SEO Pros: Craig Dewart @ MyContentPal & Link City

MICHAEL:
Hi guys, Michael here. Do you want a second opinion on your SEO? Head to theseoshow.co and hit the link in the header. We'll take a look under the hood at your SEO, your competitors and your market and tell you how you can improve. All right, let's get into the show.

INTRO: It's time for The SEO Show, where a couple of nerds talk search engine optimization so you can learn to compete in Google and grow your business online. Now here's your hosts, Michael and Arthur.

MICHAEL: Hello, Michael Costin here. It is time for another episode of the SEO show. So this week, I have a special guest on the show. Well, all guests are special, but this one's a special guest as well. His name is Craig Dewart. Now, Craig actually runs three different SEO related businesses. One's in the content space, one is in the link building space, and the other is in the recruitment space. So especially recruiting SEO people. So he's got exposure across three different parts of SEO, three different types of customers, three different types of service offerings. I thought it would be cool to bring him on as an SEO pro and talk about how he got started in the world, how he learned it, of course, all of that sort of grounding stuff. And then each of those different pillars or the different businesses he runs, what he's seeing out there in the wild at the moment running those businesses. So let's jump over to our chat now with Craig Dewart. Hi Craig, welcome to the SEO show for people who may not have heard of you. If you could please let us know a bit about yourself and your background, we'll get going from there.

CRAIG: Thank you for having me on. So I'm Craig. I've been an SEO for probably close to eight years now. It's been a while. I've been in the game since I was just before I was 18. The last two years, two plus years, I've been running my own agencies. I run three. I run SEO for Hire, My Content Pal, and Link City. So Link City is a link building company, My Content Pal is a content company, and SEO for Hire is an SEO specialist recruitment company. So yeah, we run all three, mainly based in the UK, but we have staff all around the world now. And yeah, we help SEO do better SEO.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, I actually came across you via my content pal on Twitter. That's where I first became aware of you. And I thought it'd be great to bring you on the show to have a chat about that because you, you're touching on a few key aspects of SEO there, particularly content and links through the two brands. And then of course, hiring people, building a team, which is getting harder and harder these days with the skills being in demand. So I wanted to cover off, I guess, all of those topics as we chat, but, um, I always like to find out from people how they got into SEO, you know, where did they discover it? What was it sort of a conscious thing, or did you stumble across it? And maybe if you could tell us a bit about your travels to get started and then we'll move into chatting about the different businesses you have on the go.

CRAIG: Yeah, so I used to DJ. So basically I was quite young, I was only 17. No one would give me like a gig, no one would hire me as a DJ, I just had no experience. So I ended up running my own club night. So I'd hire the venue out, put it on a set. I did that about seven or eight times, realised it was quite hard to hire a venue out, like they never made it easy. So I started a website called Venue Guru and then I went and got investment and I don't know why I did this, but I literally would go by all the local businesses, chap in the door and ask for money. And one of the people that I asked was called Colin Boyd. He owned a record shop. I didn't know he ran an ACO agency too. So Colin gave me investment. He was one of the investors. The startup eventually failed, but Colin went, why don't you just become an intern for my company? I thought, okay, I'll do that. So I did. I did an apprenticeship with Colin at Boyd Digital, worked my way to the top of his company and managed an outreach team there. I spent quite a few years there and again, just going from being an intern to managing an outreach team within a few years gave me so much experience. I remember going to his house one night and asking to build this team. And luckily enough, it was at a time when they were also thinking of building this team. So they gave me a shot. Not sure why they did back then because I was young, I was managing people way older than me, but they did and they made me through it. And I got to, I mean like one of the big clients was GripOn, so I was going on weekly meetings with GripOn. I was managing a campaign for them. And I had a ton of experience that early on. So I think my hunger is what's helped me scale to this point and what's helped me get all these free agencies. But also, I've had a lot of experience from the very early days of my SEO career. And yeah, that's what started it all, came from DJing.

MICHAEL: Well, we have a lot in common, actually, because I used to run club nights and events and DJ full time as well before I became a DJ. So that's a chat for another time. But you mentioned there that you ran the outreach team. Was that a segue into Link City, your link building agency, or what was your sort of first move once you moved into doing stuff for yourself?

