Build better SEO strategies with keyword clustering

Seb shares his journey, starting his own business, Atkinson Smith Digital, and key content strategies he uses with his clients.

The conversation delves into practical insights on keyword clustering, creating revenue-driven models, and effectively communicating the value of SEO with clients.

Learn how to bridge the gap between technical SEO and business goals, and discover innovative methodologies for forecasting and analysing market opportunities.

• Website: https://atkinsonsmithdigital.com/

• LinkedIn: https://www.linkedin.com/in/sebatkinson/

• Bluesky: https://bsky.app/profile/sebatkinson.bsky.social

• Seb's guide and template for this process: https://atkinsonsmithdigital.com/keyword-clustering/

• Seb's first appearance on SWC in 2020: https://withcandour.co.uk/podcast/episode-51-the-seo-process-with-seb-atkinson

• Seb's previous appearance on SWC in 2023: https://withcandour.co.uk/podcast/why-you-should-care-about-inp-with-seb-atkinson

Jack: Hello and welcome to this week's episode, off Search With Candour. We are back in the studio and I'm joined by a very special guest making your third appearance on the show. Welcome back s Atkinson.

Seb: Thanks for having me again.

Jack: It's been a pleasure, mate. It's lovely to have you back. I know we were talking just before we started recorded.

Jack: You have done an episode with Mark in 2020, then an audio episode with me in 2023, and now we're in person on video in 2025.

Seb: All three of them in person as well. Yeah, in different studios, different rooms. Exactly. Yes,

Jack: exactly. Yeah. Yeah. It was the previous office before then in the podcast studio now and then now in this studio here.

Jack: I think you're the first person ever to do that isn't Mark. because even I even, I didn't go in the previous studio, so yeah, of course you've got me beaten. so I've got more experience than you somehow, I dunno. Sort thought of let's not get carried away.

Seb: So where's the next venue? You're going to shift it into the main room or?

Jack: Good question. Yeah. if we're doing like live events and stuff, I'll be like the big, we'll get on stage or something like that. exactly. But I know we were talking about, again, before we start recording, you've been on quite a journey in those five years as well.

Jack: I know Working House for many years. You've been in digital marketing for 15 years. Nearly coming on now. Almost, almost. I keep getting, but I think it's like 13.

Seb: I started in 2012, so yeah, I'm not quite that old.

Jack: And, for me, I think it's really interesting because you've just started your own business, right?

Seb: That's right.

Jack: Atkinson Smith Digital. You are now doing your own thing as an independent growth consultant and SEO and doing all this cool stuff. And basically, I want to kick things off with what has that been like for you so far after so many years of working in house and all that kind of stuff and working in agencies, that's how you first met Mark as well.

Seb: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah, it's been great actually. starting my own business is something I've wanted to do for a while, and I came to this point where I thought, if I don't do it now, then am I ever going to do it? And you have to just sometimes give it a go. but yeah, it's been really fun, fortunate to have some really great clients who, we've got some interesting work that we're doing together.

Seb: and actually I think this is the topic we're talking about today because this is the most important thing that I do for my clients. Pretty much all of them have this kind of, service that I do for them. yeah, it's really, relevant to, to what we've been doing.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. And I think as, again, as we mentioned before, this ties really nicely. We talked about. IMP Last time you were here, that was just as it was being announced. I know with Mark you had a broader discussion about kind of SEO processes and how you approach strategies and all that kinda stuff, and I feel like we connect well with that initial discussion as well, talking about keyword clustering, content grouping, and then tying that into a revenue and traffic model. And I know you've really developed a cool little system for this, and that's exactly what we're going to talk about today.

Seb: Yeah, absolutely. Yeah. This is something I've been developing over the last few years. I've learned a few of these processes from other people, from a few courses, and then add a bit of my own spin on it and, see what works with clients and what they, resonate with.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think for us here at Candour, we do, we always have that kind of conversation about. How you want to connect a lot of the different metrics and KPIs, right? Because I think we, US and SEO, we have gotten very guilty of just being like, just report on traffic and don't actually make a connection to the other stuff.

Jack: Attribution has been very wobbly over the life of the last couple of years. GA four being responsible for that. Lots of cookie tracking stuff, being responsible for that as well. So I'm really interested to Get started with what your approach, that initial stage is, the kind of keyword research, the keyword clustering side of things.

Jack: What's that initial kind of step for you as you are brainstorming this strategy?

Seb: Yeah, definitely. Maybe thinking about it from a client's point of view in the first instance, so let's say your business and you want to, invest in SEO. A lot of clients, at that stage, they don't necessarily have knowledge of what's the direction, like, where are they going to head, not just from what they're going to do, but also what's the outcomes of that in business terms.

Seb: So what's the traffic and hopefully revenue leads, inquiries, what's that going to, what are they going get from the work? So this is really, I use this as a really first step for. All my client relationships because it's about getting the buy-in and the understanding of what are we going to do, why are we doing it, and what are we expecting the outcomes to be?

Seb: And I think what's really important is, speaking the client's language because, and this came up in the previous, search of Candour episode. They don't really care what a canonical tag is. but they do care about, how many people they're reaching, the number of leads they might be getting from the work.

Seb: So it's really about speaking their language, putting it in terms that they understand and they talk about at a higher level, and taking it from there. so it's really the process I use is about trying to map out, what we're going to do and where it's going to take us for the business.

Jack: Yeah, I think that's a really good way, almost like you said, it's like an onboarding kind of discussion almost, right? Where you're having, 'cause I find a lot of clients, you get that initial, They almost dunno where they are a lot of the time. Do you know what I mean? if they've never worked with a fresh ICO before, never worked with an agency or never had an in-house team that do this kind of stuff, like you said, you don't wanna go straight in with, oh, we're going to sort out your call web vitals. We're going to talk about INP and sort out canonicals and stuff. yeah, cool. You do need to have that discussion about technical stuff. But that's probably a better discussion for developers and connected in that process. But I think you're totally right. Being able to communicate with clients and speak their language is a huge difference maker when it comes to relationships with clients,

Seb: Yeah, a hundred percent. a lot of the people that SEOs report to, they don't have those technical skills. it's not important to their roles. So really translating those things, that's probably one of the difficulties of SEO is being able to translate this list of technical recommendations into something the client actually cares about.

