I'm very proud to share that Aira won not one, but two awards at the recent UK Search Awards.

Our team took home two of the winner trophies, both in very competitive categories.

The first win of the night went to the Paid Media team who were awarded the win in the Best Use of Search (Retail/Ecommerce) category, for their work with long-standing client, French Florist. This added to their award earlier this year at the UK Paid Media Awards.

The judges said:

The creativity of this campaign blew us away. The team had a thorough understanding of their audience, and the combination of different methodologies led to a very successful campaign with some strong results and a happy client!

To make the night even better, our SEO team also picked up the prize for Best Large SEO Agency, returning for the trophy that we last won in 2019.

Once again, the judges had some amazing feedback:

We had a strong appreciation for this agency. Despite facing challenging times, their positioning and resilience were truly impressive. Their remarkable growth journey was a standout aspect of their presentation. Of note was their commitment to involving their staff and promoting diversity, which we found particularly admirable.

It truly was a fantastic way to end 2023 and I'm very proud of the team and very happy that their work has been recognised by industry peers in this way.

Image credit - UK Search Awards.

Three years after the outbreak of Covid-19, the way we think about work has changed forever. Following the shift to remote and hybrid working, companies had to quickly figure out how best to support a remote workforce, and this accelerating a shift to cloud based HR solutions, as demonstrated by ISG in their HR technology trends survey for 2021. 

HR professionals and the C-suite are looking for HR SaaS solutions that can help them adapt to the new ways of working, whilst looking after employees and providing them with a frictionless experience when it comes to HR. The shift to remote and hybrid working has been welcomed by many people across industries, but it’s created challenges too. Around 20% of employees struggle with loneliness while working from home, while 67% say they feel less connected with colleagues.

The turmoil in the jobs market over the last few years that has boosted the search demand for HR software is significant, with the rapid development of AI tech starting to influence the recruitment process. Indeed, 92% of HR leaders are planning to increase use of AI as a solution for rising talent challenges.

However, very few providers are capitalising on this demand with an effective SEO and content strategy. Some are succeeding and taking a lion’s share of the traffic on offer, but still leaving money on the table for others to take.

Below, you can read our research into the HR SaaS market. Find out who’s winning and importantly, how you can claim more of the growing revenue on offer from an industry currently valued at $24billion and expected to reach over $35billion by 2030.

The tldr: who is winning, why, and how to beat them

Of the 25 firms that we researched, Gusto is winning in terms of the sheer volume of traffic that they are generating from organic search, particularly in the United States. They appear to be doing this via:

• A large marketing team of over 50 people, many more than competitors
• A relentless focus on producing content for their target audience
• Very strong brand awareness via broad, popular keyword rankings
• Excellent customer support content which also brings a lot of search traffic
• Genuinely useful, free online tools and calculators for their target audience to use
• Strong backing from a range of investors

How you can compete with them without hiring 50 marketers

Whilst hiring 50 marketers would help, it’s not something many of us are able to do overnight. Also, hiring lots of people will count for very little if you don’t have the right strategic approach in place. The good news is that you don’t have to do this in order to start grabbing hold of some of the opportunity to acquire more customers and grow your market share. You can do this by focusing and executing on a few key areas:

• Connect the key features of your HR software with the pain points of your ideal customers, then map these features to a robust content strategy, backed by SEO data and insights.
• Split your content strategy into targeting for customers who will use your software every day and customers who hold budget and influence over the decision making process.
• Create unique tools for your target customers which go beyond day-to-day HR issues and capitalise on our changing world, such as tools for team wellness and remote working.
• Connect your content strategy to marketing automation tools, utilising gated content for lead generation and nurturing for your sales team.
• Leverage a thought leadership approach, backed up by industry reports and data to establish your credibility and brand awareness on relevant publishers.
• Build relationships with key journalists and bloggers who write about HR software on a regular basis.

Or, just hire us and we’ll do all of this for you. 

Now, let’s get into the details and show you why this is the right approach to grow your organic search traffic. 

The organic search landscape

Using data from Ahrefs, we’re able to see who is the organic search market leader based on the volume of keywords that they rank for globally, combined with the estimated number of visitors they are getting from those keywords each month. Here is the top 10:

As we can see, Gusto is far and away the leader when it comes to the overall number of keywords that they are ranking for, plus the estimated amount of traffic that they are getting as a result. Let’s take a closer look at them and what they are getting right. 