CRAIG: So, I actually became fascinated with Ecom products. Back then, I think a lot of SEOs go through this, we have this power to rank whatever we want, technically. We can see the keyword research, we have access to big data, and it's very, very easy to get distracted with ideas. And I had a new idea every week. I just wanted to do it all. So that was like a big failure. I eventually went and joined this company. It was a third package company, FreeLP. So basically they would bring products in, they'd ship it out to people. So I got to see and see the health industry and supplements. And I actually went to Sweden and made my own What's it called? Probiotic for this brand. So that was fun. So I got distracted with that for quite a while after I left Boy Digital. Then I tried to freelance while I was doing all this. So I was trying to build an e-com product for this company, trying to build an SEO freelance company, which I sucked at because as much as I had all this SEO experience, I didn't have the social skills. I didn't have the sales skills. I also had a reductive ego, which I think is very easy to get, especially when you're young and you have these skills. Yeah, I remember trying to get clients and telling them I was £500 a day, which is like clients don't want to hear that. They want to hear what you can do for them and then hear the price. And I was just being, yeah, I'm £500 a day. It's never going to work. So I had a float before I went freelance and that float Yeah it took about six months before it dried up and that's when I thought okay cool I met a guy that I actually hired a few years before for Boy Digital but I can't remember what happened either he declined the offer or my boss declined him I can't remember but I remember really liking him and for some reason I ended up speaking to him again at this point and he suggested we do a link building agency. He had experience in links, he had a database, he had money, he had a successful affiliate website and I obviously had this experience running an agency, not running an agency, running a team within an agency and I got to see how Colin and Grant did it too and I think that's one Without their mentorship, I wouldn't be where I am today. I really wouldn't. They opened a lot of doors. And it was good to see the different types of management and how they both operated. Colin was one of these guys that would throw shit at a wall and see what stuck. He's very, very experiential. He's a black cat. He's been in the game a long time. Grant was really good at corporate side and managing the agency. So I've seen both sides. And yeah, I just wasn't prepared to be a freelancer. And I think a lot of freelancers aren't. I think they go in with that ego again, with big intentions and big goals and they very, very quickly get imposter syndrome and very quickly get disheartened by how tough it actually is. The truth is, freelancing, half of it isn't even SEO. It's literally sales and everything else that goes along with it. And I just wasn't ready for it. So that's why I started Link City, which was really good for me because it was a product. So way easier to sell a product than a service, in my opinion, especially when you're selling to experienced SEOs. So I would sell the product, show them what it was, they buy in because they know, they've already bought into SEO, they're selling on now, they just know the parts they need. So way easier to sell. Within a couple of months, I got 10k a month and that started this whole venture.

MICHAEL: Great, awesome. So yeah, your business Link City, you're largely selling links to other SEOs, agencies, maybe have you built an outreach team? that runs the outreach efforts for LinkCity, just sort of brought what you knew from the old agency over to that service?

CRAIG: Yeah, exactly. We changed a few things, like we use Pitchbox and stuff now whereas in our agency, we use BuzzStream. Same kind of setup, but I use obviously Filipinos and we're digital. I probably should be telling you they're protesters, but yeah, we did change some things. We just kept improving on it, improving on it. But Link City, again, like, Serenity SEOs is cool, but there's plenty of link builders out there. So we had to make a difference. So we mixed it up, and we now make sure that if we get your placement on a website, we'll make sure it has a high entity match to your target page as well. So we do things like that. We also found that a lot of these providers would build links, and then three months later, they would be de-indexed or whatever. It becomes an orphan page because it doesn't crawl again, and then your link's in this orphan page. It doesn't provide any value. have been working on making the product different and making it more bang for your buck so it actually provides value. So we're always working on things. But I actually failed, you know, as soon as COVID hit we lost all our clients because it's a product based business and like many SEO services it really paused or stopped. So we lost all our clients within 48 hours when COVID hit and that's what caused us to pivot because I never By the way, I never liked content. I hated content. I hated it with a passion and couldn't write content at all. And again, that's because it's quite tough to get into. Back then, I was looking for the easy way out all the time. But yeah, if COVID didn't happen, I would never get into content.

MICHAEL: Okay, cool. Well, on the topic of links, we'll move over to my content pound in a moment. But when you say everything dried up during COVID, Are you still running? Is LinkCity still a push for you? Are you still running at product ties or are you maybe shifting to trying to get retainers, you know, monthly subscriptions? Or has it been more, you know, that experience has told you, you should move over to content and try and, I guess, diversify?

CRAIG: Yeah, for a good eight months, we stopped really selling links. And then we had a couple of clients that would continue to buy links, buy links. I just kept it going, which was good because it allowed us to work on the product and then use the links for our own stuff. In the beginning, I would build my own affiliate sites as well. But I don't know, they've got to a point where we were getting so many clients in and so many different niches that some of them were in the same niches that we were building sites in. And I felt I'm not sure. I felt like it was, um, I was stepping on their toes. I felt like it was a conflict of interest. So I stopped building the affiliate sites for so long. Um, but anyway, link city just kept running. It kept doing its thing. Maintains after we brought it back, it easily maintained like 10 K plus again for quite a while. Um, which is pretty decent. Um, and again, I like to keep the team there, keep running. It wasn't running at the same capacity that it could have been, um, that we were building it for anyway. But eventually when I got my ContentPal up and running and had its own managers and it was doing its thing, I did move back to LinkCity. It's actually done the whole flip now. LinkCity is my main focus just now. My ContentPal is completely cruising. My ContentPal is doing its own thing. I have a really, really solid team there. We're now back at Links because I think with the way AI is going, the way everything's going just now, I reckon there's going to be another big push in Links. Whereas for quite a while there, everyone was Yeah, buy a shitload of content. Did I answer your question there?