Seb: 'cause you could just present a load of problems, but actually focusing on what's the opportunity, that's more important, that's more exciting for the clients, and for managers, for those people working in house. so yeah, so that's really what I think the keyword clustering is the first step to, to mapping that out and then everything else that you do in SEO, like the technical work and kind of feed into that.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think a lot of the, obviously I did a previous episode with Andy from Keyword Insights about keyword clustering. So go and listen and watch that folks, you wanna go and check that in a bit more detail, but I think it's a really relevant discussion even now is so much is changing in SEO. Clustering and understanding topical authority and all that kind of stuff is still hugely important and something maybe a lot, again, maybe I'm speaking for the whole industry here, like a lot of us get carried away with one little focused bit or one little section or particular page or whatever it is, but actually building that broader understanding of a site for me always helps me better understand the client and their offerings and their services.

Jack: And the same, hopefully then you have that conversation with the client, right? You're able to then map things to particular pages and understand which URLs. Relate to each other and all that kind of stuff. What's your kind of initial process in terms of tools, planning, all that kinda stuff, when you go in with that keyword clustering, how are you getting those keywords and what kind of process are you going through?

Seb: Yeah. I think the first thing is trying to get a picture of, where is the website visible to start with? So that's understanding the content that already exists. So I would definitely start with accrual of websites. So using something like Screaming Frog, finding out what content there is, pulling in data from Search console, and then also data from GA4. Because you want to understand, some of these pages might be really therefore internal traffic. So you think about, traffic coming from emails or because people click through from certain pages, so you need to have a bit of an understanding there. So I normally just start there digging around, trying to understand what they've got already.

I'll pull the data from search console, think about the keywords, and then it's a conversation with the, the client around, what do they want to be known for, what topics that need to be visible for. and that's really where that the keyword research stage starts. they want to be visible for a certain topic. Pulling out those, keywords from a tool like SEMrush or Keywords everywhere, or SEO Monitor, pulling those out. Trying to get a real picture of this kind of keyword universe. I try and pull as much data as I can to start with, and then just try and understand, what are people looking for and, and take from there. I will say at this point this is not really around, understanding the intent at this stage. It's really just understanding, the volume to start with. I'll get into the, search intent a bit later on in the process. That's obviously really important. But to start with, I just want to get some data around, size of the market. So that feels quite important I think, for clients because ultimately they need to know that return on investment a bit later on. So that's why I'll start from those, areas trying to get, a lot of that data. So typically I might pull all the keywords I can find in the topic down to say a search volume of say 50 if it's really like high traffic topic or might even go a bit lower, if it's something a bit more niche.

Jack: Yeah, I think, again, a kind of conversation I have a lot with clients is. They might know what they want to be visible for, but aren't even necessarily visible for that at all. And almost comes around to, I know the buzzword in 2025 and SEO has been brand, right? We're all talking about brand. And I think for me, I've had conversation with an e-commerce client of mine a couple of years ago that was that, "What do you want to be known for?" kind of discussion. I was like, "Cool, you don't mention that on your website. You might want to talk about that." You have products that are related to it, but at no point do you mention it on your, about page, on your homepage, anywhere else apart from one category page. That is your kind of key products. And for me, like you said, when you're building that keyword universe, when you're having that kind of scoping out of that initial visibility and then going into the keyword, it's okay, what you are ranking for and what you have, how much does that align with the search demand from users? And balancing those two and understanding, okay, cool. You do rank really well for these things. You're clearly getting a lot of traffic. You're making money from these particular queries. Particular searches, but. You wanna be known for something else, let's have that conversation and how do we approach that?

Jack: So I guess, what's that next step once you've gone through that? Yeah, keywords research kind of stage.

Seb: I think one other thing I would like to add in at that stage is, understanding what's the ICP ideal customer profile because, that's just another source of information. customers that have done that, that they obviously have a bit of an idea around who they're trying to reach, and sometimes they might be that mismatch that you're, talking about because, yeah, they're talking about what they think customers want, but actually there might be some missed opportunities. That's another way to expand that keyword research. Yeah. yeah, at that point I'll then maybe talk about some of the themes with the client. and that's like a first stage in try and making this like a partnership because they obviously need to be, have to feel like this is worthwhile. And doing this kind of sense check initially, like talking about some of the themes that you found. we found X, Y, Z topic. I think they relate to the ICP. I'm giving you a lot of acronyms now. but, we think they relate to this because, for whatever reason, because a bit of research, that's your chance to then refine that list down a little bit. And then hopefully you get to that stage where you've got like a decent list of keywords, into certain topics. And then that's where I'll use the tool like keyword Insights, to cluster them.

Jack: Yeah, like I said, talk to Andy from Keyword Insights before. And I think for me, there was a really interesting discussion about the types of clustering. I know keyword insights have evolved them, or even since I spoke to Andy a couple of years ago. The difference between na, natural language processing, ander clustering and combining the two or relying on one of the other. What's your kind of thoughts on, prioritizing one of those or should you combine both?

Jack: Has that changed since AI search and LLM stuff gets involved at all?

Seb: Yeah, I think, there's obviously a few different tools that do this and I think really it's a mix of both. so it's, getting related keywords together. but I think it's also important to look at the search results and, pull that in.

No, I think, Keyword Insights does that, and I think some other tools do that as well. I think that's important because you need to know what's winning in search results. One example of that might be, I had an example with a client where, they were selling products, but it wasn't e-commerce.

They wanted people to fill out a form. And the thing is, we saw that a lot of, in fact, all of the search results were dominated by e-commerce results. So straight away that, that knowledge is important because it means, the kind of experience that Google's pushing. So the feedback to the client was, okay, we can, your business model isn't e-commerce.

We can create these pages, but actually we should probably think about. up updating these pages, we should think about e-commerce and how your business is going to then maybe adopt that in future. Because, Google's trying to give customers the best outcome. There's a reason why it's pushing the e-commerce pages 'cause it thinks that's what customers want.

So that's a really good signal for us to consider. so that's why I think it's important to factor in search results.

Jack: Yeah, that ties really well into, you mentioned search intent earlier, right? I think that's that conversation you have and I love being able to literally show AER and be like, eight out of the 10 results are specifically product pages.

That's pretty clearly a transactional intent. And for me, I think intent can be pretty mixed sometimes can be a bit wibbly, wobbly sometimes. But when you can have that data, you can actually show a client, yeah, this is actually what Google is serving up to people. There's a reason, as you said, there's a reason Google is doing this.

Because it's clearly trying to show the customers and the users what they want. For me, that then gives you that extra kind of like data backup in a way of, rather than just saying like this, I get the vibe, this is transactional, I get the vibe, this is navigational. no, here's the actual data behind that.

And you can really sell that to a client in a way that you couldn't if you were just this seems transactional to me.

Seb: Yeah, and even if you can pull, there's a label in SROs. Yeah. Pull it. Let's say, okay, this is transactional. Okay, great. You can put that in your spreadsheet, but actually, the client might not even understand what that means.

