In this episode of the Forte Growth Podcast, we interview Edd Dawson! Edd recently orchestrated a significant exit from broadband.co.uk, and in this episode, we dive deep into the intricacies of that venture. We’ll explore his unique strategies in optimizing conversion rates, building out a diversified portfolio of broadband and energy sites, and his success in crafting a livelihood solely from affiliate marketing within those domains.
But our conversation doesn’t stop there. We’ll delve into his usage of Sasktel, the keywords that drive traffic, and a special tool that’s discussed in detail. The tool is called Keywords People Use (and with an exclusive promo code “FORTE” for your first month free), is designed to help you discover what questions people are asking on Google. From utilizing features like People Also Ask to tapping into sources like Reddit or Quora and employing Google AutoComplete, it’s an all-in-one solution for clustering your topical ideas and managing your keywords.
So, whether you’re curious about how Edd has turned his websites into profitable enterprises, eager to learn about his daily routines, or interested in his thoughts on AI and its integration into his workflow, this episode promises a rich, engaging experience.
Watch the interview with Edd Dawson
YOU TUBE VIDEO EMBED
Listen on Spotify or watch on YouTube.
Learn more
Links to any sites mentioned on the podcast:
- www.broadband.co.uk
- Follow Edd on Twitter @channel5
- Keywords People Use – Code “FORTE” = first month free (Not for unlimited plan)
Transcript
James:
All right, welcome to the Forte Growth podcast. Today we have Ed Dawson. Welcome, Ed!
Edd:
Hi there, James, how you doing?
James:
I’m good, thank you. No, thanks for coming on your original site that you indexed in your broadband website. I don’t know if… Are those sites still around or is that a relic of the past? I might be completely wrong.
Edd:
No, no, I mean, the stock, my original site, yeah, broadband at credit UK, that is still around, that’s still going strong. We founded that 2004, so nearly 20 years ago. And we, yeah, we operated that successfully up until two years ago when we sold to one of our competitors. We got approached during lockdown. And, you know, we’d always said, if we got the offer we wanted They came along and they’ve taken it on and they’re running it brilliantly and it’s still going great guns so it’s still there for people to see.
James:
Oh nice. Yeah, before we dive further into that and some of your other sides, what’s your background? How did you get started into all this? And then I guess what are you currently doing now?
Edd:
Mm-hmm. Okay, yeah, well, my background is I did a computer science degree back in the mid-90s. I graduated about 25 years ago. So I’m a programmer at heart, I’m a techie. So that’s when my background came in. So obviously that was just around about the start of the web when the web was becoming big. And I ended up working in advertising. So I was like a programmer and then a technical director in an advertising agency. And we made lots of, so this agency was made lots of ads for airlines mainly and things like that, some big clients. And we led up the digital side of that. So we would make websites for them, landing pages, email campaigns, that kind of thing. So that’s where I switched from just being pure techie to getting into the marketing side. which then led me on to thinking, monetizing my own sites basically, and that’s where I got into affiliate marketing because I’ve seen working with the agency how affiliate was one of the channels that all these companies were using to build their campaigns around. It was a case of, well, let’s go out there and actually become an affiliate, which obviously provides scale rather than just working. on the salary side. So yeah, so that was say 2004 when we moved into affiliate side and been doing that ever since. Now, obviously on the more recent side, still as well working as an affiliate. We’ve, you know, I founded a SaaS product for keyword research last year called Keywords People Use, which yeah, it’s… It’s a new thing. We’ve never done SAS, never done a product that we’ve gone out and shouted about. But it’s been proven really successful and really popular. And it’s a different way of looking at keyword research to maybe some of the other tools.
James:
Okay, so you’re a busy man. So what made you go into broadband then as your affiliate play back in the early days?
Edd:
Okay, well that was a bit of a happy accident because my wife, she at the time had a web design agency and when they’d set that web design agency up, this was pre-broadband being internet access. It was just a word. So they set up their agency and called it Broadband Communications and registered the URL broadband.co.uk. Yeah, so that
James:
Oh wow.
Edd:
was completely coincidental. So then after a couple of years… Broadband became the new word for internet and they were getting lots of people contacting them and saying, we’d like broadband please, can you tell us about broadband? And we’re like, no, we’re a web design agency. And she said, hang on, why don’t we actually make a site about broadband and then look at monetizing it with the affiliate channel that we’ve been working on for the people. And that’s where that one came from. So yeah, so that kind of dictated what we went to in the first one, wasn’t it? wasn’t a grand choice, it was just, we’ve got this fantastic URL, let’s do something with it. But since then we have gone into other sectors around telecoms, energy, lots of subscription type services. And yeah, so that’s the kind of area we’ve gone into.
James:
Yeah, I’m just on the site right now. Just having a look at it. It looks like an old site in terms of the design. And obviously still does well now considering
Edd:
Yep.
James:
you were acquired a couple of years ago. So
Edd:
Okay.
James:
how did you keep this site? Cause I guess we’ve very rarely talked to people that have had sites over a decade, obviously
Edd:
Mm-hmm.
James:
because of various updates, killing sites, people selling
Edd:
Mm-hmm.
James:
sites, et cetera. You had this site for what? Since 2004, what was that? 16 years or so.
Edd:
It was
James:
Did I get that
Edd:
just
James:
right?
Edd:
coming up on 17 or 18 years when we sold it and the site itself now is, I think
James:
Yeah.
Edd:
it will be 20 next year the site will be.
James:
Wow.
Edd:
Well, one of the reasons we kept it was one was the fact that broadband carried on being a product. So lots of people with a site,
James:
Mmm.