MICHAEL: Yeah. Yeah, you did. So essentially, I guess the reading between the lines there, you've got that diversification going. If one's doing well, you can focus on the other. Likewise, if something tanks, you can move over to the other one and sort of have that redundancy, which is awesome. Love that approach and serving different markets within the SEO world, which is great. You touched on a few things that I wanted to chat about, you know, AI and moving away from content to links. Before we get into the chat about AI and content and that sort of stuff, when it comes to links, you know, with our agency, with the link building we do, We have pretty strict metrics and I guess ways of assessing links. I was wondering with you, do you have an approach that you take to links? You know, like what makes a good link in your world? What should listeners be looking at when they're trying to weigh up links or quality links?

CRAIG: So I always tell my team, as long as you can make a case for that link, I'm happy for you to build it. But if a client ever came back to me and says, why did you build this? And you have no reason, then I'd be pissed off. There's no excuse for that. So we look at a number of different points and we vet each link very carefully. Inbound to outbound links. So for example, you've seen sites, and you see this more and more these days too, they're sending like 40, 50, 60 plus links a month and they're all paid guest posts. And for me, that site sending links out the way it is, It's just not a good fit. And it's hard and hard to find things that aren't doing that these days because everyone's doing outreach. It really is tough. We do sell in DR, but it's more just to kind of bracket our links into an industry standard. For me, if I wanted to, I can manipulate DR very, very easily. I really could. One thing we always look for as well is trying to build that kind of topical relevance, so making sure the organic keywords are similar to our target URL, making sure that we can, again, like I said, build a case for it. And then again, looking at your obvious stuff like anchor profile, there's nothing too spammy in there. That's the other thing as well, more looking for things that are going wrong. So has there been a huge decline in traffic? If so, that's slightly scary. There's something going on there, I don't really want to build that. Google isn't enjoying it anymore, isn't giving that site love, then why will your link stick? The other thing as well is just looking at the site and straight up seeing if there's any dangerous footprints there. It is becoming harder and harder for Link City right now, especially because we are fussy and that's why we charge high rates too. We aren't doing the whole mass placement thing. I'm more of a quality over quantity sort of person and I think that also keeps you safe too. We are doing a lot more tube linking now because I think, yeah, it really does pack a punch when you do tube linking as well. But then it's also the content as well. So even if you've got a site Like, even if you've got to say it's topic relevant, but then you're putting on content and a lot of people are doing this, they're just using some, some writer who's offshore, English is their second language, they're doing 500 words. Um, like Google hasn't got any index, that's shit, but they may, but again, is the website going to build links to it, internal links to it? And if they're not, is that page going to be crawled in three months? When we're building links now, we are, like I said, trying to get a high-entity match. So we're trying to make sure that the page that you're linking to and the page that we're writing for that placement has a high-entity match. Otherwise, I actually don't have any proof for this yet. We're working on it just now, but it makes sense if you look at how software and that works too. If these pages are very similar with entities, then I should stick. And that's just, it's no extra work for us really. So why not do it?

MICHAEL: Yeah. I love that. I love that approach. Like a lot of that is similar to how we do things, but your take on entity match there makes a lot of sense. What are you just crawling at? Like, are you using Google's natural language preview tool to figure that out? Are you using other software to, you know, run one site through, see what the entity matches and then the linking site through, what's your general approach to that?

CRAIG: So we're actually building our own tool. So we've got our own tool that does it, but it just pulls from TextRazor's API. So if you, if anyone watching just goes to TextRazor, you can put in the target page, put it in there, crawl it, show all the entities, all the topics and stuff. We just have our own tool to make that easier. I mean, to be fair, you could just use Safari if you were to, but that would be expensive. So if it would charge more.

MICHAEL: Yeah. No, cool. I really like that. And, um, on face value, it sounds like something that makes sense and would, you know, factor into the ranking side of things. So cool. Um, you touched on content there, you know, the content being an important thing, and obviously that's a pretty good segue into my content pal, the business you've got going there. So obviously link city, people can come to you by links. It's a productized link building. That makes sense. What's what's my content pal do? You know, that's different from the link city approach.

