger picture overview? Is there value for someone starting out in digital marketing in general or SEO now and kind of carving themselves out as a generalist for, I guess you don't really carve yourself out as a generalist on purpose, but you know what I mean? Is there still value for people starting in 2023?
Tom: Well, what I've done, so I think about how I've been building my team is the good thing about me and my position and being a generalist is that what I can do is I can bring young people into my team because I don't have to bring expertise into my team that have developed elsewhere. I can bring really young apprentice people. Essentially all my team has started out as apprentices and I can lead them so far that my knowledge allows in an expertise area, in a specialist area. And also, it means certainly with apprentices, they don't even know what their passion is. So I can kind of go around and go, "Oh, here's this area and here's this area. Do you like this area? What about this?" I can kind of do that. And then they kind of latch onto something and then I can lead them as far as I can with it to give them enough. Because a generalist for me is not just someone that goes, "I have this one knowledge idea of what this particular channel is and I'm just going to beat you over the head with it until we get success." That's not what it is. What a generalist is someone that knows enough about one thing to be able to then take that knowledge to an extra level if they so wish to. So take for example, a technical SEO is a prime example of this. You can have a certain base knowledge on technical SEO, but by no means have I got this range. I mean we're really building up Mark's ego, I think we need to reel this in a little bit, but there's no way that I have the range of expertise in the depth that Mark has to that level. So I can lead them so far that they can learn enough and then they can take themselves further and really push themselves even further to become that expertise. And that's what I try and push them to do. So I like that growth to be able to do that because I'm this generalist, I can take them so far and then they can go and let themselves go.
Jack: Yeah, I think that's really key to, again, like we said, crafting that team. I think it's the advantage of an agency, and I've said this so many times compared to whether I'm talking to clients or other people who work in-house, there's advantages and disadvantages from both sides. But I think the power of an agency, unless you have a massive in-house team that is full of... You're working, like you said for a FTSE 100 brand or something like that, you tend to have a handful of people in a marketing team, one SEO person who is hoping the best and trying to get buy-in from developers and executives and all that kind of stuff. But having an agency where you have a team of, in our case here, half a dozen to a dozen people, bigger agencies where you have 50 to a hundred people as well and you can really kind of get a broad idea of, "Oh yeah, we have a technical SEO group, these three to five people are the best at this thing." And when you're working through, you onboard a new client, you'll do start off with audits and having a look at the site and have the technical people do the technical audit, the content people and the writers have a look at the content audit and do all that sort of stuff. Do you think there's value in there for, on the other side, I guess, freelancers also coming from that general perspective and being able to cover some bases in certain ways? Or do you think it's most effective in a kind of agency setting where you've got the specialist to kind of lean on as well, I guess?
Tom: Well, we actually work in both ways. So we have that internal team of core specialist in areas, but there are certain aspects, certain specialisms which we do outsource and we have freelancers that we work with that are amazing. Again, just amazing freelancers that we're able to work with to be able to do that. And again, I suppose where I position myself, it's a complete jack of all, master of none. But where I position myself is I kind of end up not being the marketing person, I end up being the person that kind of pulls strings and make sure you're all having conversations with each other that you should do. Content and technical in particular should be having those compensations with each other to make sure that those two marry up and you don't want them just going off in two different directions. So again, you need to have that base knowledge to know which each party is coming from and then make sure that they're all communicating correctly, which is, I'm a router essentially. I am your in-house home router, just firing pieces of traffic to the relevant devices in your home. That's how I see myself in the agency, which I think, some people might turn around and go, "Tom, you are completely redundant." And maybe one day that'll happen to me. They turn around, go, "You are just completely redundant. Why do we have you?" But at the moment I see it working really well, just having that extra layer of general, as just a little bit more harmony between all those parties.
Jack: Yeah, I think agencies go in a few different directions, whether it's with account managers or project managers as well. There's, like you said, that extra kind of layer to make sure communication to the client is going well and that's all clear and understood and that's a whole kind of element to it as well. Do you think communication skills are particularly important for a generalist in that kind of setting? It sounds like, like you said, if you are talking to different people about different things, you need to understand how to communicate different subjects to different people in different ways and understand their learning styles and their expertise and things like that. So explaining a technical thing to a content person is different to explaining content to a technical person and having that, being able to bridge that gap. Right?
