SearchNorwichXL Preview: SEO talks from Arnout Hellemans and Brendan Bennett

0:00Jack Chambers-Ward: Hello and welcome to this very special episode of Search with Candor. I am your host, as always, Jack Chambers-Ward, and it's another Search Norwich XL preview episode. We're building up to the 24th of September and you can expect a few more episodes hyping up and discussing the details of our upcoming conference. I'm going to highlight two of the speakers that will be joining us at our first ever conference, like I said, coming up in September in less than a month at the end of September. I'm going to talk about Arnout Hellmans. I'm going to talk about Brendan Bennett. And Arnout is somebody who I've known for a long time in SEO.

0:38Jack Chambers-Ward: I've been following him longer than I've been hosting this podcast and been a part of Candor. Arnout is someone who is always pushing the boundaries, trying new things, doing cool things that I don't think anyone else in the industry is doing. And I'm going to highlight a talk from Arnout that he did at a previous Search Norwich event. I'm going to give you that full talk in full so you can check that out. And it's a brilliant talk about how to get the most out of SEO without having to pay for tools. And it's a similar theme to his upcoming talk at Search Norwich Excel. Arnaut is one of those people who is able to take seemingly simple and basic things like Google Search Console, for example, and really get the most out of it to make impactful strategic business decisions.

1:27Jack Chambers-Ward: It sounds like a very fluffy way of saying it, but genuinely Arnout is one of the best people in the industry for this. And that is exactly what his talk at Search and Search Excel is all about. As Mark mentioned last week, it's about finding data and insights from the search results themselves. From the SERPs, there is way more information, data and useful things that you can be using, but nobody really pays attention to it. But it's a free resource, right? And that's what I'm going to be talking about coming up in Search Norwich Excel coming up next month. This one talks about how to use Google Search Console and some other free tools to do some brilliant SEO work.

2:08Jack Chambers-Ward: And I'm also highlighting Brendan Bennett, who is our principal SEO consultant here at Canada, who was on the podcast a couple of weeks ago and will be on our Future of Search and SEO panel coming up at Search Norwich Excel as well. And this is talking about client communication is talking about client management, project management, and how to deal with that as an SEO, how to communicate with clients, how to understand and translate and all that kind of stuff. It's a brilliant, brilliant talk by Brendan, again, did a previous Search Norwich event a couple of years ago now. So two talks coming up, one from Arnout, then the second one from Brendan.

2:47Jack Chambers-Ward: And both of those guys will be at Search Norwich Excel. Like I said, Arnout is our first talk, our opening talk just after 11 a.m. and Brendan will be on our Future of Search and SEO panel as well. Off the top of my head, I think that starts at three o 'clock. I believe that's the correct timing. Don't quote me on that. I will share the proper timings and links for everything in the show notes. So go and check them out in the video description down below. Without any further ado, here is Arnett Hellman's talk about using free tools, including Google Search Console, to get the most out of your SEO.

3:24How to work on your SEO without paying for tools. I could also have named this how to do SEO the Dutch way. Because we're very cheap ass people. There's a reason for that. There's a saying going Dutch, right? The other person doesn't want to pay. So I don't like paying for stuff. and you'll notice. So who am I? I mean Jesus, Mark called me a legend. I was flabbergasted. I think you can never say that about anyone. Maybe, but I would never call me a legend. But yeah, apparently. So little quiz. Three pillars of SEO. First First one, anyone? Any takers? Links on content. Links! Who was that? Well done.

4:21Second one, content. So what's the third one?

4:30Jack Chambers-Ward: Candidate. So if you have the content, if you have the links and you don't appear, what is wrong? The indexability or the UX, right? The technical part indeed. So I try to find tools that can fix all of these problems, right? But for free. First one, who uses GA4? Who loves it? I do.

5:06So how do you use it for SEO? Question? Yeah go ahead. You don't use it for SEO? And how? Low performing pages. I hate bounce rate because nobody understands what bounce rate is. You still find it out of J4. No, luckily, yeah, but Jesus, don't look at bounce rate, right? I'll tell you why. Because if you look at bounce rate, it essentially means that there was only one hit in the database, and no more hits. Right? Okay, so this is really helpful. Who of you is tracking this? tracking the page title of their 404 page in GA. Anyone? Come on! This is a mandatory thing to do. It is! Because you're screwing users.

