Monday SEO’s - An Interview with Jack Bird, Our Content Operations Manager

This week, I thought we’d put the spotlight on one member of the Add People staff. When working with Add People, as the name suggests, you gain access to a Swiss Army knife of digital marketing professionals. All of whom have years of hands-on experience in helping businesses grow.

Jack Bird has been with Add People for seven years and is our go-to wizard for all things content. He has previously been featured in Forbes magazine and over the years has helped countless businesses achieve page one status online, as well as the Add People brand itself.

We asked him a few questions that would give you some boots on the ground insight and expertise as to how you can kickstart your SEO journey.

What Is A Keyword And What Makes A Good One?

Jack B: So, keywords are basically how people search for things on the internet. You’ve been using keywords your entire life without realising it. It’s a way of grouping similar searches people make.?

You might have found Add People by typing ‘SEO agency’ into Google. That’s a keyword we’ve targeted and optimised for, because we know people search for that term trying to find businesses like ours.

What makes a good keyword? There are many factors, but if I had two keywords, I’d compare them based on three things.

I’d look at the search volume first. We can use tools like Ahrefs and SEMrush to find out how much search volume a keyword has in any given month. The numbers these tools provide aren’t exact (only the search engines themselves know the exact searches a term gets), but they are close enough. Let’s call them “very, very educated guesses”.

We look at search volume because we want to make sure people are searching for the keyword we go after. Even that can be confusing, though. Something might get 3,000 searches a month, but the better option may only get 100 - and that’s where search intent comes in.

Let’s say that you run a small to medium-sized business that sells televisions directly to the consumer. You might boot up Ahrefs and think “Okay, we sell Samsung televisions and the term “Samsung” gets 10,000 searches a month - that’s loads! Let’s optimise for that.”

The bigger number isn’t instantly the better number, though.

The intent behind searching for “Samsung” on Google is far too broad. Someone could be looking up their stock prices, checking how it’s spelled, when the company was formed; all things that aren’t relevant to an SME that sells televisions.

Instead, you may want to target a keyword like “cheap HD TV's in Manchester”.

This captures the customer right near the end of their journey. They basically have their wallets in their hands, and that’s where you want them. Yes, this keyword may only get a fraction of searches compared to “Samsung”, but the conversion rate will be far higher - not to mention the competition far less fierce.

Relevance is also important to consider here. You might want to rank for “fencing” because you install fences in the Manchester area. However, type that in - and the first thing you see is a Wikipedia page for the combat sport fencing.?

Always search for your keyword yourself before committing to it, so you can make sure that you want to win that battle and the right kind of competition is appearing.

Speaking of competition, another important thing to consider is keyword difficulty.?

If you’re reading this and you’re on the internal SEO team for the Samsung brand, congratulations: you’re the only person that will rank number one for that keyword.?

For everyone else, you shouldn’t bother trying. That’s because the keyword difficulty is too high. This is a concept used primarily by Ahrefs which uses many factors (domain authority, content quality, etc) to judge how hard a keyword is to rank for, on a scale of 0-100. The higher it is, the harder it is to rank for.

Branded terms like Samsung and Google are going to be very difficult to rank number one for because it means you’re outranking the companies themselves. Even non-branded terms can have high keyword difficulty, so always check this metric.

Then, if your keyword has good enough search volume, the search intent is right and the keyword difficulty is achievable - you’re onto a winner.

(Want to know what makes a keyword difficulty achievable? Let us know and we can cover that in a later issue.)

Does Social Media Impact SEO?

Jack B: When people talk about SEO, they’re often talking about the actions of it: optimisation, keyword research, internal linking, etc. Don’t let that all distract you from what the ultimate goal is, which is to get traffic to a website and for that traffic to convert.

What conversion looks like depends on the business. If it’s an e-commerce business, success looks like people adding items to baskets and hitting ‘Buy Now’. If it’s a lead generation business, success looks like people filling in a contact form or calling up to arrange a service.

So, while social media doesn’t have a linear impact on SEO and rankings (Google doesn’t directly care if your Instagram account has half a million followers), that following can bring more people to your website and build your brand.

