Cemoh 139: SEO Expert Maddison Ryan From The Digital Hub

Simon Dell (00:01) Welcome to the Cemoh Marketing Podcast with me, your host, Simon Dell. I've been battling influenza A for the past week, so if I cough through this, I apologize profusely, which is a terrible thing to do in a podcast. We'll get all the introductions out of the way first. As I say, my name is Simon Dell. I'm the CEO of Cemoh, C-E-M-O-H.com. We are Australia's largest fractional marketing business.

And if you want to find out more about us, cemoh.com, you can find me on LinkedIn. If you like listening to this, we would love if you could write a nice review about us on Spotify or iTunes or somewhere like that. And yeah, if you're also interested in potentially being a guest on the podcast, we'd love to hear from you. Please reach out to me.

Today I am talking to a very, very smart person, Madison Ryan from Your Digital Hub. We will do a quick introduction in a minute, but first of all, Madison, welcome to the show.

Maddison (01:11) Yeah, thanks for having me. Good to be here.

Simon Dell (01:13) Now you are, you're an expert when it comes to search engine optimization. Would that be a fair assessment of your skillset? So, and, look, we've obviously known each other about six months, about a year now. And I think one of the things, one of the core reasons for having you on the show, because when we talk about

Maddison (01:24) I yeah, we have about 10 years experience, so let's go with that.

Simon Dell (01:43) SEO and the snake oil salesmen that are out there in the in the world of SEO in a minute, but Your background was five years spent with American Express. Is that right?

Maddison (01:56) Yeah, exactly. And I suppose how I started out was a lot of test and learn myself. my dad had a small plumbing business and back in the day he used to just test and learn things on the site and everything was sort of, you know, no more newspapers. Back when you used to advertise, you know, and get those clippings in the newspapers we had to go digital. And so that's sort of how I learned SEO and my love for SEO came about.

Simon Dell (02:25) Cool, cool. We'll talk about the AMEX experience in a minute, but I think it's probably fair to say SEO has been one of those marketing tactics that sort of underpinned marketing growth for probably the last 20 years. And I think it's one of those ones that is probably the least well understood by the average marketer. Would that be a fair thing to say?

Maddison (02:30) Mm. Yeah, I think there are so many facets of SEO. You know, there's new news coming out every week, every day, so it's hard to keep up and you hear that someone tells you to do one thing and then you're trying to optimize for another thing. So yeah, I think there's a lot of noise out there and it's just sort of focusing on what's going to sort of get you the right traffic and at the end of the day, conversions.

Simon Dell (03:15) And it used to be very easy, I say very easy, but it used to be quite easy to game early on in the early days of Google. And that sort of created this idea that it was a dark heart, that there was a lot of people gaming the system and doing things to people's websites that...Google didn't like and it was the wild west early on wasn't it?

Maddison (03:53) Yeah exactly, think gone are the days where there was sort of that mentality of the keyword stuffing and you used to put the keyword in the heading, the title, sprinkle it throughout the page and then you know hope for the best or copy and paste a bunch of location pages and then you know pray that it's going to rank. I think it's changed a lot since then, you've got to sort of work harder, work towards different channels and I'm sure we'll go into all of that.

Simon Dell (04:19) Yeah, yeah, look, I remember years back doing some SEO copywriting and you're right, you had to have the keyword in the first sentence and the last sentence and 4 % of copy had to be, it was very, very, very strange. let's just take a sort of step back in.

And, I guess one of the biggest challenges is if you're working for a company like American Express, we're talking, you know, multinational global finance business here. what, how, how do you, how do you do SEO with a company like that? I mean, that must be, that must be sort of, you know, staring at this giant thing in front of you, wondering about where you start and you know, how does, how do you get your head around that?

Maddison (05:14) Yeah, it was. It was sort of a bigger strategy and I think it comes down to your audience and going back to those fundamentals. You know, it's a big company with different products and services. So looking at those different products and services separately, I think there are different strategies for SEO within that and it's a broader sort of play. So, you know, and focusing on probably the quick wins first there. You know, like you said, there's just so much you could do but...

there's only a small team, what's going to get you those quick wins faster? But yeah, like you said, where do you start? think we had a whole team, so it does help. But yeah, you've got to look at where you can start and what you can make traction on rather than trying to do everything because it's such a massive website and it's global.

And yeah, and you've got to look at what the global team is doing as well match it up to Australia So everyone sort of has to work hand-in-hand developers with the SEO team The brand even you know brand is playing a bigger play in SEO now, you know, that's really a Big part of the strategy at the moment

Simon Dell (06:28) I guess that's the challenge with a company like that is you can't just make a wholesale change one morning because you feel like it. You've probably got to go and get a certain amount of people to approve things before you can go and make changes.