Tom: That's exactly why part of the reason I do what I do, I post these videos on Instagram, I post these videos on TikTok because I'm trying to take those complex, convoluted ideas from all these smart people and I'm trying to just break them down as simpler without taking away the value out of it, taking away what it actually is. And equally, we spoke about a project manager and that project manager's role. I don't position myself as a project manager because a project manager should be able to be in the nicest way possible, completely devoid of any expertise in the field and channel itself because they should be focused on communication, relationship with their clients, their business requirements, their business needs. And then I act as, I suppose in Agile, it's kind of a scrum, they call it that scrum master role to be able to negotiate between the business requirements and the internal requirements, it's kind of that role that I fit. But being able to take those complex ideas, break it down as something similar, be able to convey that appropriately to whoever needs to know it, it's quite a really key tool, certainly in my area, because there are certain things that cross are completely combative together. Certainly when you go from Google Ads into SEO, there's almost two completely different lines of thinking that you have to be able to bridge that gap between the two.
Jack: Yeah, I think that's a really important thing and something I talked about with Tom Critchlow when I had him on the show, that importance of being able to understand, like you said, understand enough to communicate that clearly and as you're doing on social media and stuff, breaking it down in layman's terms, I think that is so key for especially the early stages of client relationships that the onboarding phase, the proposal stage, all that kind of stuff where you are first introducing yourself and your team and your agency to that client and why they should sign a contract with you rather than the agency down the road or across the world or whoever it is. And I think having somebody who is kind of, like you said, you have the project managers, account managers, Mark. Again, not to put Mark on too much of a pedestal again, but he worded it in a really interesting way a few weeks ago, he had a chat with us all about understanding,because we've grown quite a bit in the last year and stuff like that, and understanding where we all are in the agency and having those people who essentially advocates for the clients within the company.
So you have the account managers who, like you said, probably couldn't run a technical audit, but that's not their job, they don't need to. Their expertise is in communication and understanding and working empathetically with the clients and understanding their business needs and balancing like, yeah, we could spend a hundred hours sorting out your JavaScript, but really is that a hundred hours actually going to make a difference in terms of profit, traffic, revenue coming in, all that kind of stuff? So I think there's a real element of prioritization there as well. Right?
Tom: Exactly. And again, that's where my role typically comes into this because you do get, and I'm not going to name any names, you do get individuals in the SEO space, again, to refer back to technical SEO. They're really passionate on, I don't know, site speed, site performance, site speed. And because now it's tangible with Web Core vitals and those metrics, because it was never that tangible before, they can become so anal into, "I must get this ste checked."
Jack: “We need 100% speed on every page!”
Tom: Precisely. Yeah. "No CLS whatsoever. And I'm going to make sure that content per page is under this." They can get really... And by doing that, they could absolutely blow hundreds of hundreds of hours trying to rip out every piece of JavaScript in the site until it's just a white page with text on it. They could do that. And there's a balancing act between that too. And that balancing act is typically between a project management level and my level to be able to go, "Okay, well technically what we're trying to achieve is X." And I've got the project manager going, "Yes, but the client only has so much money and they want results. So what are you going to do to be able to achieve and balance those between the two?" And that's the conversation that we have to make sure that we can just contain that and always have a focus on output and priority and actual results. That's the plan.
Jack: Yeah, I think that's something I really struggle with sometimes when I'm head down on a project and I'm scheduled, it's a one-week thing, I'm doing this audit all week and that is what I'm focused on to really pull yourself back a step or two and get the bigger picture and understand why am I doing this? What is the actual output? What is the deliverable? What is the client expecting to see? Does the client want a presentation? Do they want an Excel? Do they want a Word doc that breaks it down into different sections? What's the actual most digestible version of this data of like... Some clients, maybe they're a bit more experienced, they're already in the process. Maybe they've worked with agencies before or they themselves have worked in digital marketing. And I've got a couple of clients who I've worked with where will be like, "Oh yeah, this needs fixing on the site. I trust you. Here's the thing I found. Off you go. And I trust them to sort it."
And some other clients I've worked with previously who are, as you said, marketing 101, they are far more traditional marketing and have worked in maybe paper marketing and all that kind of working in magazines and stuff, but don't have much digital experience. So you throwing, "Oh yeah, CLS is 0.6." They'll be like, "I don't know what CLS stands for, let alone what 0.6 means. That sounds bad, I think? Should it be 1? Should it be 0?" I'm like, "I don't know." And yeah, being able to turn that into an actual digestible piece of information I think is such a key skill, especially when you are presenting it to clients or even if you're in-house and presenting it to people who, like you said, and again something I talked about with Tom and Tom mentions in his SEO MBA course is understanding where you're going to get the buy-in from.
