Turn client expertise into SEO gold | Search with Liv Day and Ellie Wraith

0:00Ellie Wraith: Hello and welcome to this week's episode of Search with Candor. I am your host, Jack Chambers-Ward, and this is the podcast where I interview the best and brightest across SEO, search, AI and digital marketing. Welcome to a very special episode with two guests this week. I am joined by Liv Day and Ellie Wraith from Digital Loft. I'm going to talk all about how to take client expertise and turn it into SEO gold. I know this is a big topic for a lot of people working in digital PR, working with clients, working in content as well. And it's a really great conversation. I dig into a lot of what Liv and Ellie are doing day to day to really get some great data from their clients, get great insights, opinions, stories from their clients and how to repurpose that and share that as content and create some really unique and interesting stuff.

0:53Ellie Wraith: And unique is the key word here, arguably. Uncopyable. interesting, fresh, and unique is exactly what we're looking for when it comes to content and our clients. So that's exactly what we're aiming for this week. Ellie and Liv dive into their strategies and tactics about how to go about this, how to pull insights out of experts and clients who might be a bit more hesitant and a bit more timid, maybe not so interested in sharing their expertise at first. But by the end of this episode, you will know how to get those little golden nuggets of expertise from your clients or your team if you're working in-house as well.

1:32Ellie Wraith: Before I get to my conversation with Liv and Ellie, please do go and subscribe on YouTube. We are a candor agency on YouTube. If you're not already watching us there, there's links for that in the show notes. You can get every single episode every Monday if you subscribe and hit the notification bell. You'll also get notified of any extra videos and bonuses we put up there as well. And you, of course, you can subscribe and follow on Spotify, Apple podcasts, all that lovely stuff. If you want to keep up to date with Search with Candor, if you want to keep up to date with our newsletter, you can go to coreupdates.com.

2:04Ellie Wraith: And if you want to check out our very exciting upcoming conference, Search Norwich XL, you can go to searchnorwich.org. Again, I'll put links for everything in the show notes and you can go and find your tickets there. That's happening on the 24th of September 2026 right here in Norwich and tickets are as low as£100 if you use the discount code that is linked in the video description down below you can get it for less than£100 for a full day with eight talks and a panel with world-class SEO speakers from around the world. Okay enough waffling from me hopefully you enjoy this week's episode and I'm joined by Liv Day and Ellie Wraith.

2:45Ellie Wraith: Let's get into it. I have two special guests joining me this week. First, I have Ellie Wraith, who is the head of search at Digital Loft. Ellie has worked in marketing content for over eight years. And you may know Ellie from appearances on shows like Search for Sean, SEO Stream and Loft Talk. Ellie, welcome to Search with Candor. Thank you so much for having me, Jack. Yeah, it's great to be here. Just a quick intro by myself, in case anybody hasn't seen any of those appearances before, which is entirely possible. As Jack said, I've got about eight years of experience working both in-house and agency side in marketing and search marketing.

3:18So I understand the challenges on both sides of the table, especially in relation to kind

3:23Ellie Wraith: of how we are best placed to liaise with the experts we have at our disposal. We're really close with Liv as well here at Digital Loft and super excited to be talking about what we've got on the cast today. Absolutely. Thank you so much for the little introduction there. And of course, second but not least live day is the client partner at digital loft live has worked in marketing for well over six years you may know live from speaking at events such as brighton seo or digital marketing europe or the digital pr summit as well as appearances on shows like rank up and the aforementioned search of sean live welcome to search with candor

4:00Liv Day: thank you so much for having me yeah we've all been on search for sean yeah We love Sean. But yeah, my name is Dave. I'm a client partner, so I am very much the hands-on day-to-day of all, not all of the SEO account management. That'd be quite a job. A lot of the SEO account management here at the agency. So Ellie gets kind of stuck into all of the industry news, all of the managing the team, keeping us all in shape, and I get to have fun. Amazing, amazing. It's going to be a really interesting topic for us to discuss.

4:32Ellie Wraith: I appreciate you guys pitching something that I think a lot of us agency side think about and talk about. Obviously, it is a tricky time for the industry at the moment, but I think it's going to be a really interesting topic. We're going to talk about how to turn client expertise into content that those competitors can't copy. And I think this is a particularly interesting conversation at the moment since so many people are talking about link building coming back and digital PR and all this kind of stuff. And I know, obviously, you guys at DigitalOft have a lot of experience with this. So I guess I will kind of start things off and Liv, I'll come to you first.

5:08Ellie Wraith: Why do you think this is a topic we should be talking about right now in the industry?

5:17Liv Day: I think it's definitely a topic we should be talking about right now, but I also don't think it's anything brand new. I did a talk on this at Sheffield DM, I want to say about three years ago, and it was about getting client expertise to create unique insights, whether it's for SEO, whether it's for digital PR. So definitely not something new and I think something that good SEOs have been doing for quite a while now. But I think now that we're in the AI era, I'll just get that first mention out of the way of the podcast. I'm sure we'll have plenty more. but now we've got this ai era that we find ourselves in it is a million times more important i feel like ai has completely commoditized that generic informational content i think anyone can write a half decent blog post or bit of informational content about anything i think i could go out there and get chat tpt to help me write something on a topic i've literally not ever heard of before and that would be okay but it's consensus content and it's a consensus of everything else that is already on the internet and there's no incentive for google for chat tpt for whatever other algorithm we're looking at to surface that kind of content and really it's adding no value to users and i think everything that we talk about when it comes to this kind of uncopyable content comes like boils down to some of the principles that we've had in seo for so many years of add genuine value give information that's not just kind of formulating what's already been there even like when you go back to sort of the early seo days of like the skyscraper method of just have what was there and make it a bit better it's the better extension of that of look at what there already is and what net new knowledge can you add to the conversation and that's what's gonna a help from an seo perspective get you ranking get you appearing in ai search because there is that incentive, but it's also what's going to genuinely help users, anyone who's on your site to actually take insights.