Gusto is generating most of their traffic from the US market which is one of the larger markets and it appears to be where they are most active. They also seem to have a large marketing team of over 50 people and they are producing a LOT of content via their blog and resource sections. 

The marketing team is certainly doing a lot of things right when it comes to content. One example is their Resources section which includes things such as Business Planning calculators and Employer Tax calculators which HR professionals may use and bookmark. Placing your brand front of mind with HR professionals by providing something of value is a great way to build your brand via search and increase the likelihood of them becoming a future customer. 

These tools and calculators appear to generate a decent amount of traffic whilst also attracting links to the domain with 405 linking domains to the /resources/ section alone. This means that they are not only attracting traffic, but they are also increasing the strength of their domain which in turn, will help attract more search traffic. 

It’s also worth noting that they’re not the only ones enjoying success here. CharlieHR hasn’t scaled the idea as much as Gusto, but do have a holiday calculator and holiday pay calculator which ranks well and gets links. This approach seems to work well in this sector and whilst this can make it harder to stand out with such an approach, it is worth considering for a brand wanting to capitalise on what is working for others. With the current changing landscape, HR software firms need to be asking themselves how they can provide valuable tools that can help with hot topics such as remote working and employee wellness.  

Gusto also has an extensive blog section which alone generates a huge chunk of their traffic and, given that they rank for over 200k keywords (far more than competitors) we can safely assume that they get a lot of long-tail traffic too. 

Alongside these sections, they have a very detailed support subdomain that ranks for over 30k keywords on its own - this appears almost by accident because many keywords are similar to those they rank for on the blog.

Whilst they are doing a lot of things right, a byproduct of their success appears to be that they are generating a lot of traffic which may not be leading to potential customers. For example, some of their most popular keywords in terms of traffic generation are:

• [gross pay]
• [pay stub]
• [what is net pay]

These keywords are related to what Gusto provides but if we assume that their target market is business leaders and those who work in HR, these people are unlikely to be Googling these types of words.

Therefore, they are probably generating a lot of traffic which isn’t necessarily leading to conversions or customers. This isn’t to say that they are actively doing things wrong here, but when it comes to analysing their success, we need to bear in mind that a lot of their traffic may not be the traffic that you’d also like to target. 

Aside from Gusto, we can see that BambooHR is second in our list of HR SaaS companies winning with their SEO strategy. BambooHR has closed the gap significantly on Gusto in the last few years, and now receives just ~14% less traffic than Gusto receives (still mostly US focused). Like Gusto, they are doing a good job with content production.

Their blog generates a lot of traffic and they have smartly created a glossary section that not only attracts traffic but also generates links. They seem to suffer from a similar problem to Gusto here in that the glossary will generate a lot of traffic but much of this traffic isn’t likely to be decision-makers in the HR or business leadership world. 

Another area where BambooHR performs well is their webinars, which are run regularly and touch upon trending topics that are likely to appear to their target audience. They are also allowing previously run webinars to be accessed on-demand, and gating them to ensure they continue to generate leads. Many webinars are in partnership with related, non-competing companies which almost certainly gives each webinar more reach to a relevant audience.

Alongside webinars, BambooHR has a range of other gated content. Not only is this content generating leads, but some of these pages also rank well in organic search.

For example, thanks to its range of resources, BambooHR are ranking on page 1 in the US for the following keywords:

• [compensation trends 2022]
• [experience report]
• [rethink recruitment]
• [work from home expectation vs reality]

Whilst these keywords do not have lots of search volume, they are likely to be used by HR professionals who may become customers for BambooHR. 

The organic keyword landscape

Whilst a relatively niche sector, keyword search volume in the UK and the US is pretty substantial. Our research showed that even if we just take the top ten most searched for keywords, the total number of searches per month is over 4,000 in the UK and nearly 12,000 in the US:

This is just for a small sample of ten keywords which shows the sheer size of the opportunity available to companies who are able to take advantage and get their SEO strategy and execution right.

The advantage of keywords like the ones above is that the intent behind them is very, very clear. Someone conducting a search for [HR software] is likely to be researching their options for trialling and onboarding HR software. Contrast this with the keywords we discussed earlier such as [gross pay] and [pay stub] that Gusto are ranking for and we can see a clear difference with intent. 