CRAIG: So content is expensive, you need a lot of it. And again, in the beginning, so like how we started my content Palo Verde at today, it's night and day. In the beginning, we were just trying to get people affordable content that was optimized by software. But since then, like we've It's taken us two years to get to this point. We are constantly working on improving it, constantly training. We have a weekly workshop where we just look at one part of content. And I told you earlier, I hated content. It was the worst thing ever for me. I remember having to write guest posts back in the day. And I found it horrible. It was one of the most draining things for me. But now I really appreciate it. I appreciate the importance of content, obviously, because I've been forced to with my content pile. The only reason I started my content pile was because there was a big gap in the market back then. Software SEO was taking off. There was agencies out there. Yeah, word agents and that have been about for a long time. But there was still a gap in the market, especially for software optimized content. And we just leveraged that. That was the first thing. I managed to get a contract for 200,000 words. I wrote the whole thing myself in a month. That content that I wrote back then would never pass just now, our standards. But I did it back then to start the company, and that's how we did get started. Again, for we have three teams, we have a prepping team, we have the writing team, we have a proofing team. I think most writers suck at proofing, it's just they just do, which is why we put a lot of money into proofing team. We were very careful with who we hired for proofing team. We were very careful with who we hired for all three parts to be honest, but most of the proofing team because that person has to look at content and they can't miss anything, that's the thing. They have to stare at words all day, huge walls of words, which makes your eyes go square and stuff. So there's other things we put in place too, like we capped how long we can proof per day, how long we can proof per week. There's strict requirements and like we can't go over them otherwise we found that uh deterioration and proofing things could slip um with the prepping team that's essentially just setting up for SEO success so I don't want my writers focus too much on optimization, because I find that writers aren't like that. Writers are very creative people. They want to get into a flow. They want to just enjoy their craft. They don't want to have to worry about search engines. So we know how to prep, so they understand the basics of it. But We have people that can prep for them and what they do is they basically look at, so they'll go to the setup, they'll build, their job is to build a comprehensive page plan. So they'll look at Google Suggest, people also ask questions, they'll look at your competition, they'll then build a header plan from that. Phrase, we've started using Phrase. I love Phrase now. I think their outline builder is unreal. There's some really, really cool parts of Phrase that I like. Also something I'm playing around with Phrase just now is their originality score. Don't know if you've seen it, but that's quite a new feature. But yeah, back to the prepping team. they have to set the article up for the writer. So they'll create a Suffer doc, they'll change the settings in the back end of Suffer, and they'll take the client's brief, and just make sure everything on that page is ready to go, and put in some citations and stuff. We now offer an advanced briefing service too, which incorporates Market Muse, which is really cool. So we use Suffer for optimization, we're then using Phrase for curation, and then we're now playing with Market Muse for topic modeling. So again, Preppers, that's their job. They then send it to the writer, the writer comes in, they write content. I don't tell my writers to stress over the score at all. The only reason we're using Surfer is to give them an idea of the keywords. I say focus the top 25% of the keywords and then that's it. If they do that and the prepper's done their job, they will almost always hit 65 plus in surfer without even trying. So then if they then try and get keywords in, they'll usually get to 70 plus. I prefer to go up to 70 plus, do more articles, send that to the client. I don't think the client should be trying to get to 90 plus, 100 plus optimized articles. What I think they should do is Get it indexed, let it rank for three to six months, then review and search console what keywords are coming in, and then start to lace in keywords that could make that piece better. But do that after the first six months, don't do that from day one, because then you run the risk of over-optimizing, right? That's the approach that goes to proofing team. They will proof and edit that work and either send it back to the writer or they will send it to the client. And that's the process really. There's a lot more to it, but I could talk about it all day.

MICHAEL: No, that's brilliant. Really interesting. And what would I, um, you know, let's say I'm a client. I want a 2000 word article done on, you know, X topic. What sort of a turnaround time, because it sounds quite involved there, quite different to going on TextBroker and getting, you know, something churned out or, you know, using AI tool or something like that. What's the sort of turnaround time on a typical piece of content?