Edd:
they have a natural lifespan because products come and go. Broadband had a lot of longevity. We still have other broadband related sites that we operate. The longevity of broadband has been huge. We always thought to start with that it would be a short-term thing, that there would be another thing came along like hyperband or some new term, but nothing ever did come. And even when the technology changed within broadband, so it went from sort of to fiber optic, people still called it broadband and they still marketed it as broadband.
James:
Mm.
Edd:
So that’s what helped give it a lot of longevity. And also the fact that, yeah, it became… At the very start it was like a new product, there was lots of people who were just coming along to find out about broadband, it wasn’t available in every area. So we were then very more helping people in early steps. And then as the product matured and everyone starts to churn, just like car insurance, people search for new car insurance every year, people tend to search new broadband if they move in house or if they want to get a faster deal or a cheaper deal. So we became more about helping people as they churned suppliers.
James:
Mm.
Edd:
Yeah, and it just kept that longevity. I mean, it wasn’t to say there weren’t ups and downs. We had massive problems back when Penguin hit Google Penguin back in,
James:
Mm-hmm.
Edd:
I can’t even remember, 2011 time, 2012 time. We got really badly hit by Penguin. And we lost, you know, we went from ranking number one for the term broadband in the UK to like, you know, last page on 900 and something. We got completely hit. Yeah, and then Panda, that came along and whacked. again so we had to go and do a lot of work to recover that which we did and to be fair that recovery I think our traffic went to five fold after we recovered on that so it took some time so yeah so we just stuck with it because you know we knew it was a good site was getting good traffic and yeah I mean if you look it isn’t the it isn’t the most modern site I mean that basic design on there now dates back to around about 2010 that design refresh there’s in terms of responsiveness and that kind of thing. But yeah, the basic design is that, oh, but it works really well. We spend a lot of time, and we do on all our sites, doing conversion rate optimization. So we actually
James:
Mmm.
Edd:
split test changes. And it’s just so something looks pretty, doesn’t necessarily mean it’s gonna convert well. So everything on that site, if you’ve got a question about why have we done that. Generally it’s because we’ve tested it and tested it against version after version after version to make it do what we want, to get the people to take the desired action basically.
James:
Interesting. So those tests that you’ve made
Edd:
Mm-hmm.
James:
for your CRO, have you also used the same principles maybe in other niche sites that you have? Do they translate or transfer over niches? Or is it specifically within broadband that this seems to work well?
Edd:
It tends to work best with affiliate sites because obviously with an affiliate site your aim is to be the middleman and so therefore you want to get people to take a particular action on your site and then move them onto a merchant. So for example you’ll have different paths through the site depending on where they land and what their original intent was. So all those intent paths basically can translate to some other websites, others don’t, it depends on the market. Across the telecoms ones you’re basically yeah, you’re trying to give people either availability or price deal information and then get someone to click to a merchant to Find out more information to sign up. So yes, if that kind of intent path just translate But then you’ll find Sometimes just you’ll try something it worked on one side and another one with a different kind of audience It just doesn’t work. But what you have to do is test it testing is what makes you learn and makes it improve based on the data rather than on the gut.
James:
So is there anything in particular around CRO that you have done on this site, I guess that has now become a main practice for you for your broadband sites?
Edd:
I think the key thing is have a landing page with a clear objective, a clear start point. So on broadband.co.uk, on the main landing page there, it wants you to give you a postcode. We want a postcode so we can then narrow down and give you information about what’s available in your area. The same will happen with other sites where you’ve got a location specific service. You want to get that. someone to give you a location, a postcode, so you can then narrow down and start bringing them down the path of what’s in their area, because that’s a really key thing. That’s translated well across sites. There might be other ones, so there’s a speed tester landing page on there, and again, you want people to provide you with a postcode, again, so we can compare speeds against
James:
Hmm.
Edd:
what you should be getting in your area. So if you can personalize… early as possible that makes the information provided much more relevant to people.
James:
Nice. And then a lot of people when they talk CRO as well, they talk like colors, button colors, small things like that. Did you ever test anything like that? And did it have an impact?
Edd:
The best CRO is to try something very different. So rather than doing something subtle like a button colour, because you can get some changes with that, but they tend to be so small that to make it statistically significant, you’ve got to run that test for so long. It’s better to make big bold changes, really bold changes. So like have very different design looks or. very different call to actions, because that’s where you’ll see the biggest changes by making big decisions. So I’m not one that really buys into, you must have a green button for this kind of action or a blue button for that. To have a contrasting one sometimes works really well. I’ve got an energy site where we’ve got a couple of calls to action on the page that do look out of place, but that’s intentional to get people to move their focus. But in general, you’ve got to try big bold changes rather than little tiny subtle changes.
James:
And then regarding the broadband side, how big was your team for that? And what does, I guess, what was the day to day to keep that up and running? Did you have to make constant updates to articles? Was traffic coming through blog posts or was it more just to the main landing pages? Because you’re ranking, for example, for cheap broadband, et cetera, et cetera.
Edd:
Okay yeah, I mean team wise, I’ve always kept things small. I’ve never tried to build a massive company. I mean some of our competitors for broadband, they are big companies. I mean
James:
Thanks for watching!
Edd:
like in the UK, there’s Money Supermarket, which are listed on the stock exchange and at times they’ve been worth over a billion pounds. Market capitalization, so it’s really, really big. We always kept it small. I like working from home. I’ve been working from home since 2006. So we’ve been doing that for a long time. So when the pandemic came, we were quiet. There’s no real change for us. I like that flexibility. So we always kept a very small team. When we sold that company, it was a team of two full timers that went to the company that
James:
Mm.