The value of these keywords

We can understand more about the importance of targeting these keywords from an organic search perspective if we look at how much it would cost you per click to get traffic using Google Ads:

We can see that we could be paying up to £69 per click to get traffic for these high commercial intent keywords. 

Here is how the picture looks for the top keywords in the US:

Here, you could be looking at paying up to $210 per click for these types of keywords. 

Whilst paid media should be part of every brand’s digital marketing strategy, this shows the need to not be overly reliant on paid traffic and that organic search needs to share the load. Not to mention that as the market becomes more competitive, the costs for paid traffic are likely to increase every year. Indeed, the US CPC has increased by almost 300% in less than two years.

Who is winning with these keywords?

In terms of who is winning SEO if we focus on just keywords with a high level of commercial intent, this is how the list looks when we checked the rankings for over 200 keywords:

What you’ll notice here is that very few of the companies who are getting the most traffic overall, such as Gusto, perform as well when it comes to high commercial intent keywords. This presents an opportunity, but not the only opportunity. This data also reveals another element that needs to be part of your SEO strategy - publishers. 

This list includes publishers who have written content on the topic of HR software—including these articles from PC Mag and Tech Radar—as well as comparison sites like SoftwareAdvice.co.uk, TechnologyAdvice.com and Capterra.co.uk.

This tells us that Google wants to show a mix of software providers and publishers on page 1, meaning that sometimes, users are looking for different types of results. In terms of SEO strategy, this opens up another avenue for us to grow our business. Not only should we try to rank directly for these types of high commercial intent keywords, but we should also build relationships with publishers who produce content related to our product. 

The paid media landscape

So far we’ve looked at what HR SaaS companies are doing with organic search, but what about paid media? Organic traffic is great—after all, it’s “free”—but, as we touched on earlier, a lot of these companies are ranking for terms that might not be quite right in terms of search intent. An effective paid media strategy should get your brand and value proposition in front of the right people.

How much are HR SaaS leaders spending?

Gusto might be winning on the organic search battlefield, but the picture is different when we look at Google Ads—at least, they’re not competing as hard.

While Gusto were ahead on total HR software-related ranking keywords, and organic traffic, they’re a long way off the biggest Google Ads spenders in this space.

Let’s take a snapshot of this by looking at the activity around search terms related to ‘hr software’ in December 2022. The below table shows the five biggest US Google Ads spenders compared to Gusto.

Clearly, Gusto has a much smaller budget than the likes of IBM, Zoho and Sage, but they’ve clearly prioritised what to bid on. According to Semrush, Gusto was bidding on just six keywords in December 2022, but those keywords yielded an average of ~1,000 sessions each. By comparison, IBM’s keywords are yielding an average of just ~10 sessions each.

We were a bit surprised to see IBM appear at the top of the list for Google Ads spend. After all, the American corporation is known for hardware and IT software, not HR solutions.

The landing page IBM is sending people to is for IBM Watson Orchestrate, a ‘personal digital worker’ (which they’re also referring to as ‘digeys’) designed to provide HR, sales and operations professionals with their own interactive AI to help with mundane and mission-critical tasks. It’s not really a competitor to the other companies we’ve reviewed, but it’s interesting to note they’re spending on what appears to be very top of funnel keyword terms tangentially-related to the product.

Interestingly, of the 10 HR SaaS companies performing best for organic, only three appeared in our paid media report for December 2022 in the US (BambooHR, Culture Amp and 15five), while just two appeared in the UK report (Employment Hero and Culture Amp). Are the organic HR SaaS leaders choosing to rely on that organic traffic, rather than commit budget to Google Ads? Unless their organic traffic is converting at a high rate, this could be a missed opportunity.

What content is being promoted?

Let’s take a closer look at where this Google Ads traffic is actually being sent, as well as what content is being promoted on social media.

Google Ads

Below shows a selection of the advertisers bidding on the search term ‘hr software’ in the UK:

Unsurprisingly, given the intent of the search term, the ads here are directly promoting the software. As such, all four ads lead to landing pages detailing the specific features of the platforms, as well as offering software demos.