6:10Actual users end up on a 404. Right? So this is a report. Luckily I don't run the PPC for this client but, have a look at that, 1400 users on mobile got a 404 and came from Google paid search.

6:37For fuck's sakes. So what is it? Page title, page path, query string session source medium simple report just set an alert or look at it regularly fix it and you know what if you're an agency and you do this for your client you're a really good agency because you make them look good so what do you do you redirect the ones right and if it's paid you fix That's it. Easy peasy, lemon squeezy. On we go. Okay, who uses search console? Most used tool, right? How many of you uses the interface, and solely the interface? One? Multiple? Stop doing that. On the 18th of August 2017, Google said we're making a little privacy change.

7:45So whenever you filter something in the interface, we might leave out more. That more is a lot. So there we have it. There is the free tool that will solve it. There's a Google Sheets add-in that will fix this. It's called Search Analytics for Sheets. If you put less than 25 ,000 rows from the API, it's free. You don't need to pay anything. So you just select it. There you go, the country. I don't do filtering. I just get the raw data because it's more important to me. and then you request the data and there you go you got everything nicely sorted right so what are the big tips when using this you don't filter the requests on the API just take query and page and now you've got the most the biggest data set you can get from the API you can combine keyword and landing page something you can't do in the interface, which is an absolute nightmare because you can't see cannibalization, you can't see loads of things, right?

9:07But if you link it up to Google, like Lucre Studio, Data Studio, whatever they call it nowadays, what you can do then is set up very advanced filters, filtering out the brand terms and only taking certain patterns, right? which will give you amazing reports. Anybody has a bigger site or wants to do more than 25 ,000 rows? Yeah? Probably you know this, don't use the native connector in Google Data Studio or Google Looker, whatever they call it, because if you do, you filter on the request which means you get less data because they take their privacy stuff out. Use an API with your own data store and pull it every day.

10:06Or use branch tools. I love this tool. It's built on your own how do you call it, it's built on your own data BigQuery, which you can make any report. But the cool thing is they pre-populated reports, so you can overlay Google updates, you can do all kinds of stuff, and I think it's about 30 euros a month.

10:35Now, some of you I spoke about, the really secret sauce, the biggest link index that is free. I bet this is bigger than Ahrefs, than SEMrush, than Moz, than all the other tools out there, right? So what do you do? How many people know that you can import all of your verified Google Search Console sites? Yeah, raise your hands. Quite a few. And when have you learned this? Was this four years ago, three years ago, two years ago, one year ago? Four years ago? I did. I have been talking about this for ages because I think it's absolutely brilliant step. So you just click on login with Google, take your Google account that has access to all the search console and then on you go.

11:34Then here's a report that supposedly doesn't exist anymore but it You can basically get all of your backlink data for your website with all the response codes that the Bing bot has encountered. You can get the 400s, you can actually see which page links to that 404. These are features you normally have to pay for in the paid tools, but it's right here. So you get broken links ending on 404 or 500. I'll share the slides because this is the page that supposedly doesn't exist anymore, but if you fill in your full URL with HTTPS, it will give you this data, if you verify the site. Little trick. I didn't know it worked, because this was an old deck, and I tried it again and it still works.

12:37Pretty damn cool. Happy about that. So, more free backlink data. You see, I don't really do a lot of link building for my own domain, but I actually got 33. Real organic links, haven't paid anything for it, but it will give you anchor text, the page that links to it, not the domain. Google search console gives you a domain but this will actually give you the page the anchor text but more importantly you can do this that's me the second one is Bastion Grimm the third one is Aleda Solis right and I can see backlinks for all three of them and you can do this for any site on the web

13:29Now that's fucking powerful right? I mean honestly, I was like blown away when they said they would give this. They told me in 2017 I guess in Boston, I spoke with one of the guys and they said, just wait a minute, we'll fix our Bing Webmaster Tools and you'll be amazed. Keyword research, literally to up the actual searches. Now, use these searches? No, because Bing is tiny, Big G is massive. But it will tell you about the search behavior, so you can benchmark where keyword data are. I think this is better than using Google Keyword Planner or a lot of the other things. Who has used this? Raise of hands.