Edd:
purchased that website. So now I keep a very small team. a couple of full-time people. And I’ve got a good roster of contractors I can use for certain particular things. But I’ve always kept it small, always kept it lean. In terms of where did the traffic come from, we basically had a very, this kind of feeds into where keywords people use are coming at a certain point. But we’ve always built, I’ve always built sites around questions. So rather than doing keyword research and looking for keyword volume, because for most subjects, you know, you know there is, you can get a good feeling of how big a volume is likely to be for different topics, different niches. So obviously for one like broadband, that’s quite big because it covers a lot of people. So we always based it around questions. If we answer people’s questions and work from the bottom up rather than going top down, we’ll start to build more and more. Terms that we rank for we’re building a pyramid of face content that reaches up to that pinnacle at the top So we always based it around questions. So we worked mainly on broadway. It’s many on long form guides And so there’s some guides in them and people talk about refreshing content This content on that site that I wrote back in 2004 that is still there and it’s still ranking well
James:
Oh wow.
Edd:
And you know, it might have been updated in frequently over that period But we never ever looked at it as in terms of we’ve got to push out so many posts per month or per week. We never looked at it in terms of, you know, we must refresh content every six months or every one year or delete old content. We never did it that way. We always looked what questions were coming along. So as broadband changed over the years, the questions people ask changed over the years because,
James:
Mm-hmm.
Edd:
you know, when broadband first came out, you didn’t get TV with it. You didn’t get all these other things with it. So then… you know, we had to start making content based on new questions that people were starting to ask about the subject and build those into new guides that all fed into having a base of content that then starts to rank for all sorts of keywords because if you answer people’s questions, you’ll naturally, you know, start to put, you use the keywords and the phrases that we will then start to rank for because they’re the ones that people actually use.
James:
Nice. I will get to your keyword sasdle too, but before then, the obviously with the site’s age, it’s
Edd:
Thank you.
James:
likely got a lot of authority behind it, not just from domain age, but just from being around so long, a lot of people linking to it. Did you have to do your own link building for that site initially to get it going? Or was this something that because it was just so early, I guess in the game that you just kind of built it and it kind of grew from there?
Edd:
Yeah, I mean it was early doors back in 2000, in the early 2000s, you know, Google was still pretty new really and SEO, the SEO landscape is still very new and very, you know, nowhere near as in-depth and complex as it is now. And yeah, we didn’t do any link building as such, we did in the very early days, you know, we didn’t really need to a lot. You know, it always… already ranked quite well for the term broadband because it was ranking for its name when it was the web agency.
James:
Mmm.
Edd:
And so then when we switched it to be an affiliate site about broadband, it did naturally keep, oh, lost you there for a second. Oh yeah,
James:
No,
Edd:
we
James:
you’re
Edd:
did
James:
still
Edd:
actually.
James:
here.
Edd:
Yeah, yeah, cool. Yeah, where was I? Oh yeah, so early days link building, no. We did quite well naturally. Then later on as competition grew, so we’re talking sort of, hmm. late 2000, 2010, 2011 time. We did have to spend more time link building, but back then link building was a different game. So it was things like forum posts, text link ads, comment, well spam now really, you call it comment spam. You know, just, you know. on where they let you have a link. And that was back then, that was legitimate. There was no, Google’s terms of service didn’t say you couldn’t do these things. That only came along slightly later, and then they obviously cracked down on it with Penguin, and that’s when it really came with bitters in the arse basically.
James:
Hehehe
Edd:
And we then had to go back and disavow a huge amount of link building that we’d done over several years. And obviously since then, we recovered, and that’s when we sort of made a policy then. on that site of not overtly link building. But we were in the position, once you rank well, you will pick links up naturally. So if you are patient and get to that point, then you don’t have to worry so much about link building. Yeah, and we made a very conscious decision then that we would have been hit once, we didn’t wanna get hit again. Now that’s not to say that I think. link building is a bad thing for people to do. And I know there’s some brilliant link builders out there who do some great things that are perfectly safe, legitimate and work well. I mean, some of the digital PR stuff, for example, all those kinds of things and the Harrow, all that outreach is brilliant. But it’s just something that we decided not to concentrate on. We concentrated on functionality and content. So for example, like broadband, obviously that had, our key differentiator there was we built a database of broadband deals and kept that up to date. So that constantly up to date content and a comparison engine that people could search and find availability in their area. And so we could say, this is what you can get in your area and these are the up to date prices. That content piece, that engine, that’s what drew people to link to it. So
James:
and
Edd:
yeah, so link buildings. Yeah, it’s a tricky one. And I wouldn’t
James:
Thanks for watching!
Edd:
call it a link builder. That’s not my specialty. I’ve since gone and looked, yeah, look, I’m more of a content builder, I’d say.
James:
Yeah. So regarding the updates and recovering from it, was it just disavowing those links that got you to recover or did you have to do more work after that?
Edd:
Yeah, well, I said there was two things. We got hit by Penguin, then by Panda. So Penguin, that was very much a link disavow and we had to, back then you had to prove that you’d done outreach to try and get links removed. So we did lots of outreach to get links removed, which is the opposite way around of what you want to be doing. So we had to do a lot of that and then do a disavow. I think we had to submit that disavow a couple of times, remember. It’s a long time ago now, remembering back. And… So that was what lifted the Penguin penalty. And then Panda, we had to do a lot of content work and that was a lot of templating. That was removing a lot of thinner content we had on the site before then. And yeah, looking very much at making the page design neater and cleaner. Panda was a completely different piece.