Facebook

Gusto is also currently running ads on Facebook. From what we can see in Gusto’s Facebook Ads Library, all of these ads are bottom of the funnel:

It’s possible that these are remarketing ads only being shown to previous website visitors, but regardless, Gusto are potentially missing a bit of an opportunity here. Social media marketing is often at its best when brands provide valuable and engaging content to their target market, and exclusively running BoFu ads isn’t taking full advantage of this.

Like Gusto, BambooHR is running some BoFu ads, promoting the platform’s free trial. However, BambooHR is also running ads to gated content:

Although we’re unable to see the results of these ads, it’s important to include ToFu and MoFu content in the mix to avoid alienating a social media audience with sales messaging.

If your organisation is following in Gusto’s footsteps and simply pushing a sales message on Facebook, it might be time to consider promoting content that’s going to offer value too.

LinkedIn

On LinkedIn at least, Gusto are mixing up its ads with some value-led content:

On the face of it, this seems to be a more holistic mix than what they’re offering on Facebook, but it’s important to note we’re making some assumptions based on what we know about best practice.

On the face of it, this seems to be a more holistic mix than what they’re offering on Facebook, but it’s important to note we’re making some assumptions based on what we know about best practice.

How to win if you’re a HR SaaS company

Let’s bring all of this together and look at what you need to do to acquire more customers via search and ultimately grow your market share.

At the moment, there is no one in the UK who is doing anywhere near the level of activity that we can see from Gusto. There is an opportunity for someone to use a similar approach, leveraging their own USPs and digital expertise to grow their share of organic search traffic. 

The picture is a little different in North America, where the likes of Workday and Zenefits are putting a lot of effort into their content output, while the Germany-based Personio are doing the business in Europe, but there’s a big opportunity in UK market for a company to become the leader in the same way Gusto and others are doing. Here is how to do it without hiring 50 marketers like Gusto has.

Content strategy

You’re fortunate to be working in an industry that thrives on great content. HR professionals work with people and are often passionate about doing a great job, meaning that they are almost always looking for ways to learn and do a better job. The SaaS companies who are winning are ones who produce content that ties directly to:

• Customer pain points and problems
• Different buyer types within your target customer list, such as user buyers (those who use your software every day) and economic buyers (those who sign off budget and renewals). Hit those economic buyers with content that demonstrates the value of your software to their organisation.
• The customer journey from awareness of their need, right through to considering their options and finally, making a decision - you need content and landing pages across the entire journey

This should lead you to a core set of ideas and topics that you can produce, driving KPIs across your business:

• Organic search traffic
• Leads for your sales team
• Brand awareness
• Industry credibility and authority

There are other parts of the puzzle that will ensure more than just organic search traffic. 

SEO strategy

Producing content is only the first step in a successful strategy. This content needs to be supported by SEO data, research and insights so that what you end up with is likely to rank well and bring the kind of results that your writing deserves. Every piece of content that you produce should be briefed by an experienced SEO who will advise on things such as:

• Which keywords to focus on and include in your content
• How to make use of structured data to help your content stand out in search results
• What internal links to your key features and related content should be included
• How to make the best use of headings and subheadings
• Guidelines on what ranks already and how to replicate what is working for them

This isn’t designed to get in the way of your creative writing and expertise—it’s designed to ensure that as many people as possible see your content and that your time doesn’t go to waste whilst your content disappears into the myriad of other content that is produced every day.

Lead generation and nurturing

Once you have visitors coming to your website, you need to ensure that you give yourself the best chance possible to convert them into customers. There are a number of ways to do this and one of the most scalable and efficient ways to do it is to use a CRM and Marketing Automation tool such as HubSpot which will allow you to:

• Drive visitors to leave their details by giving them something of value, such as advanced content, an eBook, a tool or a webinar.
• Customising the calls-to-action that a visitor sees based on where they have come from and what content they have viewed before. 
• Scale and automate your email activity, sending relevant content and messages to your list whilst you’re working on something else (this is where you can act like a company with 50 marketers!)
• Track how many people visit your product pages after landing on a piece of content.

This, combined with a solid SEO strategy, will ensure that your content strategy adds real value to your business and moves far beyond “blogging”. 

Promotion strategy

Finally, the missing piece of this is the requirement to tell the world about what you’re doing and build relationships with industry contacts who will be able to help you. This can take many forms, with the most effective methods for a HR SaaS company being:

• Find the publishers who regularly write about and review HR software (we’ve found a bunch for you already above) and start to build relationships with their writers.
• Take hero content pieces and promote them to industry publications and start to establish yourselves as a source of industry data and insights. 
• Have an “always-on” approach to digital PR and watch for opportunities to comment on mainstream and industry news related to people and the workplace.