Maddison (06:42) Yeah, huge compliance, you know. I'd love to have just gone in there and edited some descriptions and things. But, yeah.

Simon Dell (06:49) How do you judge success in an organization like that? Is it simply, you you're sort of looking at the organic traffic to the website, you're measuring yourself against that. What's a win, you know, what was a win for you in an organization like that?

Maddison (07:12) Yes, so you're 100 % right. So the organic traffic would be the first thing. I think then drilling right down to the conversion, so the sales, the credit card sales would have been what we were looking at and then all the other services and products. You know, I think it's important that you can get all that traffic to the website but then if it's not set up in a way, the UX isn't right, we're not converting people, so what do we need to look at there? So you really have to look at the holistic reporting and so we had a bunch of tools for that.

Simon Dell (07:46) And what are some of the ways that you can, you can get people to convert better? Because as you say, you know, which is a very valid point is getting people to the website is just half the battle to getting them then to, you know, buy the credit card or fill the form in or pick the phone up and all those kinds of things. What is, what's driving the consumer to make that purchase? there, is there, are there some common kind of things that the consumer reacts better to.

Maddison (08:18) think it's a lot of test and learn and it's looking at your site again and seeing how the UX is, know, have you got the buttons in the right places, have you got the call to action set up, is it on mobile, is it easy to view, has it got that desktop responsiveness. And then again going back to fundamentals, so what does your audience want to see. I think there's that perspective around SXO now which is that search experience optimisation.

It's where SEO essentially marries up with that experience on the page and then the conversion. So it's all those three things together and I think it is bit of test and learn and seeing what works. I know people use the recording software to view how users are on the site, seeing what they prefer better, is there a huge pop-up in the way. So there could be things that you're missing. And you you think the site is great and it looks amazing. It's got all these banners and pop-ups and things, but at the end of the day it might not be what your potential customer would like to see.

Simon Dell (09:26) Yeah, I guess the challenge there is that in a world of, I was gonna say, let's try and find the politest way to say this, but in financing credit cards, it's not the most engaging content. I'd imagine a lot of the content on those websites is quite functional. People are looking for something specific.

Maddison (09:42) Hmm.

Simon Dell (09:55) Must be hard just trying to, it must be hard just trying to track to see if they're actually, you know, to understand if they're engaged or not.

Maddison (10:04) Yeah exactly, mean it's not I suppose a sexy product and I think that's where the testing comes in with you know different button colours, different carousels, seeing what pictures people react with better. So there's a lot of that A-B testing just to see what user reacting to more and that comes down to yeah a lot of the UX.

I guess on the plus side though with a brand like that, you've got at least a decent amount of traffic to be able to do A-B testing. You know, because obviously there is a lot of traffic. How do you sort of do that if you're working with a smaller client that doesn't have that, you know, doesn't have the luxury of those thousands of visits a day? Is there a way that you can...you know, test things as well without having all that traffic.

Maddison (11:06) That's a good question. think even just asking a colleague or someone external to your business even to have a go at using the website, watching how they use it without making any comments and then you can get some insights from there or testing out the journey saying, can you try and buy this product on my site and then watch to see how they look for it, how they find it. So if you've got no traffic at all, that's one way.

You know it might be worth doing a social test, some traffic to your page to get that data and then you can sort of find out what's happening there and get some insights as well.

Simon Dell (11:46) So my understanding of SEO in the last sort of 15, 20 years is that there's obviously, Google is taking into account a lot of different things when it's looking at the success of a site and how to rank it compared to its competitors and things like that. And obviously the number everyone used to use was this idea that Google was measuring 200 different things. Is that still the case? Are they still looking at that amount of things or is it more? Are there some that perhaps are more important than others?

Maddison (12:29) So now I think it's more about diversifying your channel besides the website so that you can sort of dominate on the SERPs. So it's looking at channels like say Reddit for example or Pinterest or your LinkedIn and having that total strategy so that you can rank in different ways. I think most recently we saw that the Reddit traffic that was showing up on Google was declining sort of since January.

So I mean what does that mean? Does it mean let's stop commenting on there as an authority source? Well no, not necessarily. I think again it comes back to does that sort of channel work for your business? If not, maybe it's good to look at something else. You know, it's not just doing it for the sake of doing it. I think it comes back to the vanity ranking where you just rank for the sake of ranking your page. But at the end of the day, you know, if it's not going to get those people in and it's not, you don't have that authority, yeah, it's not relevant.