James:
And then with your team as well, because you mentioned you’re a content guy and that’s kind of where your specialty lies. So how did you hire your team and what are their roles within your team? Are they, for example, doing the outreach and link building if you were going to do that, or are they doing kind of the graphic design, I guess, complimenting skillsets that you may not want to learn or go into and spend time doing?
Edd:
Well my team, developers, because I mean I am a programmer originally by trade, I’m not the world’s greatest programmer and I don’t think there’s much I’ve actually coded that’s actually still out there live in the world now. But I know enough to spec, I know enough to understand what the possibilities are and I can play about. But in terms of production development, developers and designers, because my design skills are awful. I’m good at saying, I’m good at wireframing, I’m good at designing a site, I’m good at designing flows, but to make them look good, that’s not me. I haven’t got the patience for playing around with graphics tools and things like that, so for me it’s developers and designers to bring my ideas physically to life. When it comes to content, I still generally will write most content myself because rather than going for a quantity, with me it’s about quality.
James:
Mm.
Edd:
We also do quite a bit of programmatic stuff. So
James:
Okay.
Edd:
if you’ve heard of people talking about programmatic SEO, which is fundamentally is what Broadband Accredit UK was, because on there are provider pages, there’s deal pages. You know, all these pages are templates powered by backend database. So to add a new deal in, you just add a deal in the database and it will appear on the website, you know.
James:
Mm-hmm.
Edd:
So we do lots of programmatic stuff. So that’s… how we tend to produce more content is programmatically on top of the underlying guides that we produce and FAQs that provides the authority under
James:
Hmm.
Edd:
a site. We then programmatically build out the dynamic content that is the more frequently refreshed stuff.
James:
Does AI play a role in your content workflow at all?
Edd:
What we’ve definitely been using ChuckChefBT for doing all sorts of things. It’s great for sort of start with if you’ve got a start idea and then just talk to ChuckChefBT and build from it and I’ve also used it for generating emails so if you want to put an email into a workflow then just giving describing the email that you want to ChuckGBT, it will give you really good outlines. They always need some work, but it’s really, really good for that. And we’ve been building AI into keywords people use, which we’ll talk about later if you like, but there’s lots of AI in that, that extends it, extends the core product.
James:
Let’s dive into that and the keywords people use. So do you want to maybe explain how the tool works? Okay, let’s start here. How is it different to all the other keyword research tools out there? Because obviously there’s quite a few different ones on the market that do similar things. So
Edd:
Okay.
James:
how does your one differ? And then you can also dive into the AI side as well.
Edd:
Okay, yep. Well, it’s different and it’s similar to lots of tools. I think there’s very few completely unique tools out there. They’re all based fundamentally on the work of others previously. But what we are is we’ve got lots of things that others do and we’ve also got some unique things. So it’s based around, the core concept it’s based around is, because a lot of them will look at volume. Most keyword tools are about volume. We don’t look at volume, we look at questions because fundamentally everybody searches online is trying to answer a question. So you can align your site, your content around the questions people are actually asking, you’re gonna be more successful than just chasing volume because everybody chases volume and they all end up competing against each other. If you actually come along and chase questions, answer people’s questions, you will naturally build authority content. So it’s all based around questions and surfacing questions online from different places that people ask them. So we’ve got, and if I can remember them all, we’ve got, we mine Google People Also Ask, we mine Google Auto Suggest, we mine Reddit and Quora, we mine ranking websites, and then we’ve also got the AI on there as well. Now the People Also Ask is the most popular one. because that’s questions that Google is telling you, people are asking these questions. And what we do is we’ll take a core broad term off you or any start point, so you can just type in broadband, and it will then mine through the different levels. So it’ll take the first four questions that come up, and it will then click those questions and take all the questions that then come up from that. And you can do deeper searches and click down and down and down and down. But a normal search will bring back around. 40 questions and from them it maps them nicely in a tree. So you can see how these relate to each other and it’s the start
James:
Mmm.
Edd:
of building your clusters. So it starts clustering them for you. The same happens with Google Autocomplete where we will bring back all the different ABC, how, can, what, with all those prepositions added on. so that we can modify it so that we can bring up all these questions. And then you can build up huge amounts of questions with all of these things. Now, we can then take the AI and we can then further cluster them. So we can then feed all those questions. You can choose topic clusters and it will then cluster those again for you. And if you don’t like the clusters, you can say regenerate and it will bring them back. But it’s actually really, really good
James:
Hmm.
Edd:
clustering all those questions. So it starts to build up. the within moments you’re starting to build up from just a talk from a single topic, you can build up clusters, the questions you’ve got to answer within those clusters and it starts building you your entire plan of how to go out there and cover that topic to become the authority essentially.
James:
Interesting.
Edd:
Yeah, and with that we can also further, we’ve built in AI writing on that so you can actually on questions and on clusters that it builds for you. And again, AI is such early days, and we like to say that these are, take them as skeleton briefs, you could take them and publish them. And we have on some test sites just to see how they do, and they do rank. I mean, it’s early days to see what the longevity of these things are, but it’s
James:
Hmm.
Edd:
really, really good if you are wanting to build some content just to have an outline produced for you straight away that you can then go and edit. Because it’s… with creating anything, it’s getting those first words on paper is always the hardest thing. You know, it’s that procrastination
James:
Mm-hmm.
Edd:
point. Having to sit down and say, right, I’m gonna write now. What am I gonna write? But if you’ve got something in front of you that’s been generated and you can read through and say, oh yeah, right, yeah, and then you can start modifying, editing, and working with it, it just gives you a massive jump forward.