14:24Has anybody used playback tools like Hotjar? This is the free one. It's completely fucking free. I don't need to pay anything for it. You can load this, you'll get heat maps, session replays, unique user insights, frustration metrics. It's all in there, and it's free. You can just use it. Like, why would you pay for a tool if it's free? That was my Dutch voice.

14:58And here's another one. I get so frustrated with people that look at spreadsheets, that look at tools. For fuck's sake, just use the SERP. Think about the Autocomplete. what your wife or better half do a fucking search. You'll be amazed. They're stupid. Right? I mean, the amount of times I'm standing next to my wife, I'm going, ah, you might want to do it in a different way, right? This is not the best way to Google or to search or whatever. But that is the attention we need to grab. we need to understand their journey right we can find pretty much anything on the web using search modifiers or whatever but they can't and really pay attention to the layout if the SERP serves images and you're trying to rank with the video or with a blog post you're not gonna get the click if they have forums and you try to do that with a blog post it's very unlikely you'll get it right so it's all in the SERP if they show shopping results you need to have a shopping feed to be able to get in it's a very simple one and last but not least the people also ask like apparently there's a tool and I'm pretty in love with that tool, I must admit.

16:41But before that tool, I tried gaming it by adding plus onto my email address to get more searches. But those fuckers, they fixed that. And what I did, because I'm cheap, right? But I've been using People Also Asked. What you do is you click open one of the people also asked and more will join This is a great way to do free user research. You can map that into different articles answer those questions It's the best way right Okay, now I'm gonna get into the handy Chrome extensions who uses Chrome Everyone, come on. Okay, so there is one thing. This is free, but you pay for some of these with your surfing data.

17:42Right? So be aware. I mean, I'm okay with that because I think the search data can have my data because I stand out so much different from other people, so I'm fine with it. But be aware of that. First one SEOquake, been using this for ages. Actually the company behind it is SEMrush so all your data goes straight into SEMrush. But hey, if you want to use this it's easy to download a whole SERP. So just set it to 100, click download SERP, you'll have all the URLs ranking for that. You can do loads more so that's the link, download the SERPs, basic on-page data like Open Graph, Twitter, Twitter cards, all these kind of things, right?

18:35Why is it not working? Okay. Core SERP Vitals. Who has heard about Core Web Vitals? Right? PageSpeed. But the cool thing here is as you can see if you install this extension and it's made by a developer from Brighton and I don't think he sells his data so I didn't ask but I don't think so but the cool thing is it will give you the Core Web vital scores for all users on that particular page not domain level but page level so you know what you should be aiming at.

19:20Alright, there we go. View rendered source, who knows this one? A little bit of technical SEO you should. It basically looks at the initial response, this is more advanced so sorry before saying this. But it's the initial response and then it looks at the JavaScript rendered one. so it's a great way to debug stuff is like my page title is not being picked up or I have problems getting my pages indexed etc etc that's it redirect path a great one as well I think they do sell or at least use this oh I mean within In time, cool. Great to easily check the response code. So you can see 301s, 303s, 304s, 404s, whatever.

20:19Now, trick question, who knows about Kapo?

20:25Not a lot of people know this, but if you change the order in your head, It can have a massive impact on load times. Adi Osmani, who is a Google advocate for the SiteSpeed team, built this little neat tool that integrates with the web developer console. In the JavaScript console you'll see what you can change and which order you need to change your head into having a way faster response and a way faster load time. It's quite advanced but fun. Great and simple, up to change your head in order. I think I'm almost there. So this one just came in. I didn't know about this one. but if you have multiple websites you need to keep track on when they expire or when your SSL expires who has had problems with their SSL that is quite embarrassing like I had it with my own website so a client said I was doing your website but I got this thing this SSL your websites insecure now you can You can go to free domain alerts, it's built by a tool called Little Warden, and it will give you exactly when they will expire, and they will send you a message when it's about to expire.

22:02So just set it up, fire and forget, get an email if it's about to expire a month before, you can renew it, done.

22:12There we go. One more, one more. Almost there. Almost there Mark. So the crawling tools. There is a crawler where you can pay for with your attention. It's called Alpha Crawler. It's free to use. You sometimes get an ad. But if you're starting out as an SEO consultant, it gives you pretty much the same results as a lot of the other crawling tools. The second one, if you need to do it you can just sign up have a 14-day trial get the stuff crawled. I would recommend getting it but if you want to do it for free this is the way. I don't think they fixed the thing with the plus so if you have a Gmail address you can add a plus one or a plus two.