7:23Liv Day: And from our experience, this really kind of net new knowledge is what snowballs and what makes content go really, really well. So we'll publish something that has that real kind of insider knowledge that we're like, actually, no one's talking about this online. No one's mentioning this. and that's when you see such great results because people are paying attention to it and it gets traffic and it gets results. It gets shared organically. It gets kind of digital PR outreach opportunities as well. Ellie, how about from your perspective?

7:54Ellie Wraith: Do you think this is something more people need to be thinking about, especially as we're thinking about it from an agency perspective as well? Absolutely. And I think more people should be thinking about it. More people should be, and even if they are thinking about it, recognizing how important it is, especially when, you know, the explicit guidance from Google now states, you know, it includes the phrase non-commodity content. It encourages publishers to kind of go above and beyond to include unique, original, expert-led material that kind of surpasses what's defined as common baseline knowledge.

8:37Ellie Wraith: and it warns against anybody that's kind of creating content that doesn't add genuine value and we're all kind of you know the the baseline um the what used to be i think the kind of the gold standard writing um something that is well put together something that's factually correct that used to be the kind of the level we were aspiring to that's now the baseline and kind of the standard has been raised so much um and what's now as live very rightly said what's now achievable by absolutely anybody. I think my grandma could write an article on topic X, Y, or Z, given half an hour under a fresher on how a keyboard works.

9:19Ellie Wraith: So the fact that the playing field has been leveled so much with AI, we just have to think outside the box to discover new ways to bring in things that are genuinely new genuinely interesting genuinely adding to a discussion that is already quite saturated building on the concept of information gain not just kind of replicating what's already there but adding new things to the mix as well yeah i think that's a really interesting kind of perspective you both touched on i think ellie you mentioned information gain there and liv you mentioned bringing value how do you guys go about actually measuring that when it comes to discussing content with new clients?

10:05Ellie Wraith: How do you actually measure that value or get an idea of what the, I guess, percentage of information and what new information you're giving with content?

10:18Okay.

10:19Ellie Wraith: So I don't necessarily think it's a, you can put a number on it. I wouldn't say there's a kind of defined percentage of new information that has to be in a piece. Ultimately, what we're all trying to do in SEO, in content, is provide the best possible answer to a given problem and present it in the most efficient, accessible way. That doesn't mean there's a specific percentage of new information that has to be included within a particular piece of content. But what we will find, especially when we're talking, when we're working with clients who have subject matter experts on a given topic, that whatever kind of the, whatever answer we can kind of put together that kind of the response to the question that satisfies the user's intent, that gives them kind of the broadly the information they need.

11:18Ellie Wraith: There's always going to be personal experience, kind of hands-on examples or kind of lived insights that we can bring in that are going to take it beyond what the general kind of the baseline answer is. So I wouldn't say it's something that we can measure. It's about once we've finished a piece of content, once we've incorporated new, genuinely valuable information, can we confidently, credibly sit there and say, this piece of content now answers this question in the most comprehensive, efficient, accessible way? If the answer is no, then we go back to the drawing board. If the answer is yes, then perfect.

12:05fact.

12:06Liv Day: Yeah, and I think you can fit it into workflows in different ways as well. So it might be that you think of a topic comes to mind through a conversation with a client and you go, actually, I don't think anyone's talking about this online. And the article itself is going to be net new information because you're talking about it, in which case that's kind of your answer. But But otherwise, if it's you thinking, have we seen competitor do sort of information around kind of X, Y, Z, and actually we've got something to add to this conversation here. We're going to do something on a similar topic, but better.

12:40Liv Day: It's something that we can work into our planning process. So when we brief our content team, we can go here is what is currently ranking and give that real analysis of it of here's what they do. Well, here's actually what we think they're missing. And here's what. Expertise we have. And I think part of our job in the roles that Ellie and I have is bridging the gap between our clients and the content writers. Our content writers at Digital Off will have access to our clients to ask them questions if they want. And I had a client conversation yesterday where they said, we want your content writers to ask as many questions as possible during this process.

13:19Liv Day: It's a fairly new client. And they said, you're not going to be absolutely experts in this industry. we are with there's loads of us on our side putting a slack channel just get them to ask away and as they're going through that writing process we can just add in little bits of information because if they're not asking those questions where are where are they getting that new information from from an agency perspective we're not expected to have every single answer to that brand new information for every single industry so it's that continual kind of conversation and communication and going into a piece of content, knowing that you have that objective to add something really new to the conversation and knowing in advance.

14:00Liv Day: Yeah. In fact, this insight would be really, really good. Sorry to interrupt you there.

14:04Ellie Wraith: Just on the back of what Liv was saying, something that we have as a standard working practice is checklists when we're writing content. As teams grow, as we expand across a wider range of clients and content types, standardization, quality checking becomes harder. It actually does. So kind of checklisting different steps is something that works really well for us. And actually on checklists, something that we have is, does this piece of content the writer has to go through and answer before they share for approval, does this add something new to the conversation? They need to actually fold that into their process, their writing process, their research process, and make sure that whenever they are producing content, it's going beyond what's already out there.