James:
I need to play around with this today. This sounds quite good. But around the clusters as well,
Edd:
Mm-hmm.
James:
I guess some of the issues someone might run into, for example, is you have the people also ask questions or questions people are asking, but knowing if that should be a blog topic on its own versus part of maybe a bigger article as part of maybe a seed keyword, does the tool do that for you or do you have to figure that out yourself?
Edd:
Well, it’s a good question, and you’re not the first person to raise that. And it’s the tool. I think we launched it, when we launched it, not even a year since we launched it, basically we launched it last October, so it’s still quite new. And we are still adding lots to it. And at the moment, it doesn’t say to you which ones should be within an article or whether you should create an entire article from it. In the first instance, the topic cluster tends to. because a topic cluster will tend to create its own headers. It’ll take all the questions, so we’ve got 40 questions. It will then group those questions into the clusters with a new heading. So I’m trying to think of a good example, but there was one where it was coffee. Yes, if you use coffee, one of the things it brought out was some of the questions were all health related. Health was never mentioned in any of the original questions, but you could tell they were health related. and it created the cluster for health and all the questions within it. So it’s really good at picking out the clusters that you should be building, but within that, it is a little still to your discretion as to whether you wanna answer all the questions on one piece of content or whether, because some questions
James:
Mmm.
Edd:
just are bigger than others. So some, you have to use your human intuition there, that’s where the human side comes in. to decide how much of a piece of content is that question gonna be, whereas others tend to clump smaller and it better clumps together into one piece. So we’re getting better at saying how you should spread them out, but there’s always gonna be the need for human interaction in there to get the very best out of it, I would say, with any keyword tool.
James:
Yeah, I’m just having a little play around with it now and it looks like the Google auto complete is like the old wasn’t Answer the answer the public
Edd:
Yeah,
James:
it’s kind of the
Edd:
yeah,
James:
same
Edd:
very
James:
output
Edd:
similar. Yeah. Mm-hmm.
James:
Yeah, very similar that is nice. And obviously the people also ask gives you that kind of topical map with the With the key headings and then a lot of the other questions in there So actually it gives you a lot of different questions So my question to you is are you using this for your own niche sites? And then how are you? Are you literally going through and trying to answer every single query to give yourself that type of relevance or are you being a little more selective with what you’re writing on your site?
Edd:
Yeah, they’ve totally reused it. I mean, it’s been born out of the process that I’ve used for so many years. That was the reason for producing it, because it’s a, you know, obviously, I’ve listened to lots of podcasts, been to lots of conferences,
James:
I’m gonna go.
Edd:
read lots of articles of how people do stuff. And yeah, I’ve always thought, I’ve never quite done it the way that other people do, or so many people do in terms of where I start and what I do. So this… This is the approach, I mean if I had this tool 20 years ago, I mean people would have asked wasn’t part of Google 20 years ago, neither was, or does it suggest. But, you know, if we’d had this 20 years ago, that it would have informed how we built then. And now, yes, we do use it on our site. So if we’re writing on a particular subject, we will go in here and we will use this tool to find us questions and to then build that pillar content. around. And like I say, this is where the human side comes in. Some questions, it does sometimes surface questions that aren’t necessarily relevant. You do get some weird ones in. And especially sometimes you might find stuff that, although you say to it, you say to Google, we want results in any language from a particular geography, a geographical area, it will sometimes say bring a US question into a UK search. So you’ll discard ones like that, because if it’s like a, if it’s clearly that’s something in America and we’re talking in the UK, we will take it out. But no, yeah, we totally use it. Because even if you think you know a subject well, and like I said, I’ve been writing about broadband for 20 plus years, there’s still questions come up that I wouldn’t have thought of.
James:
Mmm.
Edd:
Because especially that a lot of the best questions tend to be asked by people who aren’t familiar with the subject area. Because they’re the people, they’re some of the best people to hook in the first instance, because… they’re the people who can learn the most from you, the people who know the least about a subject. So if you can find the questions they’re asking, they’re the people that are gonna be out there searching and that’s the traffic you want. People who know all about a subject don’t need to go to Google to ask it, you know, because they know the answer. So you really need to find those questions that inexperienced people are asking, they’re the real gold in there.
James:
Nice. So you said, are you actually putting these questions into Google first just to see what pops up or you or you just trusting it, trusting it and writing it regardless.
Edd:
Oh, you mean from the tool. So like, so if
James:
Yeah.
Edd:
I, well,
James:
So if
Edd:
yeah.
James:
you, if
Edd:
Yeah.
James:
a question
Edd:
So I know
James:
pops
Edd:
that.
James:
up and you put it into Google
Edd:
Yeah.
James:
and just see if, see if someone’s written on it, if there is content or if it’s just Reddit and Quora going on or forums or maybe checking the search volume on it at all. I know you mentioned you don’t give volume on the tool. So obviously you, you’d rather just answer questions versus focusing on the volume. But is, is there anything on Google that might turn you off writing for one of these keywords?