23:04Screaming Frog, if you have a smaller site under 500 pages, is free to use.

23:16Please connect with me. I love helping people. I love answering questions. Don't be afraid to ask. Whether it's tonight, whether it's through a DM on LinkedIn or Twitter or Mastodon or loads of other places. I'm always happy to help, as some of you might know. And that's it. And then I think we can go to questions.

23:43Jack Chambers-Ward: So you see what I mean, right? Arnaut is just brilliant for that sort of thing. His insights and the way he communicates things and the way he's able to use seemingly simple tools that we all know to actually do some really cool pushing the boundary kind of stuff is exactly why I love Arnaut. And that's exactly why we've booked him for a search knowledge Excel. Now, here is Brendan's talk, and I'll leave you with this, with a great talk about communication, about common frustrations in SEO, and how to deal with them. And like I said, Brendan will be joining us for our Future of Search and SEO panel coming up at Search Knowledge Excel.

24:19Jack Chambers-Ward: Here's Brendan's talk from a previous Search Knowledge event.

24:26You may have known what this talk was as you came here. If you were expecting about 20 salacious minutes of me like ragging on clients and naming and shaming I'm afraid part of my title was truncated here So surprise that isn't what this talk really is I'm sorry if you got click baited here. I'm basically just practicing what I've learned from a hundred Brighton SEO talks that I've attended This talk really is is about how I used to find myself saying this quite often or at least making a face or grunting from time to time and actually now I'm doing it less and less often. And yeah, if I raise the roof, if I'm dropping the microphone.

25:06And it's not because I'm learning safely patience with old age. It's actually because I think often when you're feeling a frustration as an SEO, it reveals something about a weakness in process, an opportunity to improve something about what you're doing, a way to, from the client side and the SEO side, think about ways we can perhaps work together a little bit more effectively. Now, I've got a slide here because I think you have to have some kind of credentials context slide to know who's talking to you and why. So this is a vague timeline of Google SEO. And here's me in 2015, bright-eyed, not knowing a thing.

25:43Here I am fairly recently. So you can see it's taken its toll. And this is almost exclusively agency-side experience. So that is going to color my perspective how this talk is framed Now with 10 years almost exclusively agency side I'm now somewhere on the Dunning Kruger scale where I think I know less about SEO than ever before and despite knowing more than 90 % of people on the street So I'm not as long in the tooth as some of these panda penguin era nerds who are here but hoping that for in-house SEOs, agency SEOs, clients and stakeholders, there might be something in this talk you can take away and learn.

26:26And this is me in a few more years of Google's world. So there's a simple structure we're going to follow here. Essentially, we're going to identify the thing that we hate. I'm going to give you some broad kind of general examples, illustrative examples to read on the slide. I'm going to give a subjective rating on my own personal scale here of funny faces that I found on Mid Journey. So there's a few categories here. We've got AB for annoying bro, we've got CD for could definitely be annoying, and EF is obviously effing annoying, quite bad news. And we'll quickly cover why we think that could be annoying and what we might be able to do about that.

27:09So the first thing, straight away, expecting the impossible. You are essentially talking about demands here that are not based in reality, kind of arbitrary, made up, things plucked out of the air. I won't narrate all of these examples, but you can kind of see, you might anticipate these types of things where let's just exponentially grow, You know, things that have just been plucked out of the air. And you might anticipate hearing these things early in an SEO engagement. On the rating scale, it's, I think, actually on the less annoying side. This guy might not even be mad. It's just a headache that he's got or a query that he didn't want to answer that day.

27:54And the reason I say that is because, in a way, this is kind of basic SEO. You expect these questions to come up to some extent. And so you might feel some frustration. It's natural, especially if you're a new SEO. You might feel like you're being pressured to achieve more than you can achieve. And if you're a new SEO and experienced, you might actually be inclined to try and jump through these hoops and satisfy these demands. If you're not going to try and satisfy those demands, then you're at least going to have to spend time and resources explaining why these things can't be done. And that can be annoying.