CRAIG: Honestly, it depends. Our biggest bottleneck is the proofing team. It's hard to find proofers. So we aren't the fastest, we're not the cheapest. We are the best at quality, I think so anyway. Again, our reviews say that too. We just get constantly good reviews online. With turnaround time, we could get you, it depends how much you order too, right? If you order, we've had some clients order like half a million words, and we're like, shit, that's a lot of content. We had someone ask us for three million words in a month, and we're like, we could never do this for you. We just could never do that for you. But yeah, back to turnaround time, minimum, like, sorry, like, yeah, minimum seven days, like, there's no way you're going to get something quicker than that. And the time that goes through all three teams, talking like two days per team. Which, yeah, it does take time, but we'd rather wait a little bit longer just to make sure it's done 100% right, rather than getting it really quick and then sending it back, which happens, I'd imagine, with a lot of agencies. And look, that happens with us too. I wouldn't say we don't get anything returned. With the first few articles, we always say to people too, because we used to only have a minimum order of 3,000 mods, but then we upped it to 10,000. people stay with us longer now, we get more clients now. And the reason I think that is, is because when you order just one article, we may match up with the wrong rate or we don't fully understand. The content is very subjective, so we don't fully understand what you're after yet because almost every client sucks at briefing. They just do. They just produce really, really bad briefs. And it's only after they've seen that article they remember to add stuff in. So it's usually only by the second or third article where we get it right and smash it. And then after that point, Like I said, since upping from 3,000 words to 10,000 words, our left-hand value has increased, and people are staying longer and ordering more. And I think that's why. It's because we get a better chance to get to know you as a client and get to know what you're looking for and your needs. But again, what slows us down is our proofers. So we don't have that many proofers, hard-to-find proofers. And again, we have to cap how many hours they do each week. So if I can get more proofers, we can scale a lot more, because it's Not easy to find writers, but there's a lot of people out there wanting writing jobs. There's a lot of careers that they could fall into, that they could become a writer. But also, well, yeah, only like 95% of the people that do the test, they all fail. Only 5% actually pass, because we have a writing test. And that's quite a long process, too, to be fair. So yeah, seven days minimum, but probably it will be two weeks.

MICHAEL: Well, what you've just covered there is a good segue to chat about your other business SEO for hire, you know, the difficulties of finding staff. But before we do that, I guess on the topic of content, I just wanted to get your thoughts on AI copywriting and, you know, the quality of the tools, maybe the pros and cons, helpful content update. I guess being a content agency owner, you would probably have some pretty strong thoughts in that space as to, you know, the standard of those tools and whether people should use them or not. So yeah. What do you reckon about AI copywriting tools?

CRAIG: So I actually like AI funnily enough, but we don't use it and I don't think writers can use it. I don't know how you would manage that. We have 50 plus writers. I'm not sure how we would, give them AI and expect them to use it. Saying that implies I don't have trust in my writers, but We do hire a lot of people. It's only one person using it wrong, runs the risk of us losing a massive client. So we don't use AI at all. I've been playing with AI a lot more recently on personal stuff and that, because I'd be certainly not to. I run a content company. It's one of the biggest threats to that company. A long time ago, I had a battle with the idea that AI could triple my content power but I really don't think you can. I think people, yeah I don't think people fully appreciate content so then you look at AI and you see it produce all this fluffy content but for me it's very very wooden. Like I can show my writers a piece of AI content and just ask them if it's AI or not and they'll tell me if it's AI. Some cases you can't see it, like some cases if the topic isn't that technical it's pretty good but I don't know, I don't like it. I think it encourages bad habits. I think it encourages people to skip stuff. And in the end, I think Google has got a good chance of figuring it out, that's for sure. There's tools out there just now that can detect AI. They aren't that good, it's hit or miss sometimes, but they can do it. Yeah. And also, by the way, we had someone do a test on my content, how they tested my content, how they tested for the three other agencies and an AI tool, which is critical test. We came out on top, luckily, and it was good. But the AI that they used actually suggested information that would have killed their user. So In terms of fact-checking and stuff, it's wild. You really do need to ensure your articles are fact-checked, they're just truthful, it's not a complete fluff fabrication. You have a responsibility to upload content that makes sense and doesn't kill someone. So yeah, I thought that was quite a cool case study for us. But yeah, I'm sticking with it on the site. I think it should be quite good. I think it'd be good for Writer's block, I think if you get stuck and you can't figure out what to write next, it can prompt good ideas. Playing around with it for tweets, I don't think it's any decent yet. I don't think it's good yet, but again, it's been good for writer's block for me. That's the only use case I can see, writer's block.

MICHAEL: I'm inclined to agree. Like I've played around with different You know, there'd be tools for Twitter that supposedly write tweets for you and they just make no sense or, you know, they can supposedly write copy using different copywriting frameworks like sales copy, but you put your, your prompts in and you can see it just lifting passages of text wholesale off some other businesses website and putting that out there. So then you just need a person to edit it and rewrite it all and work on it. So you may as well have it written with the approach that you sort of covered off before with that, you know, planning, writing, editing, And you're probably going to come out in front anyway. And yeah, I sort of see a lot of content services though, or maybe content freelancers, copywriters, you can sort of tell when they're using AI and a lot are, you know, just trying to bang out articles and I guess make profit doing it that way. So definitely something to be aware of in the SEO space at the moment, because Google is rattling the cages about AI content and, you know, releasing updates to the algorithm to try and tackle it. And they're only going to keep doing that. So. Yeah, be very careful when playing with it would be my advice.