So actually a bit of a demo, like what does that look like in practice on the search results? So for some people who maybe aren't quite familiar with search, it's helpful to join the dots between those.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think there's a lot of that, again, the communication at each stage, right?

And I think we often say an SEO when it comes to site migrations or projects or whatever. It's get the SEOs involved as early as possible. Do you have, from the other side of it, do you have that similar kind of approach when you're talking to the clients, the other teammates, that kind of thing?

When you are getting this project, like you said, as part of, for example, as part of an onboarding process and an initial kind of conversation with a client, how early are you getting them involved in this process and having those kind of conversations with them?

Seb: Yeah, that's, really important to the whole process because, it's about building credibility, not just with the person you're reporting to, but other stakeholders in the team because it is cross-functional and you'll probably need to then leverage their support and you need to have them on side to actually help you execute when you come onto that stage.

Probably for me, the most important thing I learned a couple years ago was, so Tom Critchlow has got a course called the SEOMBA. I saw it recently got put back on. Because he pulled it for a bit and that's actually really useful. And one of the concepts he talks about there is called, pre-wiring.

And it's something that, McKinsey does. he also recommends a book, which I've read, it's called, the McKinsey Way, and it talks about this and the concepts of pre-wiring is that you are at the start of your engagement, you identify who the stakeholders are. you try and figure out what their interested in, what their goals are. That's probably going to be fairly obvious for some of them based on, their roles. but the idea of this is, figure out who they are to start with. And when you're coming up to finishing your analysis, you want to have them on side and you want to have their viewpoint taken into account.

That might be more relevant a bit later on in the process. For example, you might have, you might recommend X amount of pages, which are a certain page experience and maybe they overlap a little bit with, how the sales team works. and you might be recommending a concept that maybe doesn't work with them.

So maybe if we use the example I talked about with this, client with, they're not using e-commerce, trying to understand how the sales team works and, what are they incentivized by, what they care about. that's important because you could go in and recommend, okay, we're going to create like an e-commerce website.

That might not resonate with that team because it means, okay, their bonuses are at risk because what happens when you start making sales online? So they're probably going to be a bit upset about that, and that's important information to know because that's then leading you to, decide how do I pitch this to the company?

So understanding, where people are coming from, that's really important. and then involving them. Tom Critchlow recommends, meet with 'em one-to-one because then you can talk 'em through, this is where I've got to, I wanted to get your advice on, specific thing that relates to their goals.

And then that's where you can uncover these things. And they might say, okay, this is great on these points, but actually we need to do something differently. And this might be information you don't have. So the ultimate goal of this is when you're then presenting it back to the ceo. They've got everyone else on board so they can look around the room and see, okay, yes, everyone's nodding along.

And then he's, you can ask okay, when can we get started? And actually you've already got everyone on side so you can move ahead quite quickly. Yeah, definitely. Versus going in and, okay, you're pitching it to the CEO, great. But then if no one else has heard of what you're doing, then they might have the feedback there.

And that's not good. Look, if you go in and then you've got six people with individual issues that you then have to refine, it slows things down a bit. And also it's that potential loss of credibility.

Jack: Yeah. I love when you can get somebody who is almost like an advocate for you within the client team, right?

When you have, you're working closely with their. SEO team or their internal market team, head of marketing, whatever it is, and you build that relationship, like you said, you earn trust, you build credibility, all that kind of stuff. And when you need to make that bigger conversation with the C-Suite, you can then have them on your side, right?

You said rather than everybody question you and you are there on your own at the end of a massive conference table trying to pitch, you actually have allies and supporters there who understand that you know what you're talking about and this is a good process and this is the right way to do things.

Yeah. Rather than everybody cold pitching at the same time and being like, does everybody understand this? Everybody know what's going on. And I think it's

Seb: Relevant to people working in house as well because it's quite easy to, come into an in-house role, and just get your process in and try and force it upon people. If you're new to the business, then there's obviously existing structures. there's, people have different levels of influence. Some people have a bit more influence about than others and trying to understand that's important. So that's, if you're new to a role, that's a really good way to get them on side as well. And, show that you are willing to work with them and you are an ally for what they're looking to achieve. 'cause people are just going be resistant if you come in and make recommendations about a overview or for a, knowledge of what do people want to achieve in other teams. Are you going to find it really difficult to actually have them support you in delivering it?

Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think when it comes to having those conversations, getting that buy-in, like we said, data is important, but human relationships are just as important, if not more. I think, again, a lot of us get our head in the sand in the digital stuff and we're doing all the keyword research and all that kind of thing. And you forget that you still have to talk to a human at the end of the day. And that's not even customer-facing. That's just client-facing. Yeah. That's just, who is the other person who needs to understand this process? Who's going to be actioning this stuff? Who's going to be having that conversation with the developer, with the C-suite, whoever it is to actually get this stuff done?

Us as an agency, you working, in your own business as an external team, you can only do so much. In some ways. A lot of the time we don't get CMS access. You don't necessarily always get that, oh yeah, you do this thing and you can implement it straight away. So I think having that rapport and that relationship to the people who can actually.

Only understand what you're talking about, but actually get the stuff done, make friends with your developers, folks, that kind of thing, right? Like definitely even it's an external team, try not to burn bridges or make any enemies in that way.

Seb: And I think it goes back to your previous episode with Nick Laroi who makes that point about, you can't outsource these communications to ai.

And being able to explain that to people, what you're looking to achieve and why it makes sense for the business, that's something you can add. so yeah, that, that is really important.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. So I guess this next stages where it gets really interesting for me, we've got keyword universe, we've got some clusters and stuff.

We're going through that keyword process. How do you then go about tying that into conversions, KPIs, revenue, all that kind of stuff to start having that conversation?

Seb: Yeah, I'll give a little plug to my. Article, which hopefully will make it as a show notes now. Absolutely. It'll in the show,

Jack: It'll be linked, don't worry.

Seb: I've actually got a template in there. so what I'll do is, let's say I've used keyword insights. I've used their clustering tool. I download that, I put that into a spreadsheet, and then that's where I use my template. I would say to start with, the goal of this really is not intended to be, a hundred percent accurate.

It's a model and the model's always going to be slightly inaccurate. It's never going to be perfect. and really the idea in the first instance, so let's say we are, we're working with a company who maybe hasn't really invested in SEO before. They know a little bit about it and they know that there's, the competitors might be doing it, but they need some evidence.

Really, ultimately, that's what this is trying to do, is trying to give them evidence of why should you invest in SEO and what are you going to do? So I'll take the keyword insights output that's already clustered my pages. I then use my human brain and I'll go through and check it because, you can't outsource everything.