28:29you might naturally be worried that you're setting yourself up from the client up for disappointment in some way. But if they expect these things, the things that you can deliver might not quite fit the bill for them. And it can be a sign that maybe the client doesn't really get what you do, which can be a bad feeling, because if they don't appreciate what you can do, yeah, that's going to lead to some friction. So all of this together are kind of like red flags, signs of potentially rocky conversations that you're going to have down the line. So we're going to go looking into some solutions now.

29:03So as I say, this is, in a way, it's kind of basic SEO. You should really have been tackling these issues from right at the start of the process. We can say there are adages. If your client doesn't know that SEO is kind of a long-term commitment, that there's going to take some time, consistent effort, testing, research, experimentation, incremental gains, knock backs over time, then something's actually gone badly wrong from the very start of the process. So the solution is actually quite simple here, which is at the proposal stage, at pitches, onboarding a client, presenting your strategy for the first time, it should be really clear what you're promising and what you're not promising to deliver, what is within your capabilities as a team working together.

29:50You can help yourself with this by having some case studies, some data on hand, arming yourself with examples. If you've been working in SEO for any amount of time, you should have access to Search Console, Analytics, all kind of tools where you can basically build a case and show the story of how SEO happens. GA is only just about to bring annotations back, but there are other tools where you can annotate Everything that's gone into the journey, what kind of investment of time, resources, team, people, etc., led to certain results. If you can show that there are knockbacks, inconsistencies in an SEO journey, then everybody is armed and on a shared kind of wavelength from the very beginning.

30:34So if you don't have a few case studies in terms of what went in and what came out, you definitely should start building that kind of armory for yourself. As well as these, it can be a good idea to have some kind of explainers and graphics, things that you can kind of refer back to and share with your clients and stakeholders. So a few examples of these here. This is something that we sometimes show to clients at Canada. It's sort of giving you an idea that if you have lots of technical depth, for example, there is a kind of cascading cadence for when certain metrics will become more consolidated, what kind of hierarchy timeline you're likely to see certain results coming in.

31:16Similarly, we've got this kind of graph that we show to clients laying the idea down that some types of SEO tasks or the project as a whole is going to take some time, research, and so forth before you start to see the return on investment coming in. I often, when I'm showing this to clients, will caveat that the line may not be so linear. There may be some wobbles along the way. Another thing that you can do is forecast. So if you're being given, you know, some kind of traffic demand and expectation to hit a certain level, you can do some rudimentary forecasting. If you use SEMrush, Ahrefs, tools like this, they have some pretty simple traffic calculations.

31:58Click through rate, where you rank. You can basically set yourself some minimal, maximal models for what type of traffic you would get from ranking in certain positions. And that can be a useful thing to just kind of set a kind of realistic figure and you know, provide some guidelines on what to expect. Now I'm going to say, it says if you have to, because I think we don't have time to get into it, but forecasting and SEO is a headache. If you ask me, you have to caveat it to absolute death most of the time, to the point it becomes meaningless. But it is something you can do if somebody is putting unrealistic expectations on what you're going to get back.

32:34So if these things are things that you're having to tell a client repeatedly. That's a slightly different issue if it's a long term conversation. But we'll get into more extreme cases as we go down this list. The next one is, and you may be familiar with this idea, somebody wants the work done essentially now or on demand or yesterday. And yeah, this is basic stuff, just impatience for delivery, asking for shortcuts and that sort of thing. Or even worse, when somebody just announces that a project has been deployed or it's happening within a few days time and you have to jump and make sure everything works and nothing breaks.

33:17I put this in the CD category, represented here by this man who I think looks like Wolverine, meaning you a bit of harm, popping a sweat. And it can be annoying for a bunch of reasons. I know some people, potentially some industries, sectors, thrive in pressure and stress. But in my experience, rushing really leads to quality analysis or really solid recommendations in SEO. And it's natural as well if you're working in an agency that when a client requests something, you might think that's a moment that you have to jump to, you kind of have to satisfy. But it can mean that other priorities, things that are actually more important, are getting de-escalated and yeah, you're not working on the stuff that's really going to make a difference.

34:02It can also reveal a gap in knowledge again, where it feels like potentially your client thinks your job is kind of easy, like asking a graphics designer to just make it pop with like five minutes of Photoshop. So to solve this, generally you want to enforce timelines and kind of time scales early and then reinforce them often. So, you know, clients should be aware, probably at the beginning of every month, if not earlier, what work is due and scheduled and why it's a high priority, why you're trying to work on that thing, and that the work is essentially going to take as long as you say it's going to take.