The combination of these approaches will help you achieve growth within your target market, whilst scaling your marketing without the need for huge headcounts by hitting the sweet spot between focusing on growth opportunities and automation. 

While many fundamental principles of SEO have remained unchanged the landscape is always changing. 

Within the industry, we’ve got used to increasing numbers of “zero click” searches which has been further accelerated through the introduction of AI overviews.

On top of this, Google is always rolling out new SERP features which are eating into the real estate owned by organic results. This means that, as SEO’s, we’re getting less CTR for each search. That’s something we’re constantly having to contend with.

Alongside this, there are new technologies, most noticeably AI platforms such as ChatGPT, Gemini and Claude, which are changing the way that users do research, and find their way to making purchasing decisions. 

So where does SEO sit within all this?

This blog talks through 5 key trends and the way we’re thinking about them at Aira.

What are 5 key trends we’re thinking about?

1. The impact of AI overviews on traffic (affecting clients in different ways!).
   
2. Google is getting bolder with penalties and more impactful with core updates.
   
3. The 2024 Google Search Algorithm leaks confirmed much of what we suspected.
   
4. We’re really thinking about how we measure performance.
   
5. Laser-like focus on the target audience

Let’s take them one by one.

1. The impact of AI overviews on traffic

If you don’t know what I’m referring to here, I’m talking about these bad boys.

Back in June 2023 at MKHUG, I spoke about these AI overviews, which were previously named Search Generative Experience (SGE). 

My main concerns at the time were around: 

1. Accountability - Both in terms of what would be presented in the SERPs and also whether the information being used for results would be cited fairly (spoiler - they’re not!)
   
2. The negative impact on informational traffic - This was always going to be the most likely type of traffic which would be impacted.

The number of AI Overviews has increased (and will likely continue to!)

This study by SE Ranking showed that the percentage of search results with AI overviews has increased towards the end of 2024.

Anecdotally, speaking as a Google user in the UK, since AI overviews have rolled out in August 2024, they are appearing for more and more searches.

Informational queries are far more likely to trigger AI overviews. 

Informational searches were always going to be the main casualty of this. 

Moz’s study of 46K keywords showed that 25.4% of informational keywords being tracked in the study displayed an AI overview. This is comparably more compared to the other key search intents. 

Naturally some industries have more informational search results than others. Some industries are more “fact” or statistic based which makes it significantly easier for an AI result to appear. 

Across our client base, many have kept their rankings for informational terms but seen a drop in clicks and impressions largely due to AI Overviews (and other SERP features).

Take this example of a publisher client of ours who came to us after seeing falling traffic. 

There were a few reasons for this, but a key one was the AI overviews.

How can we react to these increasing numbers of AI overviews?

1. Focus on building brand across other channels. It’s important to be visible.

The key thing is to not put all your eggs in one basket. 

Which channels - and how you go about this - is obviously going to depend on your industry. 

There’s no point creating a TikTok page with funny dancing videos if you’re a B2B SaaS company selling enterprise security software, for example.

Instead, focus on the channels where your audience actually spends time. For some, that might be LinkedIn, attending events and speaking at conferences. For others, it could be YouTube and podcasts.

Remember these LLMs gather their information from a range of publicly available sources such as social media, the web, reviews etc so it’s not just important to be visible in one.

2. We ensure that for Bottom of Funnel (BOF) terms, our sites are performing as best they can organically.

For BOF terms (i.e. “buy x now”) there are two key advantages:

1. There are less AI overviews. This means that there’s more opportunity to compete. Your main challenge may be fighting for SERP real estate with Paid Ads (more on this later)
2. These terms have a much higher commercial intent and are actually closer to the money - which is ultimately what we care about. 

3. Make sure your editorial content focuses on your audience's pain points, not just keyword targeting.

This is a given away. Let’s be clear. 

We’re here to make money (or leads/ conversions!) for our clients - we’re not here for the rankings. At most, they are a lead metric or an indication that we’re achieving visibility. 

It’s about making sure our target audience finds our content useful and that we’re speaking specifically to the problems they’re facing or that we’re an authority in the space,

We ultimately want to make it obvious that we’re the solution to their problems.