There's no point telling the director or owner or CEO of a company, "We got 500 clicks this month more than we did last month." They'll be like, "Cool, how much money do that make?" "Oh, I don't know, I'm just presenting you the clicks." They probably want to know about the money side of things, whereas maybe if you are speaking to an in-house and you're working with their SEO team, they want to know, "Oh, we are ranking for these keywords. These have improved over this period of time." You can get a bit more granular there and stuff like that. Do you find that difficult and that key role of translating everything for different levels?
Tom: Look, if we are in this role and we're in this industry, we love what we do. And because of that, we get so passionate about it and occasionally we can get really anal about certain things, but we do sometimes forget to take that step back and just go, "Okay, well there's a thing that we've got to do here and we've got to achieve and we've got to make sure that we're doing the right thing." And translating that and communicating that can be really difficult. So I got told yesterday by a client manager, took me to one side and said, "Tom, you have basically asked them to do a seismic job that they need to do, the client themselves needs to do." And I got sat down and said, "Tom, the client is overwhelmed. So you are throwing so much at them and you've explained it and that's great, but now that it's too much and you need to reel back." And I went, "Right, okay. I get that." We all got a little bit overexcited. We saw this big massive opportunity over a year and we just thought, "Let's go." And we needed to communicate that properly to be able to just that step back and take measurable steps to be able to get there. So communicating that properly is really, really important. And being able to boil down that technical stuff to be able to be accessible, really, really key as well, which is what I want to try and do because we are our own problem as a community, as an industry because we do try and dress it up.
I cannot remember who posted, I actually saw a post on LinkedIn this morning basically just saying, we really dress up a lot of what we say when it comes to just, this is on-page SEO, it's not da, da, da, da, da... It's not this weird technical stuff. And we do do that. We're really bad at doing that, trying to be overcomplicated and just overcomplicating what it is that we actually do and what it is that we want. What we want to achieve is not necessarily how we need to dress it up. Just saying words at some point.
Jack: I think there's a big element kind of coming back to, we're talking about earlier with a lot of people who are maybe not so honest in the services that they provide and stuff like that and trying to do the big upsell of coming up with some big fancy phrase, you mean keyword research, right? That's what you mean. It's like, "We are optimizing your customer journey for blah blah blah." It's like, I mean you are, yeah, but you're just changing page titles to further match search intent. Right. Okay, yeah.
Tom: Yeah. You are just changing the background colour of my homepage. That's what you're doing right there. No, exactly that. And again, another reason why we've got ourselves in this situation is because there are certain, this CD underworld of SEO digital marketing in general, which is, we are just going to say some really complex, convoluted trigger keyword, buzzwords to flower this up to make it sound like we're doing a huge amount and an awful lot. And well, we don't need to do that. Sometimes just doing those things that are really easy and simple go a long way. And if you don't convey that to your clients, just say, "We're going to do some keyword research that sounds like a small, little tiny job, but actually it allows us to do all of these wonderful lovely things." Then if we can convey that properly, then we can get so much more out of our customers and a lot more trust out of our clients and customers as well.
Jack: Yeah, something you mentioned earlier as well was there's real value in going back to basics with so much of SEO,. And like we said, people try and upsell with some big fancy thing, but actually starting off with something as simple as I just mentioned it, page titles for example. Oh, turns out, say on an e-commerce website, all of your page title category pages are just category, brand name, category, brand name, category, brand name are not actually the thing that holds those products. What are those products categorized as? And I've seen it so many times when you just do the tiniest little thing and then make a site-wide review of, let's have a look at just all the page titles of what are you actually saying to people when they see your pages on the SERP? What is that initial reaction to it, that first impression you're making? And tiny little changes on that can make such a big difference. And then you build up to wider concepts, expanding and building content hubs and bigger projects. And like you said, you get that moment where they're feeling a bit overwhelmed, breaking it down into individual little steps. And I have to do this for my to-do list personally, being able to tick off little things of like, "Okay, I've crawled the site. Now I've exported it. Now I'm looking at this thing. Now I'm looking at this thing." Having those steps is so key for me to then process that data myself. And I think a lot of people have a similar kind of thing of don't just throw, here's 15 things to do in no particular order. They kind of need to be prioritized and broken down.