Edd:
I think if you’re doing research for a new site, because some people use this to, you know, they want to start a niche site, and so they want ideas. So they’ll come in and they’ll search for all sorts of things to see what comes up to see, you know, trying to see if a niche is for them. That’s when, yeah, it’s worth going and Googling the questions. If you download, obviously our tool allows you to download CSV exports of all the questions as well as many putting within the tool. If you do a CSV download, it actually provides you with a link to all the pages that are ranking, the ranking pages for that question. So it will give you the PA. So you can find them in that CSV. But yeah, if you go and check them on Google, I would totally suggest that to see what kind of sites are ranking, because that’s when you’re trying to find out what your competition is and how easy to get into that niche it will be. So if you’re going in and all the questions have been answered by a massive behemoth of a site, you might… potentially want to question whether that’s the right one to go for depending on your resources and the time span you’re looking at doing but if you know If you’re already in the niche if you’re just if you’re looking at this and you’ve got an established site already and you wanting to rank better and you wanting to pick up more people then You know who your competitors are, you know, you know the landscape for your site You don’t need to go and re-google them because you know, it’s all you know, these questions are being asked. It’s come from Google Like I say Going back to the volume side of it, if you went and asked another tool that gives volume first, because these keywords, they’re very long, the questions are very long keywords, they’re the sorts
James:
Mm.
Edd:
that always come back as zero search volume. But you know they’re not zero search volume because Google’s telling you that people are asking these because it builds a complete, it builds people to ask, it builds all of these out of actual real queries that people are using. The search… the tools which provide search volume, they’re aggregating data from a disparate set of sources that are all still really guesswork. The only people that know exact search volume to Google themselves, and they don’t give that data away. There are some clues you can find in certain places, but they’re all guesses. And as you get to more granular questions, that level of volume data just doesn’t exist. No one’s got it, so everyone says it’s zero. But it’s not. And if you answer questions, you’re not just targeting that keyword. You’re targeting… all the other keywords that you will cover in the topic as you answer the questions. So that’s what builds up a much broader sort of number of searches that you will appear for. You won’t just appear for the ones, the question headlines. You’ll start appearing for a huge number of related searches around it. And that base content, that’s what then in the long run will help you rank for those volume terms. you know, no site ranks for the term broadband without a huge amount of content underneath it. No one ranks for car insurance without a huge amount of volume of content and links under it. So you need that base content, which will start to get you visitors in search to build that base content, and then you can interlink within yourself, you’ll produce great content, which will start to establish links of its own, if you don’t go out and build your own links to sort of give you a boost. And that is what will then start to bring you up to those terms that have got volume in those other tools.
James:
Do you want to dive into your current niche sites that you’re building and operating right now? Maybe how many you’ve got, sharing the niche if you’re comfortable with that, and then any kind of monetization, traffic numbers, whatever it is that you’re happy sharing
Edd:
Yeah,
James:
within
Edd:
yeah, yeah. So on that side I’m going to have to think, the policy I’ve always done is to start sites and then leave them and then come back to them after a year or two. So…
James:
Before you go on, when you say start sites, how many posts are we talking?
Edd:
Again, these sites can vary and will tend to be not a huge number, not a huge number of places, because I tend not to use a blog, I don’t use WordPress, for example. So all my sites are built on bespoke programming. So it’s not that WordPress is bad, it’s just that we’ve started building before WordPress was really a thing. So this is just more of what we’ve always done. So. We, an average site might have anywhere between five to 20, I call them guides, so that’s really what their posts, yeah. That might be a start, but there then might also be a lot of programmatic pages around them. So for example,
James:
Hmm.
Edd:
I’ve got one site in the electricity niche, electricity and gas energy in the UK, which I started maybe… four or five years ago. And it started off just with some basic content about choosing energy providers, how to get better deals, all those kind of things. And then it then had a directory of programmatic pages which were within the UK, different regional areas of the UK. So it would pick up people doing geographic searches. And they were templated. So then that’s, you know, so they’ve got content based on some data base we built upon on different aspects of energy in those areas. And then we just published it and left it because I knew that what we’re competing against are some very big players in energy switching in the UK that all got destroyed by since Covid and the price, the energy price increases since the Ukraine war. So now that… left alone, started ranking, because it was answering those low-level questions, and it’s now started building links, and it’s now started ranking well. And then I’ve gone back to monetize it by adding in an affiliate link to an energy provider. So my strategy is start them in a niche, don’t monetize them, and just let them sit. So I tend to start a new one every year or two. and I’ve been
James:
Mm-hmm.
Edd:
doing that for you know 15 plus years. So I’ve now got a string of sites in various different states. We’ve got let me think one two three about five no six monetized. They are in broadband. We cover the
James:
Oh,
Edd:
UK,
James:
wow.
Edd:
US, Australia. They’re in mobile telecoms. same places. We’ve got the only G1 and they’re the ones that monetise and they are generally monetised on affiliate deals. So yeah, we are pushing people across to mobile providers who will then, you know, we get rewarded for any sales. We also do a little bit of display. That tends to be in areas where we have not quite got the traffic for the affiliates to work yet or if… finding affiliate deals is tricky. In some areas you find, yeah, you can’t monetize them all or you haven’t quite got the contacts in there to get an affiliate deal yet so you need a little bit of display but display revenue is probably only about ten percent of our income. So numbers wise we get around about half a million visitors a month across all sites. So…
James:
Mm-hmm.
Edd:
So around about 5-6 million a year and it’s all monetised, 90% affiliate and I’m not going to show exact numbers but we’re many six figures a year in income on those. So it’s a very good living, I’m not going to complain about that.
James:
Yeah, for sure. And it’s interesting. You’ve gone, uh, I guess multiple sites within the same niche. And I think
Edd:
Thank you.
James:
more people are doing that within their portfolios. I’m doing the same thing and the niches I’m in. And I think it’s a good way. Are you ranking then for multiple sites with the same terms?
Edd:
Yeah, well, what we’ve done with the multiple sites so that they are targeting different countries.
James:
Different
Edd:
Yeah,
James:
regions. Yeah.