My experience Keyword insights is great. It really speeds things up because doing it manually is basically impossible. Yeah. Keyword Insights has given me some good results. I will, I do find sometimes it may be makes pages a bit more granular than possibly necessary. and maybe also for, it, I don't really want to pitch doing a huge number of pages.

That's a lot of work. I'll work from the top down. so maybe I'll consolidate a few more. So I'll go through this manually. I'll then think about the page templates. obviously I'll have an idea of what, the kind of website it is and the kind of content I want to create before I do the keyboard research.

Because that feeds into it. But that's where I need to then map it out. So let's say it's I don't know, in the e-commerce website, it'd be quite clear, which are product pages. I'll then have obviously fed in some of these categories. So I'll map on one column. Okay. Is it product pages? It's a category page.

Let's say it's I dunno, FMCG. and you may, maybe you need some recipes, then that might be another category that's fed into keyword research. So then they'll say this is a recipe page. if it's blog content, you might have like roundup pages of various products that you've got. Or let's say it's recipes.

Again, you might have roundups of recipes by theme. if it's a B2B business, you might have landing pages for the different products. you might have, I dunno, applications or use cases and that might be another topic. So mapping those out that's important. I then also. Map them by theme. and those themes have to align with the way the business is organized.

I dunno, let's say Clinton cards for example, they're obviously going to have a card section, but they also do other things. Yeah. So they might have a balloon section, but you need to know, how is the business structured? okay, let's say you've got cards, division, and then you've got like the balloons division is, I have no idea how the structured, I've never worked with them.

But you need to know that because then you want to group it by business unit, because later on that might be a question. It's how does this relate to the business goals? So you need to have it segmented at this stage so you can then group them together in a way that makes sense to the business.

Jack: I like the idea that you've just stirred up like an internal battle of balloons versus cards. Sections and cards. The departments, they're actually big rivals. I heard. Exactly. Yeah. The battle for like higher sales numbers from the two departments and stuff like that. I've encountered a similar kind of thing where you have.

You've got like internal politics stuff as well, And we had a conversation with a huge client a couple of years ago that was like tens of thousands of pages. Multinational company, multiple different languages of the same site, all this kind of stuff. You've probably heard of them, that kind of brand.

And I went in with a big, first of all, your hreflangs are all completely screwed. You need to sort that out. But some of the languages you say you do aren't real languages. There was like Scandinavian, I'm like, that's not an option. That is neither a language nor a country. You need specific codes for your HF Langs.

But the big thing about it was, okay, are you doing different, say for example Portuguese. Portuguese and Brazilian Portuguese, they are two different things. Is your content for those two markets different? Or are you just putting Portuguese content out there? Should you just consolidate that into a Portuguese version of the site that is for both markets?

Or should you separate that? Do you have the capacity to separate that out? Maybe let's consolidate that. And they were like, no, We can't do that. Brazilian team. They have too much internal influence. we can't touch them. I'm like, okay. So for the German speakers, then, if you're talking about that D region, like how does that work?

Jack: no. Austrian can't touch them either. I'm like, okay, let's, have a conversation about how this works. Then like from, my naivety of not understanding how many different teams there were, like, let's go back to step one. What is the internal dynamics like here? Like you said, you need to have that conversation with the balloons department versus the cards department.

And if you're in a meeting with the balloons people, you don't want to be talking about cards necessarily, like Yeah, cool. Or lumping them together or chucking 'em all together.

Seb: Yeah. And then's say, my profit and loss has now got cars in there, which is stupid. Exactly. Knowing that. Exactly. That's an interesting point about languages as well though, because obviously you're figuring that out, then you might actually decide, I'm going to do a completely separate keyword clustering project for that business unit that might actually help to break down those projects and make it a bit more easier to manage. And I guess with international you can then look at your two lists of your Portuguese and then your Brazilian Portuguese pages. And then that's when you can link them up with Lang.

Because obviously search trends are going to be slightly different by culture, even though the, it's a shared language. that's a whole other can of worms though. Yeah. Yeah. The future episode,

Jack: Even like British English and American English can make a big difference. And again, had a conversation with a client a few, a couple of years ago now that was like, do you want to call them sweaters or jumpers, pants or trousers? What's the app? You are using the same content for both. So what's the approach here? And they were like, we get most of our traffic from the US and most make most of our money from the us. cool. Call them pants then. Yeah. Yeah. I'll be slightly offended as a very British man, but I will also not be that bothered that I wouldn't purchase a product because you called it pants.

You, I'm not sadly thinking it's underwear. I can see the photo of the product. And I think you're totally right when it comes to building that dynamic and having that conversation comes back around to a big thing that a lot of us talk about is forecasting, right? You mentioned this as a model that is adaptable.

This isn't set in stone. I think a lot of us get into, almost like there's no point SE forecasting a lot of ways 'cause there's so many unpredictability, so many variables, so many elements, especially with what's going on with whatever Google is up to with AI mode at the moment, all that kind of stuff.

How does this then tie into that kind of approach to a kind of forecasting, a forward looking and a predictional kind of model?

Seb: Yeah, forecasting is very difficult and it definitely something I've struggled with for probably my whole career in SEO. it, yeah, it's hard. I think, that there's a couple of ways that people have done it that I've seen.

So I used to use, SEO Monsters Forecasting Tool, which is great because it'll give you this like curve. it, we'll look at, okay, in 12 months we want to achieve this target based on the keyword list, and they'll give you a curve to get there. that's all well and good, but the problem is, you might be putting this together before you know how much content you want to produce.

So an example for some of my clients is that they want this analysis. Before we actually agree, how much are we going to actually invest in s show? They need the analysis beforehand to actually know, what we're going to do and how much resource we can put towards it. 'cause you can't really ask someone to invest X amount per month when you dunno what the outcome is.

So sometimes we'll do this as like a project to start with. So the way I structure it is, it's more of this, I call it like an opportunity analysis. So I'll have a range of potential outputs. what I'll start with, and I keep this really simple, 'cause as I said earlier on, it's a model so it will be inaccurate.

Some models are more useful than other models. so I try and give a range. So what I'll start with, so I've got obviously all my, all my keywords cluster the pages so I know what I need to produce. I'll then start with a kind of a baseline level of performance that I want to achieve. I'll use, I use search console and I'll have a look at what's the average, click through rate across the website.