Tom: It's exactly that. Look, I'm going to tell the story that I told before, but I'm going to give it some more details. So essentially, for this particular, this'll show if any of my colleagues actually listened to this podcast, because they'll all turn around and go, "What did you do?" So essentially what we were talking about in this instance was a faceted navigation on an e-commerce sort to be able to take a typical category, a hard-coded category of let's not use the example of the actual customer. Let's say something like a Nike trainer, that's your category. And we'll be able to create using some form of filtered faceted navigation, a landing page for blue Nike trainers. And Nike trainers is the go-to always for, for SEO example.
Jack: Isn't it?
Tom: I've just realized. It's the textbook go-to even by Google themselves I believe. But we create that page using, and even just using the term faceted navigation and stuff like that, it's just like for certain clients and customers, it's like what are you chatting? What is that? And obviously, it's complex, it's convoluted. They need to get their product data and they need to understand how options and filters and all those kind of attributes work. And I get that. But on its basic level, what we're trying to achieve is a page which allows you to rank for X query, which without creating hard-coded categories for every single one of these, which you don't want to do and I don't want to do, we are going to do it using this way and this strategy, which is common amongst lots of e-commerce.
That's what we're trying to do. But obviously, because we'd not conveyed that and I'll hold my hands up, we'd not communicated that very well, they were like, "You're asking us to do all this stuff to thousands and thousands of products and I don't really know why. And now I just don't want to because I don't know why and you're just asking me to do loads of stuff and I pay you loads of money, so why am I doing it?" That's what happens and that's what we get to. So communicating that, that's really important.
Jack: Yeah, I think having that kind of, like I said, the way to break it down and prioritize it can be so important when, even if you're communicating to people who are of similar knowledge and in other teams and things like that, like I said, it's a key part of me doing my day-to-day to understand, "Okay, I know I'm recording a podcast with Tom at 1 o'clock today. I know before that I need to go and set up everything, make sure the camera's working, make sure the mics are working. For example, I had a bit of feedback and buzz on the last time we recorded on using this microphone, so we need to make sure I test that first. Plug that into one input, make sure that input's not the problem, then test the cable that it's plugged into and really kind of problem-solve every piece of it and understand where could we be going wrong there."
And I think you can apply a similar kind of thing to communication and whether that's coming from a generalist point of view or from a specialist point of view, being able to problem-solve that thing across and say, "Okay, where's the weak point here? Where's the mistake? Where's the issue that I've made or somebody else has made?" Whatever it is, is such a key part of understanding, again, bigger picture stuff and understanding that whole kind of process. Right?
Tom: I think you've hit on such a key part there, which is the problem-solving element because I think one of... This is where I'll get all the backlash as well. I do this a lot. One of the things that happens with specialists in particular is that when they are faced with a problem, they will go with a specialist solution. And what I mean by that is sometimes it's the arrow in their quiver, which they always know just works. And that's not necessarily solving the problem that's in front of them. That's just something that they know that might work, that's worked for them in the past rather than just reverse engineering this problem and going, "Okay, well the factor could be X, it could be Y, it could be something else which is not solving the problem." And I think that's what I always try and do is just look at this pragmatically and just go, "This is the problem. So therefore the solution doesn't have to be this fancy pants thing that you are very, very excited about. It's Occam's razor. Occam's razor. Yeah. The simplest solution is usually the solution. So the generalist in me always, always goes back to Occam's razor for me, which is just making sure that we're dealing with the very simplest solution that's in front of us. And just because we hear hooves doesn't mean it's always horses, it could be zebras and things like that. You've got to think about, a generalist has got to think about it in that very pragmatic problem-solving way, which I think helps. I think it really, really helps and adds an extra layer of value. I'm useless in everything else. Like I say, I'm just a jack of all trades, but at least I can do that.
Jack: I think that's a key part to diagnosing and stuff as well, where like you said, you have somebody who comes to you from one of the specialist teams and says, "Hey Tom, we're having this issue. We don't know why, but you've got experience with other channels and other sides to it." You can then say, "Oh, actually, what the client has done or what we have done or whatever might have affected that in some way." Like, "Oh, the way we've changed this thing for the paid side of things or a social media post, that has actually influenced, have you looked into this channel or this other side of it and all that kind of thing?"
Tom: Exactly. A perfect example is if you do paid ads or you do... And you've got a paid ads team and you've got a conversion rate optimization team, the conversion rate optimization team's not working on this particular client for whatever reason. And the paid ads are coming to me and going, "Oh my goodness me, our ROAS has dropped through the floor, which is burning money on a bonfire now." And we weren't doing this six months ago. And so what we want to do is we want to create 12 more campaigns and we want to do an all brand awareness with no manageable campaign objectives whatsoever. We just want to throw more money at this problem. And then you look at it properly and you go, "Well, that's because the add to cart button's broken and no one's buying anything." Something as simple as that, I think is probably an example of those situations that can't happen. You've just got to get those two teams also working together and making sure you're bringing in the right people at the right time.
Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think when you are head down, like you said, you're staring at Google Ads and you're saying, "Ah, the ROAS is down. We've not changed anything. The landing page seems the same. We've not changed anything there. As far as I know, the SEO team haven't changed anything." We're like, "Oh, the external developer might have changed one tiny little thing and accidentally knock something slightly out." And then like you said, suddenly the add to cart button doesn't work. Or we mentioned CLS earlier, suddenly there's a massive layout shift and you get the button that moves around. And again, the example that Google always gives is people accidentally buying stuff when they're trying to cancel stuff. The cardinal sin of CLS where they say, "Oh no, no, I want to cancel the order." And then it loads and they click buy and they commit to it and they spend money accidentally. "Oh dear."
Tom: "Oh dear." People should just be more patient. That's what I say. They should wait a little bit, or just have better internet connection on their mobile phone or upgrade their mobile phone, because their phones...
Jack: Get on 5G. That's what we say.
Tom: Yes, exactly. Which I never get 5G anymore. I only get 5G if I'm in my office, my proper office, not my home office, or in Manchester.
Jack: Got to be really in the city center to get that 5G coverage, right?
Tom: Absolutely. Absolutely.
Jack: Cool. Well, let's wrap things up and I guess we'll finish off with a bit of advice. So you, as a more experienced generalist, like I said, being a digital marketing director yourself, and what advice would you give to somebody who is looking to get into digital marketing and SEO from a generalist point of view? They kind of want to poke each different channel and have a look at all the different options, and where are some good places to start in terms of learning and getting into it and getting that broader picture of digital marketing as a whole?
Tom: That's such a good question. I think my first piece of advice is you've got to take your ego out of the equation.
Jack: Oh, that's a good one. Yeah.
Tom: So in my younger years, just back in the day, my ego would rule everything that I did and I'd be very conscious of how people perceive me. I wanted people to perceive me that I was very intelligent and I knew everything. And I realized that that was just crap and I had to remove my ego. And that's why I say that I don't know everything about SEO. There are so many more people that are so much more intelligent than me on these areas, on Google Ads, and these people are on LinkedIn and they're on Instagram and they're on TikTok now, and they're so much more intelligent than I am. But what I do have is ears. And I do listen to these people and I listen to them carefully and I try and absorb it and I try and place whatever knowledge that, obviously you have to have your own little bullshit filter to kind of make sure that that's real because they can be very aware of that. So make sure that that builds in and then apply it. If you don't apply it, you don't know either. So you've got to also try and apply it in your own instances. And if someone's out there trying to move into a generalist role, the best way of doing it is by going and doing an actual project of which you are the everything. So I've been in very, very small agencies. When I first started at Ina4, I was the digital marketing team. The people doing digital marketing before were the people that were selling it, which is just a recipe for disaster. And so I had to take these and be everybody, which is why I had to go and learn and do this and do that and go and learn everything. So go and do a project and apply those. Try and do some SEO and do some content marketing. Write, try and learn everything that you can about copywriting. And then if that does well, and maybe it's a niche site and maybe it's an affiliate site of some. Go and do some Google Ads to drive traffic towards that, some social media advertising, go and try and boost your brand and your profile on social media, which is my sort of key focus at the moment where I'm trying to get my head around all these algorithms on TikTok and on Instagram to try and build those. Just go and do because there's no other way of learning than going and doing and just listen, listen to all of those people. We're so free. We don't have that box in the back room of digital agencies anymore where the secret recipe of SEO is hidden away under lock and key. We don't do that. The community is so open to sharing their thoughts, sharing their ideas. So just put that ego to one side, listen, apply and yeah, you'll learn and absorb so much.
Jack: I couldn't agree more. Absolutely. There's a quote I've always kind of lent on for this kind of stuff, which is, "If you're the smartest person in the room, you're in the wrong room." And that was such learning experience for me, coming from, so often in previous roles, I was the most techy person in the room. Because I'm a nerd, like you said, we kind of grew up with that age of, oh, I've known computers most of my life, but I also remember before computers. So I remember the age before the internet and the age of dial-up and all that kind of stuff. Yes, I'm in my thirties. It's a thing we remember where you have to understand, again, that problem-solving thing. You can understand, "I remember how to fix a printer because I've fixed a few printers in my time." I end up being like...