14:54Ellie Wraith: And when it's published on the client site, it's unequivocally the client's content because it includes information, insights, expertise that is owned by them and them alone. Yeah, I think that's an interesting point to kind of jump off there. Liv, you mentioned that conversations with clients, which I think is something we should all be doing more of for the record. How do you balance that compared to a more traditional sort of topical research or keyword research kind of thing? Is it, I'm almost picturing it almost like anti-topic research, like, oh, that's already been covered. We know the competitors already talk about that potentially.

15:31Ellie Wraith: Do you have those kinds of conversations where you're trying to sort of counterbalance client conversations with what is being talked about? or is it a case of avoiding trends necessarily? What's your approach to that, Liv?

15:49Liv Day: I think there's obviously the balance there because there's an element to which if something's trending or you think that something's going to begin trending, you absolutely want to lean into it. But yeah, it's funny you mentioned, I feel like I'm doing less and less keyword research is every time I start kind of a new client strategy, I still love you, Samra, but turning to it less and less because the amount of industries that we work the amount of industries where we work in where actually there's really like next to no search volume for any of these terms but they're actually so incredibly valuable and how else am I gonna get them there's obviously plenty of tools but the most valuable thing is that kind of a conversation so I think getting I'm also a advocate for as many conversations as possible and not just having access to kind of like one or two people on a client side but who are those wider subject matter experts whether it is i've had conversation with engineers product designers people on the ground and going trying to get a digital pr expert comment from someone and going actually that person's not available because they're in inquiry right now like that kind of level of expertise and getting that person on a or see people very time poor so arranging kind of like a half hour interview recording it and asking those kind of questions of what do you think no one is talking about in your industry right now that you think is really important like what are the most common conversations if they're someone that's like customer or client facing what are the most common conversations or pain points or questions that you have if there's is there something that's going on in your industry that is kind of common practice that you actually really disagree with.

17:36Liv Day: Like if you've got a bit of a slightly controversial opinion, is there anything that everyone else is doing and you actually think it's a bit rubbish? There's a whole kind of list of slightly fun leading questions that you can ask to get so many more content ideas that are actually really, really relevant to the target audience that keyword research probably isn't going to show up, particularly if it is a niche industry. and some of those questions like what do you actually think like what should everyone be talking more about what do you think your competitors aren't doing very well like what are they missing and where's that opportunity for us to really capitalize it's such a valuable

18:16Ellie Wraith: yeah i often find i've had this experience before where you you want to go for that approach but some clients are hesitant to either put their name behind words and kind of put themselves out that i've also had you guys have experienced this i had a very guarded client who was convinced that everything they did was like a top secret industry specific thing i was like i don't think it is like i can see what you do on your website so they were they're working sort of like uh decorant like wedding decorations and like dried flowers and stuff like that and i wanted to discuss the process of like how do you dry the flowers what's your selection process like oh it's all very top top secret kind of thing i was like i don't think it is it's been happening for like thousands of years.

18:59Ellie Wraith: I think people know how to try flowers. But have you experienced that kind of more timid, more reserved client? And how do you go about convincing them, I guess, to say this is actually going to bring value to your brand? Ellie, have you had those kind of experiences with some clients before? Yeah, absolutely. And usually it's an education piece. it's about kind of recognizing their their reservations because they are valid especially you know if they've worked really hard to build some proprietary data they've worked really hard to you know to to get to the point they're at they don't want to share it freely with with all their for all their competitors to see but it's an education piece about explaining the rationale behind why we want to and need to do this as search continues to evolve and giving them confidence about how we're going to do it as well, about kind of giving them examples of things we've done previously and kind of work examples of how we've folded their insights or kind of similar insights into content for clients, either in similar spaces or in kind of working with similar the business types and then showing them the impact of doing that.

20:22Ellie Wraith: It's well and good asking people to trust you with no evidence. But then as soon as you can start bringing in actually, this is the reason why, this is the evidence that reason why we need to do this. This is our hypothesis behind why we think it's going to be really great for your business in terms of visibility. This is kind of where we see it having an impact, not just on kind of traffic and rankings, but on actually the overall topical authority of your site and your reputation as a brand with your target audience. And these are examples of how we've executed it previously. This isn't a fixed model of how we work.

21:00Ellie Wraith: We can tailor it to kind of any guardrails you have as a business, but let's work together and try and figure out a way to meet in the middle if you are particularly cautious about doing this so that we can extract the information that we need, that we need to be able to showcase to position your brand as the go-to expert on this issue while kind of protecting what you've built and making sure that we're doing it safely and within what you feel comfortable doing. Because typically when we start a project like this, it can take a while for kind of especially more reserved, more timid, like you say, contributors to feel confident in what they're doing.

21:39Ellie Wraith: So kind of building it up and showing them, not just like launching it in full steam ahead, just kind of building it up and showing them piece by piece. This is what we're going to do. This is how we do it. This is an example of what we've done. And then kind of going more gradually and building up gradually whilst they gain confidence as well.