34:38You're the person doing the work, ultimately. I don't tell a builder how long a house is going to take, and some clients might need to learn to stay in their lane from time to time. But what can help with this to communicate is get into the world of like Gantt charts and roadmaps. This is a really good tool to have where your tasks, your resources, what you're allocating, it's all easily referenced in one central place. And you can use these to enforce the timeline at the beginning of the month, at the end of the month, in meetings, emails, and so forth. Just make sure everyone is on the same page and know what is going into X, Y, and Z.

35:16As well as that, I think something I'm fond of is enforcing the idea that there is an impact from sudden, unscoped random tasks coming in. So if this task that I'm being asked to do takes precedence, for example, over the other things that we've planned, then are we still being held to the same standard? Are we still expected to meet the exact same KPIs or hit the goals? So if you've got a roadmap like the one I just showed use some color coding or make some marks from time to time When something the client has requested has actually taken you off of task If you're both accountable for the results that are going to come So you need to kind of be honest with each other about why some targets are being missed from time to time and This actually can be a healthy thing as well to just realize that your client needs more time and support than you initially realized And you also need to highlight sometimes where rushing a thing spending less time actually risk the quality of the task or the project and Where this is meaningful?

36:16So you've probably seen this kind of triforce trifecta graph chart thing here Where the notion is basically you can have two of these probably or if you spend too much or little on one of these angles it skews the quality or the yeah, one of the other components. And this applies like well beyond SEO. But it's worth emphasizing that, you know, sometimes some SEO projects and tasks, for example, are very time consuming, quite sensitive. If you make bad recommendations in SEO, they can do pretty active damage and they can do active damage invisibly for a long time before anyone realizes a mistake has been made.

36:56So what's more important to you? You as an individual have a different idea about what's the biggest priority out of cost, time, and quality, but you are going to be held to account as an SEO for your recommendations and your work. So you should heavily steer, I think, what the time and cost requirements are in order to meet a certain standard. You have to sometimes say good work costs time and money. Now, another thing that you can do, if pushed, if needed, justified, is offer interim deliverables. So I'm very much talking from an agency side here where potentially you might think a task requires X, Y, and Z to meet a specific standard.

37:39But, you know, for example, I really like putting together a branded document that looks and presents just the right way. But sometimes the client doesn't need that. And it's good to confirm that with them and what they're really needing. Sometimes you just need to put together an email or just get some initial early conclusions over to keep everybody satisfied. But ultimately I think you do need to kind of hold firm, push back, make clear what standards you're trying to hit. And I think it's fair to say this isn't going to work with everyone. A careful, thorough, thoughtful explanation doesn't always hit, but you can at least demonstrate that you're not saying no for absolutely no reason.

38:17What about this one? This is a surprisingly common complaint in SEO, it turns out, is the client's not doing anything. So you've made recommendations, you've done audits, you've given them priorities and told them why to do a thing. Excellent work all around has been done, but nothing seems to be happening. And I don't want to be too mean here, there are lots of good reasons that client teams, any business can be really busy and resource poor. But it's still something that's worth tackling from the off. It's Wolverine again. I'd say this is annoying mainly because it affects morale. It can be really affecting, dissatisfying as an SEO to know that your work, your hard work is essentially getting parked and put into some kind of holding pattern.

39:08Very difficult to stay motivated working for a client when you know that the recommendations that you're going to make are going to go into the same dark well where nothing happens. And yeah, if you're working towards the same goal, it can feel sad that your client isn't seeing their end through. It's an often action-oriented thing, SEO, and action is often required on the client side. So keeping this relatively simple, I think this also is something that needs to be tackled right at the beginning, either at the beginning of an SEO engagement or even at the beginning of every process or task load that you're setting up.

39:45So at proposal stage, for example, at pitch, when you're laying out a strategy, what does execution actually look like? Like who is involved in signing a thing off, reading a brief, writing the content, publishing a thing, changing a thing on the website? Again, if you have a roadmap, a Gantt chart, that's something that's really quite trivial to kind of indicate that there are going to be points where multiple teams and stakeholders are involved in a process. And then it's easy to refer back to. Another thing that you might need to think about is when things get extreme is just deciding what threshold needs to be passed before you have a tough conversation with somebody.