In short - focus on the users problems - not just the keywords.

4. Do not optimise like you do for featured snippets

Let’s talk about what you shouldn’t do.

AI overviews work independently of the main search results. 

See this extract from Authoritas.

As a result, playing around with headings and putting answers to questions below specific questions is likely to have minimal (or no)  impact in an AI world.

2. Google is getting bolder with penalties and more impactful with core updates.

For several decades, Google’s engineers were able to debug their algorithm and understand why pages are ranking in different positions.

Since then, Google has lent far more into “deep” learning algorithms which have become less predictable - and naturally harder to unpick.

The number of Google Searches updates has continued to increase and increase over the years.

In this article, Dr. Pete Meyers highlights the increasing frequency and intensity of algorithm changes over the past 11 years. He does this using data from MozCast - a tool that monitors daily fluctuations in Google's search results.

4 of the top 5 “Hottest” Core Updates have been in 2024 🌶️

This, again, comes from Dr Pete’s study.

Spicy.

Within these different core updates, there’s often a story of sites and industries seeing huge fluctuations in rankings (and as a result traffic!).

Take the example of Hubspot who saw a dramatic decrease in rankings and presumably traffic to their blog from ~September onwards.

Sites with high Brand Authority have tended to fare better with the Core Updates

Another theme - linking back to the previous point - is that sites with a higher brand authority tended to fare better with the core algorithm updates. 

Take this from Tom Capper’s Moz study which showed how losers from the Helpful Content Update back in 2024 tended to have less Brand Authority compared to their Domain Authority

Interesting observation. 

Google’s also been far bolder with manual penalties

We all saw what happened to the likes of Forbes Vetted and CNN Underscored when Google decided overnight to deindex them. 

If you didn’t, Google updated their site reputation abuse policy to prevent authoritative sites publishing third-party content, helping the content rank higher than it would elsewhere. 

The (correct!) decision is that it ultimately creates a poor search experience for users.

How can we react to this?

Stay calm, avoid knee jerk reactions and analyse the data

The first thing to say is that these algorithm updates happen all the time. Often one update will “fix” an overcorrection on a previous update. 

If you react with knee jerk reactions to each and every one of them, you’ll tie yourself in knots.

A better way of reacting is to analyse what’s up and what’s down once the situation has stabilised. From there you can make a judgement on what actions you should take.

Avoid strategies you know are risky

If you are actively building a review section on your site to leverage your strong domain, you’re in for a rough ride. 

3. The Google Search Algorithm leaks confirmed much of what we already knew

When the Google algorithm leak dropped and we were all flicking through Mike King’s blog pulling out the key findings, we were all filled with excitement….

…but then we realised that all the key revelations were all things we assumed - if we hadn’t already known already. 

There are several interesting things that we picked out when going through it.

Content

Google evaluates the core topics of a website, which is presumably used to see whether the site is relevant and suitable to rank for specific terms.

This does mean that it’s probably not worth writing about topics that are peripherally related to your core site focus - and more important to focus on the stuff that’s directly related.

Content freshness is also an important consideration. For example, we can see in the documentation references to lastSignificantUpdate which shows the last significant update of the page content. This shows the value of keeping important content up-to-date.

User Engagement

Google uses user interactions, such as clicks, gathered through Chrome User Experience data as a ranking signal. This is particularly evident in Navboost which is mentioned a fair amount in documentation, which refines search results based on how users interact with them.

Clearly the content we’re producing should look to focus on how to best drive interactions and engagement from the user. This just cements that it’s also useful for rankings.

Site Authority

Google Does Have a "Site Authority" Concept and we can see “siteAuthority” be mentioned in the documentation a fair amount. This is despite consistent denials that there was a concept of domain authority. 

How can we react to the fact that we now have this information?

Basically do what we are already doing… but importantly. 

1. Do focus on quality content… not just content for content’s sake.
2. Make sure that the user experience is at the core of what we do and that we’re encouraging engagement (i.e. long clicks!)
3. Make sure that we’re still thinking about how to build authority to our site and earn coverage for our content. Hence, we have a Digital PR team.
   

4. We’re rethinking how we measure performance.

Even when I started in SEO industry a few years back now, the concept of looking only at rankings was already outdated, but now that’s prehistoric. 