22:01Liv Day: Yes. I also really just like to lean into someone's ego. Like you said, Ellie, just go like, what can I give this person? Because Jack, it's happened really often for us. And for some industries, like we have it, quite a lot of we're working in finance, it's completely understandable. if someone is going i don't want a comment to be attributed to me and then that gets the fca come crashing down on it and it reflects badly on the brand it reflects badly on me that's a whole legal nightmare you completely get it and like ellie said you can sort of be really clear what the what the process is of what the processes are and nothing's going to go without your sign-off and things like that but I also do like try and sort of butter someone up a little bit and we've had a couple of clients where we've gone you know like we we met people famous we've got we've make little celebrities out of your internal experts and they then have a bit of a giggle and they're like oh who's going to be the funniest person that we can pick as a spokesperson who will actually really enjoy leaning into being an expert and getting coverage on kind of some of the glossy publications like we had we worked with the christmas tree brand and a couple good few years ago kim kardashian had a christmas tree in her bathroom we did some expert commentary around kim kardashian's christmas tree and it was one of the um like the one of our client contacts is sort of a product expert he was in so many huge publications talking about kim kardashian's christmas tree and it became the biggest talking point of our sort of end of year review is oh yeah and we've made we've made this guy kim kardashian expert and he absolutely reveled in it and found it hilarious and apparently told all of his friends and family and they also thought it was hilarious we've got client experts who share the coverage that we get on their personal tiktoks because it's helping their personal brand so lean getting to know those experts a little bit kind of thinking what they might react well to right react less well to but if you can pick someone who you can really kind of like tap in and get excited about the brand that you can build for them then you can sort of mitigate like i've got a title for the episode it's kim k's christmas consultant

24:22Ellie Wraith: just like there you go how to create

24:29Liv Day: do you know she never got in touch i was feeling try it again there you go maybe this yeah maybe bring it back again this christmas exactly exactly exactly yeah yes exactly just to do

24:42Ellie Wraith: all the christmas with a k keep it very uh alliterative uh you mentioned there live the nature of you know having a expert who has an opinion or being potentially controversial is that kind of a typical approach or is it more that you're thinking about who might be best like you said there do you pick somebody in the team who is a bit more charismatic potentially or is it more trying to find something that might just be a stronger opinion or a unique opinion or potentially controversial to stir up some some trouble in the industry

25:23i think it completely depends on the industry i think controversial opinions are fun but it's

25:28Liv Day: definitely not a necessity like you said like i said like we work with businesses in finance i don't really think that there are many controversial opinions to have on in finance and if they're you are presenting them publicly they're probably not going to go down very well the fca um and likewise we have a lot of clients where we do expert commentary that are in the medical space and their expert commentary is coming from a doctor again not someone who i really think should be having controversial opinions not great for the brand not great for them either but I think it can it can absolutely vary I think the question that I mentioned before of kind of what is one bit of sort of advice or something that's commonplace in your industry that you disagree with is a really nice way to sort of an entry into some of that slightly more kind of controversial or stronger opinions but overall i don't think you do need to be super controversial even though i think it's often the case where like you said

26:30Ellie Wraith: you could potentially i've experienced before where i'm having a chat with a client and i think i probably can't publish that one but sure thank you for letting me know maybe we'll maybe we'll keep that one on the side so we'll just leave that in the transcript let's Don't worry about that one.

26:48Liv Day: It's when they tell you, I've had clients that tell me, give me like dirt on their competitors. Probably shouldn't. I could publish this. I could also get in a lot of trouble. Probably shouldn't. But I've heard them say like, oh yeah, I know that in like really heavily regulated spaces being like, oh yeah, someone else on our team used to work at this competitor and i know that they cut corners doing xyz you mentioned earlier

27:27Ellie Wraith: the kind of we kind of joked about the celebrity status of somebody who really does get picked up in the media and things like that i think that is often a conversation that happens from say for example you're going to more members of the team rather than just some of the the main points of contact how do you balance that growth of a personal brand so say for example one of the experts in the team versus the brand authority as a whole do you have a particular approach for that or do you think it's a bit more cohesive than uh we might first suspect Ellie what are your thoughts on that I think honestly the two are totally interrelated um I don't think you can build one without the other.

28:10Ellie Wraith: The individual is associated with the brand by default. We're working on behalf of the brand, not the individual. And the uplift and visibility that they might enjoy is a secondary effect of the work that we're doing for the business. I don't see it as a question of either or when it's individuals versus brands. The individual is who we're using to create that sense of trust um to kind of um create that um uh have that accountability and kind of be uh relatable at a personal level because people trust people um but then the brand also benefits because they bring that kind of bigger recognition they bring the kind of the sense of um credibility to the whole dynamic.

29:06Ellie Wraith: I don't know, and Liv, you might have a slightly different stance on it, but I definitely don't see it as one or the other and kind of prioritizing one over the other. They both kind of contribute to each other naturally as we use individual experts to help build the presence of a brand online, whether it's kind of natively within the brand's website, within kind of their own assets or in third-party assets as well, kind of in the media. It's about picking the right expert to tell the right story in the right place to the right people. You know, Jack, you just said there about it's not always kind of the highest profile people within a business that we might want to select.

29:55Ellie Wraith: And I know, Lib, you've got like really great experience working hands-on with that as well, across much more kind of granular levels within a business, picking product experts, picking kind of customer service experts, people that have the actual relevant hands-on knowledge that make them a genuine expert in what we're asking them to comment on rather than just the face of the brand, so to speak.