40:27I've had a few of these in the past where essentially, yeah, I'm asking the client to be held accountable for the fact that we're not going to hit goals, we're not going to hit KPIs because nothing is being done. And this is something that should be reinforced whenever you get an opportunity really start having those conversations early Use your reports use regular meetings use strategic reviews and so forth But a nifty trick that can help Psychologically on some clients is to bring competitor data into the picture So, you know if you can show for example that a another competitor or several competitors are doing more gaining faster, investing more, and we're falling behind, that can be all you really need to put a kind of data-driven fear of the enemy or aspiration into a client's heart and remind everybody that we're trying to get somewhere here.

41:22And a perhaps controversial one, if a client has been told that nothing is happening and nobody's happy working on this project, it can be a good time to think about walking away. I know that's a really difficult thing for various reasons. I will kind of come back to this. But sometimes you just need to get rid of a client to improve everybody's morale so everyone enjoys working on their SEO. Oh, yeah. This should be a quick one, actually. But you know, you've had this happen. A client has changed something and they didn't tell you. So it could be an unannounced change, a fix, a deployment. We've just done something and we need you to take a look at it.

42:06And actually this can be even worse. You're working towards a goal and the clients kind of thrown a spanner into the works, you might not find out for months at which point some damage has been done and you have to scramble to fix it. I'm representing this in the EF effing category by this digital gremlin. very unhappy bunny. And I used to get riled up by this quite a lot as an early SEO. Obviously, this is annoying for a bunch of reasons. They can reveal a gap in knowledge that you're not all on the same page. You're working on a goal. The client is undermining it. You have to spend time then reviewing, diagnosing, trying to understand what went wrong and fixing a thing.

42:48And again, that can mean other important tasks, priorities are not getting done. And it might suggest to you, the SEO, that your client doesn't really know what they're doing or hasn't invested the bare minimum energy to understand what affects their performance and the goals you're working towards. Fortunately, I think there's a really easy solution here, and this is basically just tool up, automate this process a little bit, be a little bit preventative. I don't know how I lived my life before Content King. If you don't know what Content King does, it's essentially like a site change monitor.

43:23So when anything happens that could affect SEO, you can get a little alert about it. There are other tools that do similar things. I think Ahrefs now even is doing some kind of page monitoring change stuff, which can be really useful to catch when something is happening. Being realistic, sometimes you're working with really big clients, huge clients, huge teams, where it's kind of ridiculous to expect that everybody is going to be involved, know the scope, you know, that no harmful change is ever going to happen. So when you have Content King, or something like it, you can catch when very important things are happening on the site that are going to affect things.

44:01And when you spot them, you can fix them quickly and put in a process in place before it becomes a repeat problem. So a site change monitor, I can't recommend enough. As well as that, yeah, you guessed it from the start. And with some documentation, you can tackle this. So if you have a reference list, for example, of all the things that could affect SEO or that your client may want to consult or seek advice on before they do a thing, yeah, you need to kind of flag this stuff. You need to flag the things that could compromise your goals. Now, if you make a list of all the things that could affect your SEO, it's going to be a really bloody long list, undoubtedly.

44:42But it's not necessarily a hard thing to signpost this early. I like to think that if you've made these things clear early, nobody can really be upset at you if you're a bit frustrated or disappointed when those things happen. I think I've got time for this. And this should be an easy one as well. I was talking about difficult clients, difficult situations where you may need to walk away. You may have worked with somebody like this. You may be working with somebody like this now. It's perhaps not as rare as you would hope that arseholes are out there contracting advice and consultancy on various topics.

45:26Gremlin is back, very angry-making, and rightly so, I would say. I think it's obviously frustrating when anyone in a team is basically pushing the boundaries of acceptable professionalism. And yeah, above all, it's a morale issue, I think. If you've ever worked in this kind of situation, it's the kind of situation that leads to an SEO or an account manager burning out sometimes by completely changing job, changing industry. It can be soul destroying working with somebody like this. Essentially looking at a toxic work environment and is ultimately a pain in the bum. My solution is, as we were talking about, essentially get out.