CRAIG: Yeah, for sure. Plus, like we have quite a big checklist of things that need to be done to make an article good. And you mentioned helpful content. That is obviously one of the most recent things everyone's talking about. We have been looking into it more and I just don't understand how people can Take off all these things you need to on the writer's checklist while using AI. It's so backwards. Why would you use AI and then go back? You're better just doing it right the first time. So yeah, that's my approach on it as well.

MICHAEL: Yep, totally agree. All right, well, let's move on to have a little chat about hiring people because you mentioned 50 writers there before and difficulty finding editors in the content world. And I know you run SEO hiring service as well. So it would be good to get your thoughts on, I guess, building careers and recruiting people in this world. Maybe if you can give us a bit of a background first about your business in that space, SEO for Hire, what it does and sort of the problem it's solving.

CRAIG: Yeah, so we're in a market just now, a candidate-driven market. The candidates are basically running the show because there isn't enough talented SEOs. There's a lot of money coming into SEO, but there isn't enough people to actually do SEO. And like, for example, we have two clients from Australia because they just can't find talented SEOs in Australia, and there's not enough. So with SEO4Hire, Yeah, we basically wanted to be the matchmaker in SEO. We realized as well that people were joining companies and it just wasn't the right fit, and then they would leave a few months into it. It takes a lot of time, a lot of people to sit through. When I put up a job ad now, I'm getting chef supply, I'm getting all sorts of random careers because I guess there's a lot of redundancies after COVID. A lot of people looking for a change of careers. There's a lot of different things. So we want to be a matchmaker and we want to make sure that, okay, so if you're trying to hire, you don't waste hours and hours interviewing people, asking the right questions. So we created a vetting process. We got it backed by people that go on our podcast. So we started running the SEO for Hire podcast. We started asking them like, outside the interview when we do, outside the podcast, sorry, when we do like the kind of warm up and stuff, we would ask some things, get them to look at our process. And then we use this to start vetting candidates. So say you want to use SEO for hire, we would bring you qualified candidates straight away. And again, I think recruitment companies are just vultures in general. We don't want to be like that. We wanted to make sure that we saved you time, but also made sure that it was a good match for both the candidate and you, because the candidate is going to be spending two thirds of their life there, I think it's something like 90,000 hours of their life they spend in work. So why do that for someone that you don't like? a job you don't enjoy and that place is just not for you. It's silly. So we wanted to just make everyone happy really. And it's a really nice business model too because you've got people making more money, the candidate makes more money because we usually get them a significantly higher salary. But The client's happy to pay it because that's a talented SEO. They feel confident in their decision. And that candidate is going to work hard now for the client because it respects them. They're on a nice salary. They're motivated. They will work hard for the client and make the client want money. And in the end, everyone's happy. And that's our approach. It's, again, quality over quantity. We're not these vultures that just get everyone jobs. We are matchmakers in SEO.

MICHAEL: Okay. Well, on the topic of matchmaking in the current climate, what would you say, you know, candidates, what are they looking for? And then conversely, what things are agencies looking for in their candidates at the moment? I think that would be interesting to our audience on both sides.

CRAIG: So let's just talk about candidates first. Work from home. That's like a huge one. Almost every candidate we speak to went to work from home. But we've had some agencies come to us, they just straight up still want the office. And I get it, I totally get it. I like the office. I think the whole work from home thing, I don't think people know how to work from home. I think, again, I was working from home before COVID was even a thing. And I remember struggling with it back then. It took me a long time to figure it out. I think in the beginning, one big thing that people argue for working from home is goods because they don't need to commute. And then because they don't need to commute, they can go to the gym or whatever and they can work harder but I think that's cool for the first little while but then it goes the other way so they're not getting social interaction they're not getting like they fall into a slump which then again decreases their output, decreases their mental health, their happiness, blah, blah, blah. So I don't think people can work from home, but that's a big thing that people are pushing for. Everyone wants to work from home. Everyone's wanting way bigger salaries. We see some candidates ask for unjustified salaries, if I'm really honest. And then we see some agencies trying to hire people with too little of a salary. And they have old school expectations. Yeah, so I've seen that. And then the question you asked was, what are clients looking for? So I don't think that's really changed. I don't think that's really changed. But what clients now have to pay like 10, 15k more than what they used to. So When they can get by that, we don't really work with anyone that can't get by that. If they can't get by that, I'd say they wanted a £22,000 salary or something for an SEO lead, we just wouldn't work with them. Because straight away, they aren't going to be open for change. But it just depends on the role. We're getting a lot of SEO manager positions, SEO leads. So we brought a job to the UK just now. It's for £130,000. It's for an SEO lead. The person we've placed, he's on his very last stage. He just had his last interview. He basically has a project he has to wrap up this month, so he can start in November. So we're now just waiting for the offer. Both client and candidate seems very happy. We would have brought a £130,000 job to the UK. Now for the UK market, that's insane. That's such a huge, like the average salary in the UK is probably £45,000. Now, I wonder, average salary UK SEO is probably, yeah, £42,000 to £45,000. So that's wild, £130,000 salary, that's changing his life. And also, it sets a precedent for the UK market, like people need to up the game. If you want an SEO of that caliber, it's a very, very good SEO. If you want someone of that caliber, you need to pay for it.