30:21Liv Day: Yeah, definitely agree. And I think personal brands are really, really having a moment right now. I feel like if you've asked us this five years ago, we've probably been like, no, you don't really need personal brands. If you're working for like a massive, massive business, the people don't massively matter. But like I said, it's like marketing 101 of like people buy from people. And you see it so much now. Like, I don't know if you've seen LMS have made an absolute celebrity out of a page called Catherine Turner. Love her. Love her to bits. she's their director of product development she's got nearly a hundred thousand followers because she's been for mns since before she's worked with mns since before i was born she's been there well over 30 years probably bumbling about her career doing product development having a great time going completely unnoticed and then someone in the mns marketing team probably only a couple of months ago thought she's a lovely woman but she's a completely ordinary member of the team everyone's loving the mns product development and everything new that they're coming out with get the woman on tiktok and she's become an absolute sensation and it's i think adding so much more to mns as a brand to have a real kind of profile not only do customers really really love the chocolate and pistachio dip that we've come out with but they want to know the story behind it the person who created it the idea that it came from in the boardroom and that's how they've bridged that gap and people are even more invested in product development now because they're like oh what's Catherine coming up with next so I think it's such a like it's such a fun case study I think that absolutely it's just been like a little stroke of genius I think that's mashing it but people are really invested in personal brands I think more than they ever have been I think if you'd have tried that maybe five years ago it'd of come across a little bit contrived a bit try hard but it's something about the era that we're in now of people really really appreciating the getting to know people even behind a brand that is as well then that personal brand is still currently connected to the brand itself the

32:33Ellie Wraith: you know the two are still telling the same story just in different ways

32:39Liv Day: she's yeah she's yeah they just keep her in the building they just lock her up at night and then

32:47Ellie Wraith: come back and choose some more content the next morning yeah

32:53Ellie Wraith: do you think that that you mentioned that the people want to buy from people hear from people learn from people do you think that is even more true now because of the unending of AI generated content I guess I'm asking a very leading question there but for me thinking you know creating things like this doing videos and podcasts and the kind of content where you literally hear or see somebody compared to a piece of text have you found there has been more of a trend in that way towards like you said literally putting a face and a name to things rather than just a piece of text. Ellie, have you experienced that kind of, and again, have you been able to convince clients to, I guess, get on camera as well?

33:40Ellie Wraith: To answer the first part of your question, for me, it all comes down to this kind of huge trust void we're all in, kind of ownership, authorship, everything is just being kind of under the microscope more than ever before. um the you know the the credibility of one person saying or kind of or one page saying something online has never been scrutinized more than it is right now and having being able to put faces to things and being able to bring verified um perspectives on issues that's why they're having I think having so much value um at the minute because people are questioning everything they're reading they are questioning where it's come from they are questioning whether they can rely on it whether they can trust what they're what they're reading online um and when it when it's associated with a specific individual who can you know whose profile is clearly built out as having the experience um and kind of hands-on expertise um to back up what they're saying everything all kind of immediately becomes that that bit that bit more believable um which yeah i think is is why there's such an appetite for it at the minute and people automatically kind of gravitate towards anything that feels authentic in that way authentic original um like that in terms of getting clients on camera um that is um it's a tricky one um i don't think you can ever somebody that doesn't want to be on camera doesn't want to be on camera and i think no matter whatever argument you put toward you put to them about how kind of the benefits of doing it ultimately if they don't want to do it it's probably a battle not worth fighting i don't know what you think on this one live um that said um we do we do have clients that do produce video content that are kind of um and you know that do really successfully um produce video content to share um on their own website um and across socials as well and kind of where where they are um producing content for kind of one platform it's about having that conversation from a content from a website content point of view from a search from a um search visibility point of view about because video content creation is a barrier.

36:17Ellie Wraith: There's so many obstacles there. It's time heavy. It's expensive, depending on how you do it. If you want to get professional video content, it's difficult. It's difficult to produce. So if a client is choosing to invest in it, having that conversation with them and going, well, is there a way that we can produce this so that it can be repurposed across as many platforms as possible? Let's squeeze every bit of value out of what you're doing so that you've got all of this kind of personal content that can be used across this channel. But we can also chop it up and actually use it across your website, across your landing page as well, just to make sure it's working as hard as possible.

37:04Liv Day: yeah i think our digital pr team have been having to work 10 times harder than perhaps they used to to prove that our clients are real people we at digital pr summit this year had the team from press gazette in to talk about their big expose that they did of all of the fake ai experts that are out there and our journalist panel talked about the fact that they're having they've got their editors on their backs of if you publish something that has a fake expert in that's your that's your neck on the line so you completely get it's not just they're not just being picky for the sake of it they've got someone on top of them making sure that they're not publishing kind of ai expertise but we've had to have conversations with clients to say do you mind updating your linkedin because we're trying to pitch a bit of expert commentary from you we know you're a real person the ed the journalist on the other end of the email also thinks you're a real person but is having to do that extra bit of due diligence is checking your linkedin which you've not updated since 2023 and it says you are in a different job role than you are in now so can we just go ahead and update your linkedin which from the client's perspective they're thinking that's a bit a bit mental but it is i think just a sign of the times that we're in right now but at least a couple of times a week we're getting emails going oh can this client just jump on a jump on a quick call to discuss this we want headshots we want linkedin we need something to prove that prove that they're a real person which is quite quite depressing to think about but but we get it as well even from us from an agency side like we get conversations at pitch stage of how can you prove to us that you are not real people but it's going to be real people doing this seo work like i want to see the content writers that i need to know that you're not just writing my content through chat gpt if i'm making an investment i need to know it's a real it's a real real people on the other end it's gonna you're not just sort of gonna hand me off to