Tom: Do you remember bubble jet printers? I probably still don't understand the concept of bubble jet printers.
Jack: But yeah, I think you're totally right. Surrounding yourself with smart people, whether that's spent other generalists or specialists, I think, and that's a key part of building that team of specialists that there's a big chance that everyone at Candour or everyone in Ina4 knows their specialist subject more than you or I, as generalists. But we have that ability to dip our head in this way and focus that way and be able to translate and communicate and stuff like that. And yeah, I've found that... At first I took it as kind of like "Oh man, I was so used to being clever and I was the special kid at school and did really well at maths or whatever it is." And then you learn that actually, being the big fish in a small pond actually is probably bad for that fish and stunts your growth and actually moving out, and I'm going to keep with the fish analogy, get a bigger tank and then suddenly you're able to grow a bit more and learn from other people who know more about their thing than you do and probably you ever will because they've been doing that for years and years and years or decades in some cases, and you can learn from that. And that's totally what I do with this podcast. I know that's your plan with your podcast as well, is learning those things and getting specialists on and getting people who have been in the industry for years to absorb that information. And like you said, chuck your ego out the door because there is so much stuff to learn and there's so much value there from being part of this community. And I think that's been a big, huge thing for me since I've started working at Candour and become a more kind of active member. And obviously hosting this podcast certainly helps being an active part of the community. So yeah, there's my little piece of advice for you there listeners as well.
Tom: 100%, I concur. I just concur 100%. And I think like I say, having that ego, putting that ego to one side's really key. And that's one of the challenges, one of the biggest challenges about being a generalist, I suppose, is you do have to be able to not try and although you do have to know a little bit of everything, you have to not let that little bit of knowledge sway you too far into, certainly in a position of authority like me with my team, I have to sort of sit back sometimes and go, "Okay, you..." Like I say, I'm not the most smartest person in this room. This is a room full of people that know more than me. You've got to trust them. Unless you know that you've got red flags and red alert symbols going, "Okay, well this is a bad business move or this is a bad relationship move from the client." then you've got to listen and learn. And sometimes that can be really difficult to just take your ego out of it and go, "Look, these people know what they're doing. Let them do it."
Jack: Perfect. I think that's the perfect note to end on. So Tom, if the listener's out there haven't found you already, where can they find you across the internet? And of course listeners, before even Tom says anything, all the links to that will be in the show notes at search.withcandour.co.uk as you come to expect from us here at Candour already.
Tom: Well, thank you for having me. Yeah, you can find it. So I'm going to be completely antsy, I know we've talked about generalists, but everything that I do now is SEO related, so I have for all my channels is, I'm the SEO Punk on TikTok. I'm the SEO Punk on Instagram. You can find me at dmpunk.co.uk, my website's over there. And yeah, I do have a new podcast that I'm starting up, which is the SEO Q&A. Go and search for it on everywhere that you get your podcast goodness from. And yeah, I suppose, I'm one of these people... Also on LinkedIn, I keep forgetting LinkedIn, Digital Marketing Punk, you can check that out as well. If you are in the industry and you are those specialists, I want to learn from you. I want to talk to you, I want to get to know you because that's how I do my thing and I love learning. So just reach out and chat and talk to me. I'd love to speak to you.
Jack: Absolutely. Well, fantastic. Thank you so much for coming on, Tom. I really, really appreciate it.
Tom: Jack, thank you so much for having me on. It is an absolute honour and I was nervous because you have some really smart people on this.
Jack: Oh yeah. How do you think I feel?
Tom: Yeah, but you're on that side of the table and you have all the questions in front of you. I've got to answer them. And I was like, you got some smart people. And that was some big shoes to fill. But thank you so much. You made me feel so comfortable and thank you so much for having me on.
Jack: Amazing. Thank you so much.
Outro:
That about wraps us up for this week. So thank you once again to Tom Marriott for joining me. I thought it was a really, really interesting conversation and a fantastic first interview to kick off 2023 with. Of course, I will have plenty more interesting interviews with some fantastic guests coming up later on in the month and throughout 2023 as well. Of course, Mark and I will be back to talk the latest SEO and PPC news as well. And we'll be starting off our live streams with our partners over at SISTRIX later on this month as well. And we'll keep you up to date with all of those developments. I'll be back next week, of course, with another episode of Search With Candour. But until then, have a lovely week, and thank you so much for listening.