Edd:
yeah, so region specific. So yeah, so we’ve got US, we’ve got Canada, Australia, UK, and we’ve got, I’ve got ones which aren’t earning any money that target India, France, Brazil, a large number of countries, and they’re the ones that are on the back burner, they’re the ones waiting to build up basically.
James:
Hmm.
Edd:
So they’ll, yeah, we’ll look to them in terms of time. So. It’s a pipeline. Some people’s pipeline is to buy sites, some people’s pipeline is to just go all in on one. My pipeline is to have, to just start, it’s like planting seeds basically. It’s
James:
Mm.
Edd:
like farming. If you’re going to raise a crop, you’re going to grow a tree. You don’t get an instant tree. You’ve got to plant it, you’ve got to nurture it and leave it to grow and then you come back and harvest it later basically.
James:
So have you sold any of these sites then over the 15 years or is it only the broadband.co.uk?
Edd:
broadband.co.uk and a couple of smaller sites back in the late 2000s. Yeah, but we did the main one with broadband.co.uk.
James:
Okay, and do you link between these sites at all, or are they all completely separate entities?
Edd:
I have linked between them but only tends to be like to kick a site off. So if we’ve got a related site, so we don’t link between stuff that’s completely related. So say we’ve got a, if we launched a new broadband site in Mexico for example, we might link to it from the US one to say it might just be like looking for broadband in. Mexico then here try this site you know that’s as simple as that
James:
Hmm.
Edd:
basically yeah just to just to give like an initial boost but we never aggressively link between sites purely because we don’t want to get done for manipulation basically.
James:
Does that mean then you remove that link once that site’s working?
Edd:
No, because we wouldn’t put one in that wasn’t
James:
Okay.
Edd:
relevant. So we would only put
James:
Gotcha.
Edd:
it in a relevant place in a relevant bit of content. It’s really just a discoverability as much as anything else.
James:
Gotcha. And around the programmatic SEO, because that seems to be a hot topic currently within at least the niche site community. For
Edd:
Mm-hmm.
James:
people that have zero coding experience, where do you recommend them to start to try learning some?
Edd:
I would recommend a look for a guy called Ian Nuttall. I think if you just Google him he should turn up. He’s putting out lots of stuff on Programmatic SEO. He’s got courses. They’re not expensive courses either I don’t think. I think some of them you can get them for free or you can pay him as much as you think it’s worth. He’s putting out lots of good stuff. He’s explaining how to do it on platforms like WordPress so you need… sort of low code or no code solutions for it. He’s definitely, if you’re a beginner, I mean, because we’ve come at it from our side with very experienced developers and, you know, degree level stuff, you know. It’s not that you can’t do it more simply, it’s just that’s how we know how to do it, that’s how we’ve done it. But yeah, the guy definitely to follow is Ian Nuttall on that because that’s, he’s all about programmatic SEO. I mean, he’s the reason I’m saying programmatic SEO because…
James:
Hehehe
Edd:
I used to say database driven websites because that’s fundamentally what programmatic SEO is. It’s a database driven website where you apply some SEO principles to help it rank. So he’s coined that pro, I think, I’m not seeing no one else speak, you know, using that term before him. So if it wasn’t him, he was a very early adopter. So he’s definitely someone who’s worth speaking to or looking up.
James:
Yeah, he’s on Twitter too for anyone who’s interested and wants to search. But I want to bring this a little bit back to AI and obviously with your sites, just from this conversation, I assume that your site’s 100% relying on organic traffic, Google being
Edd:
Mm-hmm.
James:
whatever it is. So
Edd:
Yeah.
James:
does the potential future of Google SGE or AI search, et cetera, does that worry you at all? Are you doing anything about it? Are you looking to diversify traffic sources at all?
Edd:
Well, am I worried about it? I’m obviously watching it, I think everybody is. Worrying is a different one because I’ve seen Google change so much over the years and people sort of lose their minds over what changes are coming and what’s gonna happen. That I’m now a bit more sanguine about it and a little bit more relaxed and say, you know, we’ll see what happens. I mean fundamentally, people. want their questions answered. They’re always gonna go somewhere to do that. And I don’t know, it would be at Google or somewhere else. There’s always gonna be somewhere that people go. Google relies on sites to provide those answers, you know? And if they stop providing sites for reason or a lifeline of traffic, then they’re gonna, basically they’re gonna eat their own tail essentially, because they, and also they’re gonna be advertising business. advertiser is really going to pay if there’s a way of traffic landing on their site. So I think it’s too early to say exactly how it’s going to play out, but I think there’s got to be a place for people to go from Google somewhere else to get the full answer. Simple things already, people don’t. What’s the temperature? What time is it in a certain place? You just
James:
Yeah.
Edd:
go there. And very simple questions Google has been answering for ages. And it just might be that they will start answering some slightly more complex questions. But I think if people are doing any kind of in-depth research into an area, they’re still going to want to go to an expert website. And I think Google has got to allow people to find and visit those places, otherwise people are going to stop going to Google. AI answers are still… guesswork in many cases. It’s a large
James:
Yeah.
Edd:
language model. It’s just working out what is most likely to be the next word in a string based on the data that it’s read and it’s understood. It doesn’t know that it’s answering the question correctly. So I think there’s still a way to go.
James:
Thank you.
Edd:
So am I doing anything about it? At the moment I think it’s hard to know what to do until the landscape becomes clearer.
James:
Mm.
Edd:
then you’re just guessing, just guessing at the moment.
James:
Yeah, I think as well, even if this rolls out a little harder and sites start taking hit in traffic, it should mean that sites that are getting traffic are more valuable ideally, and advertisers may pay more. You would assume that display ad revenue should increase because of that, because you’re one of the only sites getting traffic. I don’t know. I’m just speculating on
Edd:
Mm-hmm.