And that's not necessarily that something I'll plug in straight away. I might then think about, okay, how well optimises the content already. Some websites might be, possibly a bit of a mess with lots of different pages competing against each other, or maybe they haven't really invested, or maybe there's just no data whatsoever.

so you might start with something like a click-through rate of no 0.5 or 1%. that's a bit of more art than science to be completely honest. Then I might do something a bit more, higher level. So it might be, starting from maybe baseline of around like 5% click through rate. I might adjust higher or lower depending on how, how difficult that market is and where I think the website might be starting from.

So I might also look at, link metrics like, ah, refs and figure out how, how strong is system main compared to some of the other players in the market to try and figure something out. So it might be, 3%, 4%, 5%. and that really is a bit more like a target that I can present as, okay, we are not going to reach this straight away as soon as we publish all this content, but maybe, if we do the content and then we'll fix some of the technical issues.

So if I did like a technical audit afterwards, then we know actually there's a whole load of problems that we need to fix to release the performance of these pages, then we can say, that's our target for longer term. And then I like to give, a kind of headline size of the market. imagine if you are position one for all of the keywords.

At the moment I'm using something like, 20%, which is quite high. and in reality, that's not really achievable, even the best websites because there's always competition. Yeah. But the idea is to say we've got a market that we can reach of this size. and we are actually just aiming for somewhere in between.

The other thing I'll do, this is another tip from Tom Critchlow, which is multiply your monthly figures by 12. which I never thought about this until I got that tip from, that's from the, from the MBA course. because we always talk about monthly figures because that's what keyword data gives us.

But like the other, the rest of the business doesn't do that. They talk about courses in years. Yeah. So if we go in and talk about courses in years, then we immediately get a bit more credibility. 'cause they're like, how does these monthly figures relate to actually how the business operates?

So that's really useful. and my template, that's why put in there, yeah. So then we've got a bit of a range there. So the idea is you've got that band, Before we're even getting into how much, concrete, like we're going to achieve this in three years, five years. It is really about just the size of the opportunity at this stage to say this is achievable.

And then the final thing I'll point to is, let's look at some competitors as well. So I might then pull data from, SRAs for example, on let's say the top three competitors in the market. And we can see, obviously the data there in SROs isn't a hundred percent accurate, but it's a bit of evidence to say like they're doing something similar.

So we're going from, that's evidence that this is possible. And then the the work I would do in one of the fees, the keyword clustering analysis is saying, this is how we would achieve something similar. And it might even be a case of, if we achieve 10% of the traffic this competitor's getting, that's actually a win because we might be going from zero.

Jack: Yeah. I love the tying in the competitor side of things as well. 'cause I think that is something, again, we think about building that keyword. University. Think about clustering. It's all of kind of an internal process, right? Obviously tying in user intent and tying in search intent and tying customer data and all this kind of stuff.

But what is the market doing? What are your competitors doing? What are, like you said, the absolute top ranking, industry leading kind of people doing what are the up and comers doing? And again, having those kind of conversations with an e-commerce client, for example, I again had a conversation with a client a couple of months ago that was, where is this tiny little example come from?

They have appeared out of nowhere. Where have they come from? What are they doing? What are they doing that we are not doing that we are not seeing that, astronomic growth over six months. We are slowly, steadily growing, but we're not seeing that sudden shift. And like I said, maybe it's easier if you start from zero.

Every number looks impressive. The classic LinkedIn graph of we've increased by a million percent. Graph goes up. Yeah, exactly. A million percent from one. Cool. Brilliant. Congratulations. But what, Mark talks a lot about and what I know a lot of other SEOs have been around for a long time talk about is that.

Final push around. Nick talked about it as well that going from the 85% to 90% to 95%, I think that's true for personal stuff, for career stuff, but also true for traffic, right? When you've got a page that's already performing well or a cluster or a category or whatever it is that is performing well, how do you then push it that a little bit further and squeeze that bit extra out of it?

And for me, I think you can again, get into the flow of being very internal and being very focusing on what our other pages doing, but actually looking at what the competitors are doing. And like you said, using them as a benchmark against, okay, cool, maybe we can see a 10% growth. While they don't see a 10% growth.

You maybe not literally stealing traffic from them, but it is that there's only a finite number of resources in each industry, right? There's that whole share of voice thing that I know Semrush and Ahrefs and a few other tools have done before. It's a bit wobbly, a bit questionable, but I think it's a relevant.

It's an estimate, right? Like you said, none of this data is going to be a hundred percent accurate. That is not the world we live in anymore. Unfortunately. Even with Search Console, sometimes it can be a bit dodgy. And for me, I think having that conversation, at least to get a broader idea of it, get an idea of, yeah, we are competing, we are competitive.

Bear in mind, this company is a billion dollar company compared to Jack's local thing around the corner to Seb's multinational company. You can really get an idea of even again. Idea of what the competitors are. Who do you think your competitors are to a client? I always find a fascinating conversation.

Yeah, definitely. And then you show them a serpent. It's like this is what they actually are. From an organic perspective, you might be thinking about it from a brick and mortar store perspective versus a organic perspective. Who are your paid competitors? Who's bidding on your branded terms? oh yeah, there's whole other like landscapes and competitors you don't even think about.

And I love having that conversation with clients where you're then able to open that up and be like, didn't even notice. These people didn't even know, but they are eating your lunch and they're taking your dinner money. When it comes to the search results, maybe you should be thinking about what are they doing?

And like you said, you can then factor that into a lot of benchmarking and the kind of forecasting stuff.

Seb: Yeah, I think one of the things to add actually is, that understanding initially of what's the website already doing. so I'll also mark out what's a new page, opportunities that maybe the company's missed and what's an existing page that it maybe needs some optimization or actually maybe already performs really well.

So then I can compare that to the, the keyword data. I can then just pull in the clicks from Search console and map them to the same pages. And obviously those data sources are definitely not one-to-one, but again, helps to give a bit of a sense check. making sure that your numbers actually aligned with the data they've already got. And maybe you need to do some adjustments because, there might be some slight differences there. You, obviously won't be able to get all the same keyword data that search console will have 'cause it's got a lot more of that long tail stuff. But, yeah, that, that just kind, it makes it a bit more, more real essentially.

Jack: Yeah, I think there's a lot of that connecting to reality ties, very much around to the conversations you have with that client. Taking those theories and hypotheses and all that kind of stuff and making it real and actually tangible stuff. I think that ties a lot into literally connecting that revenue side of things and making that the KPI and the metric.

At the end of the day, that really matters. As much as we like to say, oh, traffic is great, rankings are great, whatever. If you're just reporting on those, you are not really talking about the money side of things. As you said at the very beginning of the show, you're not really talking about the language, your business.

You're not getting that conversation with C-Suite people that want to know, cool, we're investing however many thousands per month in your SEO project. How much money is that making? What's my return on this investment? What's the ROAS? If you're doing PPC stuff, For you, when you have that kind of conversation, how are you then taking all of this data and turning that into a conversation about revenue?