MICHAEL: Out of interest on this topic, you know, with there being a dearth, like sort of undersupply of candidates at the moment, where do you see it headed in, let's say, two, three years time? Do you think The market will catch up in terms of supply, you know, people will be trained up and then those monster salaries will still be around or there'll be pressure on those people with monster salaries. Do you have a bit of a crystal ball for what you think is going to happen with all the pressure in the market at the moment?

CRAIG: I think a few things are going to happen, I think. So there's now people working in an agency, they're pretty happy in the agency, but they're seeing their mates jump job and then getting five, 10K plus pay rises. They want the same internally. But if someone comes to you and asks for that internally, you're kind of side swept, you don't see that coming, like you just don't. So now you have to give someone a massive pay rise. This is putting pressure on agencies. So either they finally compromise or that person leaves the agency. You either go and find a new job, which is fine, or we're seeing a big increase in consultants now. I'm sure a lot more people go freelance, and I think a lot of clients prefer that too, because they realize that in some agencies there are a lot of wasted spend, and they just prefer working with consultants, more one-to-one. So we're seeing that. I think some agencies are starting to put more into their internal training. So I know one agency, for example, based in Manchester, they have their own internal recruiter. They work with external recruiters, but they have their own internal recruiter too. And then they have a really good onboarding program. And they've onboarded something like 14 junior SEOs, people that don't have experience, they're just straight out of uni or college. And they're training them from the ground up. And they know that they're not going to have a profit on them for the next six months, but they'll have those people for like one, one and a half years. They're getting them significantly cheaper. So I think a lot of people will put more money and energy into onboarding programs and training and stuff, but that's pretty hard. I've tried to figure out if I can build that as a product and there's not much money and it's very hard to scale. It's quite a tough one to kind of, yeah, it's a tough one. It really is.

MICHAEL: Yeah, definitely. Funnily enough, we've kicked around the idea. Well, we've always said, you know, if you could come up with a training program that accelerated people's learnings in the space and like created these candidates, that could be a business. But as you say, it's pretty tough business to try and build something like that. So can we see how it plays out?

CRAIG: Sorry, yeah, you can teach them, you can give them a course, but are they going to take it all in? Do they get real experience? And what have they actually retained from that course? And I think that's the problem with courses. So someone can build something where they actually learn something, then get to apply it, then fantastic.

MICHAEL: Yeah, absolutely. In this world, you know, and a lot of others, but I would say very much so in this world, that hands-on technical skills, getting your hands dirty, building sites, building links, understanding it all, you just can't beat that sort of on-the-ground experience for sure. Well, look mate, this has been great chatting. I think what I wanted to cover off, you know, you've got three different businesses on the go there in different fields, lots of staff, systems, processes. So you obviously have a lot of lessons in scaling and bootstrapping and stuff that you've learned along the way. I was wondering if, well, I thought it could be cool to maybe cover off, you know, if you have three main tips or pointers or things you've learned along the way, someone looking to build a business in this space, you know, what would you tell them about bootstrapping or trying to scale one of these businesses?