Simon Dell (13:30) Is it, yeah, okay. It's one of those things that, know, I think every month or every few months, someone sort of says there's something else, Google adjusts something or looks at, you know, promoting a different area or something like that. It's super hard, obviously. It's super hard for people to keep up with this kind of stuff. How do you, how do you keep up with it?

Maddison (14:02) Yeah, that's a great question. think, you know, and I get to some clients all the time, it's again just focusing on what is your audience, who are they, what are the types of conversations you want to be having. I think the branding again, so just you want people to be typing in sort of Nike best running shoes rather than just best running shoes. You know, just really don't get bogged down by the latest things that people tell you. If you're writing content that's relevant and authentic and you've got something in there that's say a personal story or something that the AI LLMs don't know, then you're going to be making sure that you're heading in the right direction. I think it's all, yeah, there's a lot to keep up with and people are trying to do a bit of everything but if you just focus in on who you are, what your brand is and who you're speaking to, you can't go wrong there.

Simon Dell (14:55) Well, that's that's another sort of follow up question there about content and you know, is the challenge that you do need to be producing lots of content? it volume? Is it, as you say, it something that, you know, less content, but more authentic content? Is there sort of a nice area that you can go, okay, well, that's what I should be doing in the middle there.

Maddison (15:27) Yeah, I don't think there's a quantity. It's probably the right content and is it what people want to see. It's not sort of just generating a random AI article because at the moment there's so, so much content being fed to Google and you know, it sort of needs to work out what is relevant that's going to show up. I think again, you know, types of content diversifying, trying different channels with content, you know, LinkedIn, Pinterest, Reddit if it's relevant, even industry blogs, sort of working with PR companies. I think there are organic ways to be featured as well. If your content, you know, is good quality, there are going to be people that want to link back to it organically. So there might be, you know, a PR company that sort of reaches out or uses your content because it is original rather than you just sprinkling whatever onto the internet.

Simon Dell (15:58) Hmm. It's been very bizarre in the fact that sometimes we've written on our website, maybe there's two or three blogs that we've written or how-to articles, something like that, that have somehow managed to rank number one. We produced an article about three months ago about TikTok shops, about how they were about to arrive in Australia.

Maddison (16:31) Mm.

Simon Dell (16:53) And somehow that has managed to rank number one in every variation of questions about TikTok shops in Australia. And we're just getting all this traffic around TikTok shops. That's a challenge for me because I look at that and I go, well, that's not part of our core business. We've produced an article like that in terms of an educational piece to help out people who are essentially our target market, is marketing managers or senior marketing people, those kinds of things. Is that helping me? Have we created this beast of a high ranking article for no reason? How is that sort of adding to the bigger picture of our organic traffic?

Maddison (17:50) think at the end of the day, if it's not bringing in your ideal customers or clients, it might be worth focusing on the articles that are more better suited to your audience. It's all well and good to sort of get it ranking and then have all that traffic. But I think at the end of the day, if you can't see any conversions off the back of it, well, it might not be as relevant for your business.

Simon Dell (18:16) Yeah, that's probably, yeah, I mean, that's a key thing for us is that I haven't, yeah, I genuinely haven't seen a conversion coming off it, or if I have, I haven't been able to draw a direct link to the conversion to, and yeah, okay, it's one of those ones where, you know, it feels like there's a vanity element with it. There's a lot of traffic, there's a lot of clicks, but it's not really doing us, doing us any favours.

Maddison (18:47) Yeah. Yeah, exactly. And I think we're seeing that a lot now with, you know, the zero-click rankings with the AI overviews showing up. So just because you're sort of showing up there as well and people aren't clicking through as well. you know, if that content's not even something that you're going to potentially get conversions off, yeah, it's not probably the right direction.

Simon Dell (19:17) Talk to us about how AI is having an impact on on SEO as well. You mentioned, you know, there's a lot of AI generated content out there and you know blogs and on Excuse me and all those kind of things One of the questions obviously a lot of people must ask you is how do I get? Chat GPT to be recommending me or how do I get other AI tools to be recommending me? Is there an easy way to do that? What's the approach for something like that?

Maddison (19:54) Yeah, great question. I think there are a few things to think about when ranking in AI search engines. So the first one would be content again. So looking at your semantic tags, so the headings, making sure they're all up to date, making sure the content is relevant. I think again, if you're commenting on forums or using sort of those kind of channels, you might have a chance as well because they're all interrelated. Looking again at the technical side. So is your site up to scratch from a technical health perspective? Have you got schema on there? Is it optimized for mobile and desktop? Again, that experience, you know, is it a good experience? So when you have all of these things together, along with sort of authority, any backlinks, you know, you'll have that chance to sort of show up. And I think now it's about quality, not quantity. you know, not having a thousand backlinks if they don't mean anything, it's the quality you know you might have more chance in showing up in the featured snippets or in AI so...