Jack: Is it literally about connecting those conversions and taking that. eCommerce data or is it a kind of a combination of both?

Seb: Yeah, so we, if we're starting at a point where we've got that list of pages, we've got the, the target traffic, yeah. So how do we turn it into money?

I'll start by looking at search, sorry GA4 or whatever platform there the company's using and look at the conversions. if I can, I'll then break that down to types of pages. so it might be like a product page you'd probably expect has a higher conversion rate than certain other pages, like a blog post.

So I'll then take, or my spreadsheet. I'll have a conversion rate per, page template, and then obviously it's all connected up. So it means that if I put in a conversion rate of, 5% for a certain page topic, then that can then populate my, spreadsheet. then if it's a, let's say it's like a lead generation website, that might be a bit more difficult because an earlier example, the client isn't quite e-commerce. Yeah, exactly. Yeah. I work with a client where, some of their leads, are worth a thousand pounds to them. and then others are a hundred thousand.

So even if you had an average goal value that you could put into your sheet, that's probably gonna be inaccurate because then you have to think about, some of your pages will be going after this more kind of lower end client. others will be, okay, you might get one lead and then that could pay for the whole SEO project.

How do you forecast that? So maybe there, maybe it's just best to just, track number of inquiries. and then maybe that's something you can then work with the client to develop, and try and improve the analytics later. But, it comes down to the data you have. so if there's like an average goal value that you can pull in, I'll pull that in.

That might be, if it's e-commerce, it might be the basket value. Then, yeah, if it's like leads and I might just do a number of leads, and then I'll have that all connected up. So then let's say my baseline will, then the baseline traffic will then connect to the conversion rate of the page, and then also the basket value or number of leads.

And then I'll have a column for the number of leads I'd hope to get from, the baseline and then the same for the middle tier. And then the same for like size of market. So then we have a rough picture of, what we could be guessing from the activity and of course times it by 12 and say, okay, if we create all this content the year after, we hope that they all achieve, from the first line, the first, the baseline, this is what it's worth.

And then we can say, in year two we want to then get closer to the next percentage point, which is, the middle one. and then yeah, we've got that kind of roadmap of, okay, this is what it's worth. This is why you should actually invest in, in creating this content.

Jack: Yeah. I love you mentioned there You can, if you don't have that conversational client, you won't necessarily know how much a lead is worth to them. And I always use an example of one of my e-commerce clients from a couple of years ago that they work with big industrial projects. They're not B2C. It's very, big B2B stuff. So even a single lead can turn into hundreds of thousands, if not millions of pounds.

So every click is important, but actually if you can, and again, this is a whole other conversation about quality of traffic and stuff like that, we could do a whole other episode on that. But for me, I think having that perspective when you're going into it really helps adjust that predictive nature and that forecasting rate.

When you are going to claim you're going to bring 10,000 new clicks, cool. What do those clicks actually mean? And exactly you said there, where are those clicks going in terms of are they going to convert, are they aimed at a particular audience? Because again, exactly you said that you can have. Certain products that are a fiver and then other products that are 200 pounds, and then projects that are a hundred thousand pounds that could be under the same company.

That's a bit of an exaggeration, obviously, but it's not without, examples and reasons. I'm sure we've both worked on clients that have a broad range of prices. Yeah. Even if you're taking that average basket value, take it from the balloon section. What's the average balloons thing compared to the cards thing?

Get that kind of almost in perspective rather than taking a business wide perspective. I think for me, that really helps sell that to the specific departments, have those kind of conversations. And again, if you have that I, I can get you five new clicks of really high value stuff that is really relevant, that are likely to convert, that's more likely to bring in the next 10, 5 million pound project or whatever it is compared to, I could bring you 10,000 clicks to a blog post nobody gives a shit about.

It's cool. They're not going convert, so whatever.

Seb: Yeah. I think also I probably will just flag, like some listeners might think, they're right to think that, I've just talked about combining, conversion rate from GA four with. SEMrush, number of sessions obviously different.

I think this goes back to how it's a model. I've seen other people talk about how they'll work out the conversion rate, of their clicks from search console going into GA four sessions. Yeah, that's definitely something you can do. that adds a bit of complexity. so I think maybe something to consider or you can also just lower your kind of, click through rate targets to try and like factor that in.

So I think like that helps to, understanding some of those things. It's important to then make sure your numbers are realistic. And I'd also say realistic is being conservative because you don't wanna then obviously, cause problems for yourself in the future. So that's why, you have that spread as well.

Jack: Definitely. And when you come, even when you're talking about SEMrush stuff, right? Like I've done an exercise before where you take. You know what the clicks are for your site, and then you have a look at the estimated traffic from SEMrush or HFS or whatever tool you are using. You get a rough kind of conversion rate between the two.

Oh, they're roughly like 80 to 85% of the true clicks. Or maybe it's slightly higher. It could be 105, 110%, whatever it is. And the same is true for GA four, right? We had this exact conversation with the client last month because they had recently updated their cookie management stuff, their consent management platform, and we're like, there's a bunch of data that's missing here.

There is not much you can do about that. This is the new norm now because of data regulations and GDPR and all this kind of stuff, right? And I think for me, when you have that. at least you have that awareness of it. Like you said, you're not going in, assuming this is a hundred percent accurate, I can guarantee you 5 million pounds in the next 12 months.

This is a rough goal, this is an estimate, this is a model to predict this kind of stuff and say, yeah, I can benchmark myself and say, SEMrush is saying it's about 80%. So we assume that it's roughly the same for the other competitors as well. You can benchmark yourself there, do a little bit of math, conversion rates and all that kinda stuff between, again, this is very wobbly, very tricky, like converting between different tools and stuff like that.

But I think doing it between search console and GA four is a really relevant exercise in a lot of ways to understand users versus sessions versus clicks, how they relate to each other. 'cause again, I think a lot of us, especially if you're more junior in your career, assume they're all the same thing.

And five, 10 years ago they were much closer to being the same thing than they are now because of things like cookie management and consent and all that kind of stuff. I think having that conversation with a client and at least. Ballparking them and understanding and benchmarking with yeah, this, is a relevant number, but you need to be aware of the context that it's in. Really helps build that broader picture as well.

Seb: Yeah, a hundred percent. yeah, just that terminology is really important and making sure when you're presenting this back that all the stakeholders know what you're talking about. So clicks, what does that mean? impressions. That, that's also, I found that's actually, for people outside of SEO that's a bit more complicated.