CRAIG: three tips okay that's pretty hard there's definitely a lot um i think before we even go into the tips there's one book everyone should get it's called scaling up and it's by a guy called bern i can't remember the scaling up mastering the rockefeller secrets as soon as i got to as soon as you get to like 10 15 people this book's gonna be perfect and it's basically my baby for scaling um and that's one major reason why I've done so well. And the second thing that I improved on was the mindset and realizing that how I am as like a leader. And the reason I keep using that term is because it's the best way of describing it. But the reality is, that's what you are. As soon as you have a team of 10 plus people, that's what you need to become. You can't manage them like you'd maybe manage a five to 10 person team. Like you really do need to change the way you think. And for me, that was being more empathetic and a bunch of other stuff. I found when I did that, that they worked harder and they grew the business for me. Um, and that's my focus just now. My focus is trying to get more senior people, um, trying to create a really nice culture. We had quite a lot of issues with culture problems in the past. Like I remember during COVID, I don't know, six months after my content started, it was like Christmas time. Everyone was working from home. It's Christmas, but we're all locked up because of lockdown. We had like, Everyone was sad. Everyone was sad. I think everyone felt that worldwide. But that was my first experience with, shit, I need to change something here because I need to get these guys out of this and encourage them to keep at the KPIs, keep high quality work. I went on a journey after that of self-development. I still don't have it right. I'm still very, very far from it. But the reality is, if you have a big team, you need to lead them right. You need to make sure they're getting up-skilled. Some people come to me, and I'm just going to be very blunt, they come to me with in my eyes the silliest of issues and like asked me a year ago and I'd have been like it's just so stupid um but now I realize shit I can't really react like that um need to be empathetic need to kind of hear them out help them fix it because If I just kind of push them off, they'll just be upset. If I help them fix it or give a solution or whatever, chances are I can fix it significantly quicker, and then they just go back to doing their job anyway. So if you look at it from a pure business mindset, then it's the best way of getting an ROI, as horrible as that sounds, but you're also helping people too. And I think a lot of people watching these SEO podcasts, the reality is we're all money focused too. We're all too money focused, I think. anyone that runs their own SEO agency is financially motivated, that's for sure. And that's why I use that term. But for me, investing in my team has helped me grow. This year, we've successed. In January, we had a really, really ropey cash flow issue where I genuinely thought we were going to go under. But I also realized, well, this is my last point then. So this is a very good point. I thought we were going to go in there. I thought we had a cash flow issue. I thought we had run port-based businesses. We don't have that many subscriptions. It's very, very easy to look gloomy at some points. Because you have a contract, that's it done. Because a lot of our clients will come, buy 500K wards and disappear for five months, then come back. So yeah, it's pretty easy to have a mindset of the cups half empty rather than half full. So for me, trying to be positive all the time. Whenever I'm negative, it tends to be pretty shit, like the situation has to be bad. It goes the wrong way. When I keep a positive mindset and just keep pushing on, I have better energy, I'm able to do more things. I don't sit and stuff anymore. I used to sit and stuff all the time and be upset over it. And then the reality is I just waste four or five hours of my own energy and time and day when I could just go and work like a dog for another two or three hours and then enjoy another two hours of my own time. So right now I focus a lot on how I go to bed. I think the bedtime routine is the most important part. So I'll make sure I talk about it. And the thing is, if you told me this a few years ago, I'd have laughed at it and said it's so silly, like it's got nothing to do with running an agency. I would go to bed now and, okay, cool, what am I grateful for today? What actually went right? Rather than focusing on what went wrong. Because when you run free, you see shit goes wrong all the time. But there's a lot of shit that goes right. And the thing is, it's easy to look at the stuff that goes wrong and focus in on that. And then you just go in a downward spiral. And that's been my biggest realization of 2022. And it's helped me overall grow. I reckon we'll end this year 10xing, which is kind of wild. It really is wild. And that came from me. Thank you.

MICHAEL: Awesome. I love that. I'm sort of hearing that, you know, celebrate the wins and the downs and losses. They're never as big as they might seem at the time. You know, often you sleep on it and it seems way less than it did at the time.

CRAIG: Do you get that?

MICHAEL: Do I get it? Yeah.

CRAIG: Yeah. How do you do?

MICHAEL: Um, so well, like I sort of have, um, with our business, like you can, you can sort of start to get like in the mindset that things are going wrong or you could be scared. Every decision can sort of seem scary. You know, let's say taking an office, the first office, then the next office and the next office. And at the time it's a huge decision and you're sort of worrying about it, stressing about it. But then a few months later, You look at it and wonder how you lived without it. Or it could be the same if you're hiring someone, taking on a new salary. And it is a mindset thing. Like you can get caught up in thinking that your business could fall apart and it could all be negative. Or you can look at it as a plus. This is going to help you get to that next level. So I sort of agree with what you say there. You need to shift the way you think about things. And that helps you sleep better at night. It helps you deal with it all. Helps you interact with your clients and your team better. So totally agree with everything you were saying there. But yeah, look, I think that's been a really great chat and discovering a bit more about how you approach SEO. For people who want to connect with you and get in touch after the show, is there any way they can go to get in touch?

CRAIG: Yeah, just probably Twitter. Twitter is the best one. So my Twitter handle is CraigB0412. I tweet a lot. It's not AI, but I do tweet a lot. And yeah, that's the best place for me. But we're now building So the group's called the Charlie Delta Group, that's my big move just now. We're looking to add more businesses to it, which will be like tools and just other things that we're looking to build our suite so that we can service SEOs worldwide. But yeah, if you're interested in any of this, just go to my Twitter. The SEO for Hire podcast is pretty cool too, maybe check that out. Yeah, we're focusing more on recruitment and how people hire people. But yeah, that's us.

MICHAEL: Awesome. Well, thanks, Craig, for coming on the show. Been great chatting to you. Have a great afternoon. Thanks, man.

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