39:07Ellie Wraith: nai who's yeah i think that's a real issue you mentioned the the fake experts but also So plenty of people in our industry, especially agency side, are doing that kind of, oh, yeah, I totally have a team of 10 professional experts working with me. We're going to write your content just to quickly ask Claude or ChatGPT or whatever, like type of way. I'm like, yeah, quite sneaky stuff going on. I think you're right. So, Ellie, you mentioned the ability to kind of transform that content and take it from the initial interview, potentially into a video, into a website content. and things like that do you have a particular approach to how you kind of tailor that content to those different formats like from my experience taking a podcast episode and then thinking about social media versus a kind of blog post on a website or anything like that there's always a slight adjustment you need to make do you have kind of workflows or techniques for kind of reformatting and recontextualizing client codes in that way i own video content anything really yeah i guess if if they are doing video content or written content or a bit of both yeah um it's it starts with the the like the page so we work across um client websites that's that's our bread and butter so we look at what um a website needs to do and what the individual pages on that website need to do ultimately whatever content is on that page whether it's imagery, whether it's written content, whether it's reviews, whether it's video, all of that content needs to serve a specific purpose to that page.

40:52Ellie Wraith: It needs to be the means to an end for what that page is trying to achieve. So when we talk about repurposing content, whether it's an interview, whether it's a transcript from a podcast, whether we can extract quotes from there and fold them into a commercial landing page, offering kind of buying advice for a particular product category, whether it is video content that we have access to, that we can request a chop up and give us kind of a 30-second product summary as part of a bigger kind of category walkthrough. It's about thinking, okay, what is the goal of this page? What is it trying to do?

41:36Ellie Wraith: what action do we want this person to take when when they are on this page and what assets can we pull together to make that as likely as possible um so i wouldn't say it's kind of any specific workflow it's just having that end goal in mind work and always kind of whatever levers you pull whatever resources you're using making sure that each one contributes to that

42:04Ellie Wraith: anyway as we were we've talked about some opinions and things like that and i think that is often you know a good way to create that original uncopyable content as we mentioned for me it can come down to a lot of the kind of data that you have to support that as well right and i know our digital pr team here often works with a lot of you know creating new insights or reports from data and things like that are there any particular ways of getting that sort of unique data or insights whether it's you know internal data or external data or whatever it is Ellie how do you kind of approach that I guess sourcing the data and finding it and being able to then gather insights around it a really big part of that is um is it the onboarding stage if we appreciate the value of proprietary data.

43:01Ellie Wraith: We know how many conversations it can unlock, how many different types of content we can spin from having access to sales data, from customer service transcripts, from kind of performance data, all kind of making sure that the client is, as soon as we start working with them, make sure that they understand the value that this holds and asking what they'd be willing to share with us and in what formats just having those conversations really transparent conversations as early as possible and making sure they understand what we would want to do with it what kind of what guardrails we can put in place so that we use it safely and within the limits that they're comfortable with and establish ways of accessing it as well because every client stores data differently um every client stores different types of data and every client different people in different roles responsible for um keeping that that up to date um so just having those conversations finding out how they manage it and how they use it and how they might be able to share it with us um and getting hold of it as early as possible as well because actually seeing it firsthand could unlock lots of different ideas so that in a way you're kind of working backwards from the data rather than having an idea and trying to find the data to make it possible.

44:28Ellie Wraith: Getting visibility over it right at the outset can help shape the strategy that we put together. It can, if we're working on PR, it can open up so many different ideas for reactive to the campaigns that we might be able to do. So getting it, getting your hands and eyes on it at the outset would be my biggest tip for making it work as hard as possible. Yeah, and I think having the clarity at the outset

44:55Liv Day: with every stakeholder that needs to be involved, because Jack, I'm probably sure you've had the same, but you've had conversations at a pitch stage of, yeah, I'm going to use our internal data. Yeah, that'll be fine. Like, we can let you have whatever information you need And then either we try and access that data and someone in legal is like, no, absolutely not. Or we get access to the data, package it up. Just as we're about to set something live, someone from the brand team, it's usually the brand team, get their eyes on it and they go, no, absolutely not. So I think one thing that we've learned is knowing who's going to be involved in kind of every step of the process.

45:34Liv Day: Not every brand will have that first party data as well. you can always make get make new information definitely a big crown of a survey particularly if you've got customers we've got clients who will say look we've got 50 000 people on an email database and we can like tens of thousands of followers across social we can get a survey out very very easily and with that kind of information you know that you're going to have a representative to sample and you can really tailor to the kind of information that you might be looking to see and likewise we have a client who every year commissions a massive massive survey and they'll do it every year so we just had a meeting with their survey agency they've got kind of product information that we want to see and they want to see and we will kind of come in from the seo and pr perspective and be like oh actually can you can you ask that question because that could make a really amazing story so understanding what someone is doing already in terms of data but otherwise even even without first party data there's so many different sources out there that can really make you a lot more interesting than than the competition yeah definitely i think that's a really good uh really good way of framing it and since we're on

46:51Ellie Wraith: the topic of data i'll give our last question before we get into our recommendation section how do you measure success for a client's content whether that's long-term campaigns individual pieces what is actually the kind of things you are discussing with clients when it comes to reporting success and things like that Ellie what are those kind of conversations what metrics do you think you we should be leaning on as an industry so um as as an agency um and as um professionals working in search, we are entirely of the opinion that vanity metrics, so rankings, impressions, even traffic to an extent, does not matter.