Simon Dell (21:00) Okay, obviously, know, SEO, as I said, right at the start has been the backbone of marketing tactics for a long, long time. And obviously I can't see it going, I can't see it going away anytime soon, but there seems to be a shift that maybe Google is, maybe Google will gradually lose its dominance in terms of these AI platforms. Do you... Do you feel that's the way it might go or do you think Google is strong enough to sort of hang on to this? You know, onto this, I guess, which is, know, this has been the golden goose that's kind of, you know, allowed them to become such a huge company over the years.

Maddison (21:49) Yeah, I do think the Googles and the Bing are losing their sort of traffic to chat GPT and other AI sources. I have friends as well that just say, I only want to use chat GPT to do my searches from now on. So the mentality is definitely changing. I don't think Google is going to lose out, though. think they're adapting. Recently, yesterday they announced the March update. So I think with that, they've said again, they're going to be looking at relevant content but I also think I have a feeling they're going to make changes more in terms of AI and adding more AI search into the sort of current search engine so it could be changing and it could act more like a sort of chat GPT type you know I think we have to stay tuned because I don't think they're sort of giving up just yet.

Simon Dell (22:42) They seem to be, sometimes when I look at it, they seem to be a little bit confused themselves. They're sort of finding their own way in the dark to a certain degree. And there's obviously, I think earlier this year, was a of talk about how the...

Maddison (22:49) Hmm.

Simon Dell (23:05) they'd caused some issues I think within the search rankings and you know, sometimes it wasn't a very good experience. I think that was where a lot of people pointed out that, you know, the results weren't particularly good. And that was starting to damage their reputation a little bit. Do you kind of, do you think they've maybe misstepped earlier on and maybe they're still trying to work out what they're doing in that space now?

Maddison (23:32) Yeah, I think they sort of had that monopoly and people didn't like that, you know, they sort of had control over everything. So people like, you know, the bings and those kind of search engines now are, I wouldn't discount them as a search engine. I can see more and more traffic sort of on those channels for some of my clients. You know, people are diversifying and jumping off Google or they're going to social, for example, and testing out some advertising instead. So I think, yeah, they did lose a bit of sort of trust and people are moving towards different channels now. But yeah, it's still very highly sort of used platform search engine because I look at results of my clients and I still see loads and loads of impressions and traffic on search console. So it's definitely not going away as a top search engine.

Simon Dell (24:24) Yeah, yeah. Okay. Last question for you today. You know, there are a lot of people, they, you know, they want to, they want SEO to be a key part of their business. But, you know, you mentioned right at the start, I think, yeah, was it your father who was a plumber? You know, those, those small businesses I've seen, I've seen many businesses over the years that have become very reliant on you know, localized traffic like that. Is there a couple of things that those small businesses, those trade-based, small retailers can do to ensure that they're appearing in relevant search results?

Maddison (25:05) Yeah, I think there are few things. So probably focus on that evergreen content and so content that can be around all the time. You know, again, adding your fresh perspective to the content. Probably trying out different channels. So if you haven't tested something out before, it's definitely worth getting on socials or engaging in a forum, trying a bit of PR. I think it is a bit of test and learn. So yeah, definitely testing, testing out different channels I would say. You know, maybe stuff like posting organically on social, you've been posting and posting but it's just not working, it might be time to like a paid strategy there.

Simon Dell (25:54) Is there, and I guess, reviews, your Google reviews, is that still a key thing for local businesses?

Maddison (26:03) Yeah, Google reviews are still important. think optimizing your Google business profile, you know, it's getting harder and harder, I think, to show up in that aspect as well. But making sure your Google Business profile is up to date, you're continuing to post on there, you've got photos, fresh images of the business. And yeah, just popping in there every now and again to make sure it's up to date if you've got sort of a physical shop or store.

Simon Dell (26:31) Okay, thank you very much for your time today. If anyone wants to reach out to you, ask you any question, maybe engage your services, what's the easiest way for them to find you?

Maddison (26:39) So you can find me on LinkedIn under Madison Ryan, otherwise thedigitalhub.com.au is where you can find me.

Simon Dell (26:50) Awesome. All right, Madison, thank you very much for your suggestions and your ideas today. Much appreciated.

Maddison (26:56) Thanks so much. Good to chat.