46:10Get out as fast as you can. You can push back, of course. You can try and establish boundaries and come back to a norm. You can put it in your contracts that this behavior is unacceptable, de-escalate, maintain your professionalism and decorum, and try and negotiate. But my preferred solution here is obviously just look after yourself and look after your team. Look after the people who are doing SEO, find another client. Like I was saying, this can be really difficult. I'm really aware that some agencies are operating on like a knife edge of profitability. Some SEOs are working in a job where it's just good enough that they don't want to leave.

46:47But honestly, it will do wonders for your mental health to have some boundaries on where your self-respect begins and ends. It's a great thing about working at Canda, I will say, is that we're really not afraid to part ways with a client who is undermining our enjoyment, our patience, our teammates. Working in SEO ultimately is often high-pressured enough. There are enough things to be worried about without somebody adding to the pile. It makes a big difference to know that you're working with good, kind people. And if they keep looking elsewhere, hopefully they'll eventually hit a point where no agencies will take them on.

47:29I had a long list for this, and we're actually at the end there. I had about 15 things prepared here, big and small, that have annoyed me and others about clients, but I've tried to keep them kind of on a theme here. So I'm going to wrap up. I think in terms of takeaways, if you're going to learn anything, I think it's fair to say if you're working on SEO, this is usually some kind of long-term engagement. I also think it's worth highlighting some of the lessons of this I think are that account management in a way Client management is a massive aspect of what you're going to be doing in SEO an essential element of doing good SEO And yet it appears to me like SEO is essentially about building relationships communicating really well Sharing a foundation of knowledge with your clients.

48:22I think there's always room to improve how we do SEO and I've, you know, been fortunate to be working with an incredibly strong account management team and a really strong SEO team at Kanda that I've helped to shape as well. And so, you know, I think this is part of the reason that we are at peace relatively at Kanda is because, you know, you live and you learn. if something has frustrated you, it's a good opportunity to kind of figure out why and fix it, nip it right in the bud. I would hesitate to conclude that hate is healthy. But, you know, as I say, if you are living and you're learning and you're trying to reduce the effects of that, yeah, everything can be a learning moment to some extent.

49:05So maybe. And for those who want a quick summary slide of what we kind of roughly went through, you can feel free to gander at that. but that is me that's all done

49:18Jack Chambers-Ward: and that wraps up this week's episode I hope you enjoyed those two talks little extra previews of what we've got coming up at Search at Norwich XL if you haven't already please do go and check out searchnorwich.org or find us on Eventbrite I'll put links for both of those things in the show notes down below so you can go and get your tickets now there is an exclusive podcast discount code if you click the link in the show notes down below you will get 25 % off so you can save some money there and that takes it down to more like£125 compared to£175. It's an awesome event we've got coming up. The team here have been putting in a lot of effort.

49:57Jack Chambers-Ward: We've got some amazing guests. We've got 12 speakers including a panel and eight talks. We've got great food catered locally here by our friends over at The Feed. We've got an after party at Dead Wax Social happening after the event as well, which I can't wait to experience as well. So much cool stuff. Get all of the information. Come and join us in Norwich on the 24th of September by going to searchnorwich.org. And yeah, hopefully I will see you next month. Come and join us in Norwich. Come and meet the Canada crew. Come and hang out with us and meet all of the speakers and have a brilliant time in this fine city of Norwich.

50:35Jack Chambers-Ward: Hopefully I will see you next month. But of course, before then, I'll be back next week with more awesome guests, conversations, and even more discussions about Search and Orange and all the cool things we've got coming up. Because as I teased a couple of weeks ago, season five is around the corner. Search and Orange XL is coming up, like I said, the end of September. In October, we're kicking things off with season five of Search with Candor. It's going to be bigger. It's going to be better. It's going to be new and different and interesting and cool. And we're going to be doing some really cool stuff around AI search specifically.

51:09Jack Chambers-Ward: I've got some brilliant guests. I've recorded a couple of episodes already. They are already being edited in the background of this and some great conversations. Stay tuned, basically. I don't want to tease anymore. It's very exciting. I'll have some more teasers and some more announcements coming up very soon, but stay tuned for all of that coming up over the next, like I said, starting in October with season five. And yeah, thank you so much for watching thank you so much for listening and i will see you as always next week