Let’s say that we’re looking to get money from organic search.

These are the broad steps: 

But that doesn’t factor in a LOAD of stuff such as these SERP features: 

Rand Fiskin has an interesting take on how to think about marketing KPIs in 2025.

Rand Fiskin from SparkToro did a LinkedIn post talking about how we have changed how we think about marketing KPIs.

This approach applies to more than just SEO and thinks about wider marketing channels - which is exactly how we should be thinking about our digital marketing efforts - even if we’re predominantly doing SEO work.

The summarise Rand’s thinking:

Previously, we thought of the different KPIs as:

• Top Of Funnel - Simply bringing traffic to the site.

• Mid Funnel - The number of micro-conversions taken to the site whether that be newsletter signups, whitepaper downloads, or ebook downloads, for example. 
• Bottom of Funnel - The ultimate KPI is sales - this is ultimately the goal of marketing init.

In the current era, though, Rand’s thinking is that ultimately measuring brand exposure is the most important thing we should be thinking about in Top of Funnel and Mid-Funnel KPIs. 

This also means that he downweights the value of traffic - deeming it a “vanity metric.”

• Top Of Funnel - The question here is on whether your brand has made some form of splash in the places your target audience pays attention.
  • The key metrics are impressions, views and engagements on the platforms most important for your brand - this could be podcasts, LinkedIn, Youtube, TikTok etc - depending on which platform is most important for your brand.

• Mid Funnel - The question here is whether people are specifically searching for our brand. I.e. They’ve heard about our brand and are actively searching us out.
  • The key metrics to consider here are branded searches, brand search volume, direct visits and conversion rates. 
• Bottom of Funnel - We still have the same final objective - sales. This is still the ultimate point of doing marketing - or why else are we here?

This is pretty persuasive as a way of thinking about setting marketing KPIs - but something to note is that each and every industry or niche is going to be different. 

This model isn’t perfect, though.

For B2B SaaS businesses, this model is pretty effective. Ultimately the goal is making sure your brand is the first thing that springs to mind when looking for a specific product or service.

This same logic wouldn’t apply to other niches or industries. For example, if you work in eCommerce selling products people don't think about too much or impulse buys where brand recall doesn't matter as much.

In those cases, more traditional funnel metrics - and focus on conversion rates, for example - are more important as people are looking to make decisions quickly and mostly based on price.

But in B2B, and especially in SaaS, Rand’s thinking is a useful lens: brand exposure and recall aren’t just nice-to-haves — they’re the foundation for long-term success. If people know who you are and trust you before they ever hit your site, the rest of the funnel becomes way easier.

What are the key takeaways for us as we think about reporting? 

The central takeaway from Rand's video is to focus your KPIs and reporting on your performance in the areas that are most valuable to your target audience.

This is ultimately the key. 

If you are doing marketing for a site centred on more impulse buys where brand recall matters less, you may want to focus more on traffic, conversion rates, average basket sizes etc - then obviously sales. 

If brand recall matters more, then it’s worth doubling down on measuring and reporting on exposure in the places your target audience already spends time. That’s where early impressions are made and trust starts to build.

5. Laser-like focus on the target audience

This ties on nicely from the previous point. 

The central focus for us is meeting our client’s goals - in the vast majority of cases this is revenue directly. But this could also be Demo Requests, Form Fills, Subscribers etc. All of these ultimately tie back to making money for their business. 

Cross Channel thinking is key

At Aira, we are acutely aware that SEO is only a single channel and we have to think across multiple channels to meet our clients objectives. We focus on whatever combination of different channels will help us hit these goals.

When we look at the example of the type of journey a user would take on a B2B SaaS, it is absolutely not linear. Even this model is overly linear. 

At each of these stages, we need to consider what we can do to help move folks to the next stage. 

Awareness Stage

The focus here is getting seen in the right places.

This is all about showing up where your audience spends their time - and ensuring that you’re being noticed.

What are the kind of things that we can do at this stage?

• SEO driven content - What problems or questions do folks have?
• Paid Media & Paid Social - How can we push our brand at this stage?
• Digital PR - Where are our audience visible? Do we have any authority? 

We could also think beyond just digital: 

• Speaking at events
• Sponsoring events
• Using social media influencers
• Etc etc

There are so many different types of strategies we could use to gain awareness.