47:39Ellie Wraith: It's not what businesses want. They might say they want it, but ultimately, at the end of the day, businesses are looking for a return on their investment. They're investing in SEO. They're investing in PR. They are investing in content marketing to earn money. They want to grow as a business, and this is the medium through which they're choosing to do it. So when we report, we report fundamentally on the bottom line impact that our work is doing. If we publish a series of new landing pages, and we've chosen to approach those with the mindset of clear information gain. We're bringing in in-house expertise to really add value to these pages.

48:23Ellie Wraith: And across this page set, we've seen an uplift in traffic that's then translated into an increase in organic conversions of X, Y, Z percent. That's what we want to be talking about. We want to be translating all of the tactical measures we're taking into the actual impact it's having on the business itself.

48:43Liv Day: I think to add to that as well, I can take the slightly softer side of you want to know as well that if you're having sort of an individual impact, there is a fair bit of distance between maybe introducing expert commentary for the first time if you're working with a brand, if we work with a business who have had a lot of SEO and digital PR agencies before, but have never managed to even get sign off on a spokesperson. And we've just about managed to get that over the line. That's a small win. Like Holly said, not going to pay the bills. Us getting one of their members of the team on board is probably not going to pay the bills and it's not going to make the CFO see our retainer as a return on investment, but it's still a nice measure of progress.

49:28Liv Day: When it comes to particularly digital PR, where we really have that focus on expert commentary and expert insights, we break everything down into some of those sort of what we call softdick APIs of the percentage of coverage that includes a spokesperson. And we can go a bit deeper into some of those outreach metrics of, okay, well, how well does our kind of outreach that features insights from a spokesperson, how does that perform versus kind of anything that's just sort of generically put against the business? And we can then use that as a bit of a business case to build up well actually it performs three times as well when we're going to a journalist with a spokesperson let's do more let's do more of that because then it's going to do get a small coverage which is going to lead to all of those things which eventually build up to to revenue as well so there's definitely those small attraction metrics along the way and also understanding what the client's goal is from the outset like we will have projects that we work on where the sole focus is someone wants to increase ai visibility and ai kind of awareness of a brand of a person so being able to actually measure that and say well chat tpt didn't really have much of a clue on that we had this area of expertise before now because of this work that we've done it's recommending us and it understands us so much more and again it's going to roll up into that return on investment that you want for sure let's wrap up with some

51:04Ellie Wraith: recommendations then shall we and ellie i'll come to you first what is one actionable tip you can recommend for everyone start doing today um i would say um think about what your growth priorities are and it's easy to get overwhelmed with especially with a really big site about all the different things that could be done to drive growth. But actually, when you look at what's going to make the biggest impact on a bottom line, where do those opportunities sit and how can we best capitalise them? If we're thinking about reaching out to a client and asking for them to contribute expertise across a particular product category, which one converts best?

51:48Ellie Wraith: And if we're asking them to invest their time, their effort in providing these insights for us, how can we make that work as hard as possible from a business point of view nice gliv how about you what is an actionable tip you recommend for our listeners and viewers i think i sort of hinted out before

52:05Liv Day: and we discussed it a little bit but ask them questions i'm such a curious little curious little person to i will always put time into sort of like client call agendas at the first 10 minutes I feel like a client call can often just be, I turn up, I say what I'm working on, I say what the results are, they say call, I say bye. But it can be so, so much, so, so much more than that. So I want to dedicate the first 10 minutes to how is business going? What's changed since we last spoke? What's going on in your industry? Any news about your competitors? I actually saw this competitor's making a load of redundancies.

52:45Liv Day: What does that say about your market? like what's going new in product development i just have like a list of questions that i'll pick and pick and choose from get that bit of a conversation going because those are kind of the places where i get the best sort of insights i think where the people that i work with on a client side don't realize how much expertise they have like they said someone said to me something the other day of oh well we've got two kind of main product categories this one's actually a real pain in the ass to shift because logistically it's really difficult to assemble it costs three times more to ship it it's about the same kind of price but it's a real pain kind of wondering if we discontinue it and i'm like okay cool wish you'd have told me that a couple of weeks ago because i've put a whole strategy together about it but that's a really helpful insight to have that they perhaps didn't even think was worth me knowing and i was like no i've got such a clear idea now of where I prioritize my efforts, where I focus.

53:47Liv Day: I think really understanding how businesses work, how your client's business makes money, which seems like such a basic thing, but all of the different elements that go into that and just keep being curious.

54:01Ellie Wraith: Nice. Next up, a tool, piece of software, anything that you think deserves a bit more attention? Liv, I'll come back to you first.

54:07Liv Day: See, I wrote this down and realized it was such a cop-out because it is neither a tool nor a software. um i love like we've said getting that first party data from clients specifically customer service data so we onboarded a new client i think a month or two ago and they i said if you've got any kind of customer service data that you can use they said oh yeah we've got about like two three years worth of customer service like call transcripts that we've just kept behind like is that is that useful and i was just there like yes yes it's probably the most useful thing you could ever give me so i'm very much a believer of i think at all will only ever take you so far but you obviously then using tools so i've got all of that information put it all through ai that is where ai is the most helpful scraped it for themes common questions things we don't answer on our website currently big challenges pain points things they love about the brand and that's given me content ideas for i don't know how many months

55:12Ellie Wraith: awesome ellie how about you a tool piece software something you recommend that people should be checking out yeah kind kind of similar to live in terms of getting insights that are an absolute goldmine for for content ideas um a tool that i would recommend anybody um is it a tool a site Reddit. I would recommend anybody just check out Reddit. It's easy access, direct access to real people broadly. There is a bit of a bot problem on Reddit, but generally real communities, relevant communities that are discussing things that are annoying them about a service that you might offer, things that they wish a service would offer but doesn't, things that they've experienced that have caused them problems.