Jack: Yeah. 'cause click is like a literal action, right? Yeah. But what is an impression? Impression is a very like, passive thing. So Yeah. When does an impression triggers a really interesting conversation for somebody who isn't even aware of SERPs and how that works or anything like that.

And I don't know even, there's been some weird examples of. If a tweet or a post social media post features your link in a serp, that can count as an impression in some cases, but not in other cases. okay. Yes. It's not literally do you appear on the serp in certain cases it can be other things featuring you and, then turning into AI views and AI mode and that whole conversation as well.

Oh, that's another kind of the, shifting value of impressions. Again, whole other conversation. I've recorded a podcast on that already. Don't worry. That'll be out before this one. but I think for me, we're in an age now where this kind of predictive model stuff is really important 'cause of the stuff that is changing because of, again, the kind of wobbly nature.

A lot of the data that we're getting, because we're what I talked about a lot with when, I don't wanna say the rant, I'm allowed to say the rant. General Alderson went on the podcast a couple of months ago, was. We don't have anything that Google owes us. They don't owe us data. There's no relationship we have with them where we should be getting the full transparency of data.

And I think a lot of SEOs feel like we should and we should get more transparency. I saw an interesting conversation the other day about disavowing links. Google should tell us which ones work and which ones don't. It's but then people could game that very easily and you can just, oh, six out of 10 of the domains you just submitted were, correctly disavowed and were counted as spammy.

Then you just keep taking one away until you find the six that work. And then you just optimize your disavow file. As soon as you give SEOs data, we're gonna spam it for Yeah. For better, often for worse. I think that's,

Seb: Yeah. We just like exploiting things. I think that's, the unfortunate reality.

I didn't even, it is weird because the disavow all, for example, that's been around for so long and, it's funny, you still see people like, yeah. Regular disavow is, this is something I'll do, but I meant doesn't do anything. It's just snitching really. Yeah.

Jack: My previous agency, we would do like a, was it quarterly or monthly?

I can't, like every client gets a monthly review of their disavow file. Great. I was sat there I don't get this. Like, why are we, this is a waste of my time. I could be doing so many more interesting things than scrolling through a list of 150 URLs to make sure that they're all appropriately spamming.

Oh, go and check their toxicity on Semrush. what does that mean? Why am I wasting my time? Let's go and do interesting, cool stuff that will make people money and not be all this kind of stuff.

Seb: Yeah. It's just busy work at the end of the day. Exactly. And also, part half the time you can't even open those URLs because they're so spammy. They'll get blocked.

Jack: If you can tell it's spammy, Google probably can as well. And that's always my rule at the end of the day, like if you've probably spotted it, chances are one of the biggest and most powerful technology companies in the history of the world has probably spotted it as well. yeah.

Seb: I would've thought they have it all wrapped up many years ago, in fact. yeah, although we like to say that,

Jack: but obviously a lot of stuff has been happening with ai. They seem to be, catching up maybe in many ways with a lot of the AI stuff. But yeah, that's a whole other conversation. So having those final conversations, what is that kind of presentation and pitch?

Like with, what are you doing in terms of, like you mentioned you've got the modeler, the template, you can go and download link in the show notes, go and check out what is that process like, and actually having that conversation, you trying to do it like going through that spreadsheet with a client and you building a kind of a pitch deck to go with that.

What's the actual kind like presentation for that final kind of stage to have that conversation?

Seb: Yeah, definitely. So it is at the stage where it's really about, present the findings and really the goal is to get the buy-in on, okay, let's, now like actually write this content. I guess to recap with this, pre-wiring concept, you've spoken to stakeholders.

So let's say you've got that spreadsheet, you've mapped everything out, you're then showing it, sharing it individually with those different stakeholders and saying, okay, this is what come up with and think we should do. Let's say, okay, it's the content manager, for example. You're showing them, okay, we're gonna write these blog posts because it's educational.

And you might be sharing, here are some topics that weren't covered and here are some existing pages that are doing a great job and here's some other existing pages that, either maybe need to be merged in because they're duplicated, or actually they just need some other optimization. Then you might be speaking to like sales, and sharing, here are the commercial pages and this is what you want to do with them.

And maybe you've got okay, we want to create some new landing pages for services which maybe deserve to have their own page. So then you can talk about is that viable? So you have those conversations individually with these, different stakeholders, make sure they're on board. You might then make some changes based on their feedback.

And then, yeah, you're coming into this, I guess the, the pitch really for all the work you've done and let's say you are now trying to get, the funding to go forward. It depends really on, I guess the, the customers, or the client or if you're in house, the companies, I guess their pro process.

So they might prefer slide decks. so if, so then slide deck, or it might be if it's a remote company, a lot of people are now doing these documents and async, I've been getting into this whole Amazon process, the six pager, where basically, people will, you'll have this like template, you'll give the pitch, basically.

You'll then have supporting data and, have people read that. and that works really well Lasy, I think. 'cause you can then share that beforehand. You have people comment and sometimes I run meetings where we'll just go through the comments from the client and then say, this is what you said.

And then you might have already made some changes. so yeah, it depends on the culture of the company. Really, I think the most important things to highlight would be you'd be going back to, what the goals. So that 12 month figure we are going to be driving, or we want to drive X amount of traffic to Z amount, Z whatever Americans, if there are any American listeners.

But yeah, there's that range of traffic we are looking to generate between this and this, and that might be your baseline. And then the middle kind of tier of traffic, which we anticipate will result in X amount of revenue or leads. And then again, that's a range. so that's like your headline. Then you can go into, this is how we're going to achieve it, which might be you've got, let's say the, let's say it's four different topics that you're writing about.

Then you might break it down by, types of pages. So there's a bit more technical. but yeah, the, the topics will be relevant to the business units in the company, and then the types of pages a bit more granular about how you're achieving it. It might also be at this stage that you know a bit about the technical issues on the website.

So then you can fill in those gaps as well. So it's okay, here's our baseline traffic, but we also need to factor in these things because they're holding us back. And then you might go into creating this plan. So let's say you've got like a hundred pages that you need to write to produce this.

Then, thinking about what's a reasonable investment to actually deliver that. That's then probably a conversation about the budgets that the client's got. And that might be, you might already know some of that information or you might have that after. so it really depends about where that client is and, what's their appetite to invest.

They might just be thinking about, we just need an assessment of what we actually need to do to compete in the market. Or they might be like, they might have money ready sitting aside, fingers crossed, ready to be said. Exactly. Hopefully that's the best case. and then you can say, maybe at that point you're saying, we need to write X amount of pages, per month.