That’s important because it can take many touchpoints and moments of exposure to a brand before people feel comfortable converting.

Think of it as like a boxing match.

That funny post on X, that’s a jab. That informative newsletter on Linkedin, that’s a jab. That guide for your customers on YouTube, that’s a jab. We’re softening them up to us.

Then, when they see your website and all your lovely products and services and copy - that’s your right hook. That’s your conversion, and that’s what it’s all about.

Your jabs (social media) can make your right hook (website) even more likely to win the fight (convert the user). That conversion is what your SEO strategy should be all about, and that’s how social media can help us get there.

On a completely unrelated note, here is a great book you may like.

How Do I Improve My Site Speed?

Jack B: People can easily get overwhelmed by technical SEO. I don’t blame them. That’s because there are so many different things that can impact it, like your structured data validation, render-blocking resources, robots.txt management, your HTTP/2 implementation and your - let's stop it there.

You have my word, I’ll keep it simple. If it’s over ten syllables, it’s out of here!

In fact, one of the biggest technical SEO crimes I see committed most often is the crime of not optimising images.?

People like images, search engines like images; but if you take a photo with your phone and whack it straight on your website without compressing it, you’re making a big mistake.

A typical phone photo is about four or five megabytes, but pictures don’t need to be that big on your website. Let’s say you put your last ten photos in your phone on your website, that could be 50 megabytes of data to load.

Studies show that 57% of people leave a website if it takes longer than three seconds to load. If your images alone are over 50 megabytes, then you’re relying on your customer to have a great internet connection to fully load your site within that precious three second window.?

Instead, you want to use websites like TinyJPG to optimise and compress your images before you upload them. Websites like these use a technique called lossless compression, which doesn’t impact image quality but removes unnecessary data.

I’ve done this for many of our client’s websites over the years, often taking images from as large as three megabytes to a fraction of that. When you do that to multiple images across multiple pages, you can really start to see the benefits.?

Remember how much it annoys you when you’re on your phone or laptop and a website is slow to load. Doesn’t make you want to hang around there and buy with them, does it? Your customers will think the same.?

So, compress your images before you upload them and you’ll help with a huge part of technical SEO, which is site speed.?

Pro tip: If you want to see what your current site speed is like, there’s this great (and free!) tool from Google which I love.

What Does SEO Success Look Like?

Jack B: I touched on this a little in the social media question, where I said success is unique to each business - but there is one north star that every business follows.

We may be walking different paths, but that one body in the sky illuminates us all the same; every action of ours, intended to draw us closer and closer to its warm embrace.

That north star is return on investment, and that is what SEO success should look like for every business.

Your investment may be financial or time itself (most likely both), whether you’re working with an agency or doing it in-house. ROI means all that is worth it. It means the juice is worth the squeeze.

If you’re spending ￡1,000 on an SEO agency that delivers you ￡8,000 worth of revenue a month, that is a good return on investment. If you’re spending 30 hours a week of your time on SEO and it’s having no noticeable impact on your bottom line, that is a poor return on investment.?

Are you happy that what you’re getting out is worth what you’re putting in? If not, then you might not consider your SEO a success right now. Don’t lose hope.

It’s always upsetting to speak to potential new clients and hear them losing hope in their business because things aren’t going well at the moment. Sometimes it can only take a few tweaks to get you ranking higher, bringing a few more customers in and making a little more profit.

Stick with it. You’ll struggle to find a bigger advocate for SMEs than us and we want to see you succeed - whether that’s as part of the Add People group, or doing your own thing.?

So, what does SEO success look like? You could say it’s traffic, you could say it’s links, you could say it’s copywriting that sounds nice and has a good pun in it.

The truth is, it’s all about a return on investment.

Mental investment, financial investment, the investment of time when you want to spend it with the family that you’re doing it all for.

If what you’re getting out of your SEO is worth what you’re putting in, you’re succeeding. If you want to get more out of your SEO, well, hello, nice to meet you - may I introduce you to a company called Add People?

Thank you Jack for your time and for the cup of tea this morning! See you on the next project.

Until next week,

Oliver Eardley