56:00Ellie Wraith: And, you know, you can use AI to scrape that as well and analyze, pick out key themes there. Use it to build out kind of unique FAQ sections on a site that competitors aren't answering because it's not something that's listed in a people-so-ask response. It's not something that is explicitly listed as a related question on a search feature. Using those unique insights from actual people who might be your customer and answering those questions, reverse engineering it and figuring out what questions they want answers to and folding those into the most relevant page on your site. Nice. Last but not least, something fun you've been enjoying recently.

56:47Ellie Wraith: No SEO, no marketing, no nothing like that again some fun things ellie i'll come to you first what have you been enjoying recently a great question um i have recently um been on a bit of a series binge and i think apple tv uh is doing some of the best uh best tv shows um at the minute yeah some real high quality stuff on apple tv um i rate them very much um and there is a pretty new series called widow's bay which is which markets itself as a cozy horror. And that's exactly what it is. It's funny. It's spooky. There's great acting. It's got a wild storyline. It's nominated for like 19 Emmys or something ridiculous.

57:32Ellie Wraith: And it's just been recommissioned for season two. So watch season one now. It's an absolute wild ride and you can do it in a weekend. I would highly recommend. Amazing. Yeah, Apple TV is just full of like absolute gems. It's crazy. It is, yeah. The consistent quality of their show is absolutely ridiculous.

57:50Liv Day: Yeah, yeah, yeah.

57:53Ellie Wraith: Liv, what have you been enjoying recently?

57:55Liv Day: I've never been an Apple TV person, so maybe I'm just going to think about all the things that I now have available to watch if I'm now in front of guest subscriptions.

58:03Ellie Wraith: Honestly, mate, the bang for your buck is ridiculous.

58:06Liv Day: Yeah. Interesting.

58:08Ellie Wraith: It's a subscription that I do not regret month on month. Yeah.

58:13Liv Day: I love that. What have I enjoyed? I've enjoyed the summer just this nice summer of music I feel like a lot of people I know myself included I feel like I've been to a gig or festival most weekends of the summer and I am really not mad about it I've had a lot of good good summer festivals and I feel like just being out and about with live music I've actually had sunny weather the amount of times I've been at a festival in the rain crying and wondering why what I'm doing why I'm hoping my tent doesn't blow away i'm very much enjoying a summer of good music plenty of good gigs my chemical romance has been the highlight of the summer so far but still still more to go so we'll report back at the end

58:57Ellie Wraith: of the summer amazing amazing thank you so much both for joining me it's been an absolute pleasure to finally catch up and chat ellie where can people follow you and keep up to date with everything you're doing in SEO marketing? You can follow me on LinkedIn. That's my primary channel. I post on there about everything in content, things that are happening in search, and I'd love to connect with anybody that wants to chat about those things in more detail. Right. And Liv, how about you? How can people follow you?

59:30Liv Day: Same again. I'm on LinkedIn mainly. I was such a Twitter person until it became X, and now I'm just kind of, I'm still there. I'm just kind of lurking. So people are more than welcome to follow me on Twitter, but I don't know what insights they're going to get. But yeah, mainly LinkedIn as well. Awesome.

59:49Ellie Wraith: Folks, go and follow Liv and Ellie and you can go to digitalloft.co.uk and go and check out the agency there as well. I'll put links for everything we've talked about in the share notes down below. Thank you, Liv and Ellie, for joining me. It's been an absolute pleasure.

1:00:01Liv Day: It's amazing. Thank you for having us. Thanks for having us.

1:00:04Ellie Wraith: And that wraps up this week's episode. I hope you enjoyed my conversation with Liv and Ellie as much as I did. And go and check them out. Go and follow them on LinkedIn. Like I said, links for all of that will be in the show notes down below. You can go and check out Digital Loft and what they're doing. I know they run some great events like Digital PR Summit every year as well. So you can go and check those guys out. In the meantime, thank you so much for joining me. Thank you so much for watching or listening. Let me know where you're watching or listening from. I'm intrigued. I know I get the stats from Spotify and some of the stats from YouTube.

1:00:34Ellie Wraith: but let me know where you're watching or where you're listening from. I know we have a pretty global audience, but I'd love to hear from you about where you're from, where you're listening from and what you're doing. Is this kind of a commute kind of podcast? Is this kind of a at work kind of podcast? Let me know what you're doing while you're listening and watching Search With Candor. I'd love to hear what you're up to. As I mentioned at the top of the show, please do like and subscribe and all that good stuff. Go and check out our newsletter, which is coreupdates.com. You can go and get all of the most important SEO news every single week straight to your inbox on a Monday morning.

1:01:10Ellie Wraith: And you can go to searchnurridge.org to check out our upcoming conference, which is on the 24th of September. So stay tuned for that. Go and use my link down below. You'll get a discount. You can get tickets for less than£100 if you use that discount code. And in the meantime, I will see you next week. Thank you and have a lovely week.