We also need to allocate X amount of resource to, Technical, SEO having a, knowledge of who else is in the team is useful there. So you might know, okay, they've got an engineer, working on the website, but they might be tied up with projects. And then you might actually recommend, you might want to consider hiring someone, or actually maybe you need an external partner to do that work.

So you can then give some guidance. And really then if, if you're an external consultant, it's down to the client to decide how are they're going to spend that money. if you're working in house and it might be, it's cross-functional, because it might feed into the hiring plans of the business and, where are resources allocated.

Jack: Yeah, I like that. Having an awareness of internal resources and like requirements for external stuff as well. Even like you said, being an external consultant, being an agency or you're in-house. Being aware of what capacity there is for both resources, human people, and the money behind it as well.

I have done this a couple of times in my career and thankfully have stopped going in and going through a similar kind of process, mapping out this whole strategy, having this big conversation, right? We need to be creating, like we need to update 10 product pages. I'm making these numbers up.

Obviously 10 product pages a month, 15 blog posts a month, do this and this, and all the social media stuff and your email marketing needs to be this. And they're like, cool. We have one person. What's your, they're not writing 15, they've got other jobs as well. They're not just writing 15 blog posts a month for you.

How are you doing this? And like you said, getting people involved in that early stage, understanding where people are in that process, what their capacity is, what the resources available are. Maybe you can have that conversation. We had a conversation with the client the other day and Mark was talking to them and they were like, oh yeah, to do this stuff, we're going to hire a new marketing person to get involved in this process because we believe in this.

We have the money, we have the resources. But we want to have somebody who is dedicated to that process. We wanna have a content manager who's gonna be doing and driving that stuff, rather than Paul, little solo marketing manager, Jack, doing all of the stuff at once. Let's bring in another person who can really nail that stuff down.

And I love that kind of stuff where you can get that kind of really positive reinforcement and are willing to in willingness to invest, I guess in a way, like you said, hopefully clients just have a bunch of money, but maybe they don't.

Seb: Yeah. and that's it comes out of those conversations, getting the context of where the company is. You can speak to them initially and you might have one idea of really where that business is. but then the more you learn about it, the more useful it's because, it is, it comes back to a credibility point. So if you are pitching, okay, you need to spend six grand a month on this work, and it comes down to it and it's it's one person working on that.

And we actually don't have the budget, And it's how useful was the work? so yeah, it needs to then be balanced, but then it might also be, okay, here's the opportunity and actually we want to suggest investing in a small amount of that work because we want to get closer.

It's the context of where that client is compared to, the competition and obviously the resource.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. I think trying to go in straight with a hundred percent, like we need to do this. This is the only option kind of thing. If you do this, you're going to succeed. If you don't, you're going to fail.

It's not a good way to open a conversation with a clients, but doesn't work May maybe. It depends. Like most things. There we go. I was wondering and that will come up. I know, right? I think that's a new record, like how long it's been since we said it depends on an episode. And I know something a lot of our account managers talk about and our Director of Strategy, Jessica, has talked about as well, where you have, even if you have resources and stuff like that, it's going to be other stuff coming up.

For clients, for internal teams. And you could get end up with, cool, you've pitched all this stuff, you've written briefs, you've gone through this process. It's all working from your end of things. And then you realize you check back in with them the next quarter. Nothing's actually been written if you've done everything from your side of things, from an external point of view, but actually, oh no, we had to lay people off.

Oh, we've just not had time. Oh, we had to do another launch. Or they went on an event or somebody was on holiday. It could be a million different reasons. And then you realize the backlog of stuff starts building up and building up, oh, there's dev tickets that they need to sort out so they can't possibly implement all the technical stuff's.

OK, so you have a prioritization conversation here as well. And for me, I think that is a really nice kind of place to be, like you said, going in with this approach, going in with a model to forecast, predict, but not just assume we're going to achieve a hundred percent straight away, which I think a lot of people are guilty of in this industry of over promising and underdelivering.

Seb: Yeah. And, that's again, going back to why I do here's a range of the, size of the opportunity and I don't talk about, in April we're going to get this and maybe we're going to get that because who are we? It is like an external consultant.

Who are we to say, you are going to be creating this content without fail because we don't really have control over how the company, spends its resources. And you might even know what team they've got in place, because they've got to agree to it. And ultimately, they've got to make that decision on do they think it's worth investing after this process we've just talked about?

They'll have the data to support it and they can make that decision. And they might decide, actually, that you could recommend, you should spend this amount of money. The client might decide, actually, we're not too sure 'cause we've got this other investment, so we're going to spend a little bit less.

That's great 'cause you're still moving towards progress and then you can then work with that and then think about that process. But then the other things like, you don't know how easily it is to actually create some of these pages. So for example, you might need to have lots of product images.

And they might, you might find out actually we don't have those. We need to then go to the suppliers to get them. That adds them a convers conversation with the photographer and all that kind stuff. Exactly. Yeah, exactly. So you don't necessarily know some of these blockers until you get up to them.

And actually sometimes it's easier to just deal with those as they come. So you can say, we're going to write the brief for these batches of content. And then it's that partnership of working together to try and publish. in the good cadence and being upfront about potentially what resources you need.

When we talk about like these, templates, we might actually at that stage say, to do this, we need to have product images, we need to have a copywriter. We need to then obviously spend the time on doing the, getting actually into the weeds on the specific page and understanding the search intent in a lot more detail.

So then there's all these different things that contribute. So yeah, that's really the value that this work gives is, a bit more certainty of that to prepare for actually delivering.

Jack: Yeah, definitely. folks, go and check out Seb's blog posts. Like I said, I'll put a link in the show notes. Go and check out Atkinson Smith Digital. Congratulations, by the way, on, on the launch. And then going, starting your own business. Very cool stuff. How can people keep up with you? What you're up to the moment, what you're doing with. Atkinson Smith Digital and all the cool things you're doing in SEO?

Seb: Yeah. can get me, I'm mostly active on LinkedIn. I've got, that seems to be what most people say these days. Yeah. I've got Blue Sky as well, but I don't really log into it that much anymore. I showed a few memes on there. No one's reacting to them, so maybe 'cause they're not funny. I don't know. yeah, on the website, there's a few other articles.

I'm a little bit slow with writing, but I've just done another post around, thinking about AI, what do people need to do. So just a few takes on actually, I think a lot of businesses are actually doing a fair bit if they're doing SEO. so if you things there, but yeah, connecting on LinkedIn would be great.

If you've got any questions, yeah, just reach out to me there and, happy to answer.

Jack: Awesome. I'll put links for Seb's LinkedIn, go and check out the blog post, download the template, give this a try yourself. Thank you for joining me, mate. It's been a pleasure.

Seb: Thanks for having me.