James:
those, but I would just assume that would be the natural, I guess, way it goes. if something like that or if SGE and things like that really started to make a big difference. I think people are starting to see small differences now that it’s rolled out to the public. Like I’m getting ranking increases and things like that, but my traffic is still stagnant. So I don’t
Edd:
Mm-hmm.
James:
know if it’s maybe cause the AI answers are popping up and getting less clips. I don’t know, but yeah, as you mentioned, there’s still a long way to go to see, you know, what kind of direction it goes and whether
Edd:
Yeah,
James:
or not we need to do something about it.
Edd:
yeah, exactly. And obviously we’ve got lots of sites that are in different geographical areas. SG is mainly the States at the moment, isn’t it? And, you know,
James:
Mm.
Edd:
We’re not seeing it over in the UK yet and we’re not seeing it in other areas. I mean, we’ve got sites, our US sites, you know, they’ve not seen any change. But again, they tend to be answering more difficult questions than, you know, SG might answer in the first place. I think that the difference is going to be that The people with thin, poor quality content are going to lose out because if they’re only answering very simple questions and they’re not covering topics in enough depth, then they’re the ones where Google will be confident in its own answers rather than trying to send people forward.
James:
There might be some people listening to this as well. Obviously you’ve been working from home since 2000, before working from home was cool. You’ve been working from home for a long time. So I wanna know with all the sites you got going on and everything else, what does your day to day look like? There might be someone listening to this, fantasizing about getting to work from home and quitting their job, being able to do this full time. So what does your day to day look like?
Edd:
Well, as well as doing all our sites, we actually bought a farm a few years ago. So my day can be very varied. So after this, for example, I’m going to jump out and go on a tractor and top a field basically. So the first thing I always tend to do is look at what the weather’s like because if the weather’s good, I tend to have to get out and do some jobs on the farm. And if the weather’s poor, that’s the days where I think, right, I’m going to go and write some content today. But I’ve got very good from working from my phone as well.
James:
Oh, okay.
Edd:
Yeah, yeah, so like I say, I’m in the position now where I try and engineer myself out of as much work as possible and try and do a lot of thinking. So most of my time tends to be listening to podcasts, listening to books and just thinking. So most of my work is thinking. then coming up with ideas, giving them to my nevada pussies who sometimes hate the ideas. We have big discussions about what we should do and quite often their ideas are better than mine. But you know that I spend a lot of time thinking, a lot of times wandering around and then making notes to myself. I tend to find that I work better just when I’m in the right mood for it. So that can mean sometimes that I will work. I’ll work all evening on something and then I won’t do anything really for three or four days that’s work related That’s why all the stuff that I try to do. I try to make sure it’s got some longevity to it And scalability to it so that it doesn’t rely on me pumping out My content day after day after day after day after day So yeah, I’m probably you know, not the best person to ask that. I mean, if I was just starting out, when I first started out, if I go back, gosh, to the mid-2000s, that’s when I literally just spent my entire day sat in an attic office at my house at the time. And I got so stir crazy in the end that my wife got a dog and said, right, you’ve got to walk the dog twice a day because you’re not leaving the house. And that
James:
Hahaha
Edd:
was. When I was doing all the coding, I was doing all the content writing, it was just me by myself and that was just really hard long days. But it paid off, you know, I mean, I’ve been nuts now to spend my entire days working like crazy. If there’s something that needs to be done that I don’t want to do, or I’m not the right person to do, I’ll find someone else to do it and outsource it.
James:
Nice. Yeah, it’s good to know like, in the beginning, yeah, it was hard slog, but time to think and you’ve essentially you’ve paid your dues. And now you can farm to your heart’s content
Edd:
Hahaha
James:
and not worry so much about the size and the income coming in. But are you only in like broadband and energy? Is this like your niches that you just love being in because you know them while you’ve been in them so long, you can do your program Or have you ever expanded outside of that into different niches or tried other niches and been successful?
Edd:
So it’s broadband, telecoms, and energy. And I think for the real, well I did try, we did try one of the site ones actually, yeah we did. We tried, I tried an Amazon affiliate site where that was all based around aggregating data from Amazon. So crawling Amazon, which is a feat in itself because they don’t like you doing it. Building the database of all the product. and the reviews that people leave in on them. And then so we could rank products. So you could search. So it’s basically like a product search. And so you could come along and put in, search for any products and then find all the different products and then you could compare them. And then obviously go off to Amazon to, you know, hopefully buy them and we get an Amazon commission. And we put a lot of effort into it. And I’ve just, we’d never got it ranking anywhere. It was just, it was just a disaster. And I still. never quite figured out why it wouldn’t rank. I shared it with a few SEO people, some pretty well known names, and said, what are we doing wrong? I just can’t see why this isn’t working. There was no clear thing, but Google just hated it. So yeah, not everything works. That’s just one big lesson I’d just say to people is if you don’t ever give up just because the first thing you try didn’t work, because not everything does work. you know, when you find what does work, then follow it and go with it, but don’t just give up because it doesn’t work, because even people who, you know, who haven’t made something work will all have our failures in there, will all have things that don’t work, that don’t try. I’m always up for trying new things and, you know, we always experiment with things and on keywords people use, we’ve experimented with different promotions and different ideas, different things and some of them have just shown people show no interest in whatsoever and other things.
James:
That’s great advice to enter in this podcast yet, but if people want to find you follow you see what you’re doing. Where can they do that? We’ll link those down in the description too. But thanks for coming on Ed, appreciate it.