Consideration Stage

At this stage, it’s about staying top of mind. 

People know your brand - they are interested in what you’re selling.

The key here is moving them from this stage to the next stage in as seamless a way as possible.

What are the kind of things we could do at this stage?

• Marketing automation - Are our email flows doing their job? Are they personalised, timely, and actually moving people forward? What could we test or improve?
• CRO – Are people taking the actions we want after engaging with a webinar, blog, or landing page? If not, where’s the drop-off? What can we do to encourage them to take the desired action?
• Content strategy - Are we giving people the right info at the right time? Case studies, product comparisons, pricing pages - the stuff that helps them make a decision.
• Paid Media - Should we be running retargeting ads based on the specific content people have viewed on the site?

The goal here: remove friction, build trust, and make it easy for someone who’s curious to become someone who’s ready to buy.

Decision Stage

At this stage, it’s all about getting users to convert - whether that’s booking a demo, buying a product, or filling out a form etc.

They’re close. Now it’s about making the choice as easy as possible and removing any objections or reasons to waiver.

What are the kind of things we could do at this stage?

• CRO – What’s stopping people from converting? Are there blockers on key pages? What A/B tests could we run to improve conversion rates?
• Marketing automation – Do we have the right email flows after sales calls or demos? Could we test new approaches to help close the loop?
• SEO – When someone searches for “[brand] reviews” or “[product] vs competitor,” what shows up? Are we actively managing our online reputation and review presence?

The goal: remove doubt, build confidence, and make taking action feel like a no-brainer.

TLDR: Single-channel thinking misses the bigger picture

If you focus on one channel, you’re leaving results on the table.

There is real value in thinking holistically and about how the combination of how different channels can work most effectively together to drive more conversions.

Whether it’s organic, paid, email, or content each channel can play a role in driving conversions - then it’s about thinking about how we can leverage each channel to drive more conversions.

Blended Search: How we maximise search visibility

When it comes to SEO, this is the landscape we’re generally faced with:

For a majority of SERPs, the space for our website to get visibility is increasingly small. 

So what can we do to compete?

We look at the terms that we can achieve organic visibility for, and those which we cannot.

From here, we can work on a strategy which allows us to compete using Paid ads for terms which we’d struggle to compete for organically and have organic content targeting terms we can realistically compete for.

This is why we need blended search. 

To help with this, Keyword Navigator, our proprietary keyword opportunity tool allows us to see: 

1. What the organic opportunity is for specific keywords (in terms of traffic & conversions).
2. What the Google Ads metrics are for specific keywords (i.e. total cost, conversions, conversion value and ROAS).

This helps us to make those informed decisions and whether we should focus time and resources on organic content around a topic, paid or a combination of both.

If you like what you see, get in touch

If you're looking for a digital agency to partner with to drive your marketing efforts forward with experts in SEO, Paid Media, Marketing Automation, and Digital PR then get in touch.

How to create content that’s both link-worthy and helpful

As digital marketing continues to evolve, the quest for quality backlinks remains a crucial component of a successful SEO strategy. 

However, to remain competitive in 2025, it's not enough to simply chase links. 

At Aira, our Digital PR team always strives to make the content we produce work harder. 

I’m a firm believer that you can build creative content that earns links (both proactively and organically) but can also rank and bring traffic to your site. You just need to get the fundamentals correct.

In fact, I gave this exact talk at PRMoment’s The Intersection of PR & SEO webinar. You can view the presentation here.

Firstly, it’s important to note that not all Digital PR campaigns are made to rank and not all Digital PR campaigns are made to be overnight successes. After all, the main goal of these campaigns is to help build authority into other, usually ‘money’, pages to help those rank higher. And that’s fine. But if you’re working in a space where you can create content that delivers both, this is where magic happens.

So, how do you strike a balance between building authority and improving organic performance? Let's explore how to create digital PR campaigns that are both link-worthy and genuinely helpful.

Creating content that’s both helpful and link-worthy 

Leveraging expert commentary - becoming a trusted source

In Google’s helpful content guidelines, they list that ‘trust’ is the most important factor in assessing whether your content is ‘helpful’ and stands a better chance of ranking in the SERPs. 

Trust, therefore, is crucial. And it can be utilised in the following two ways: 

1. To demonstrate trust to our own readers. This can be in the form of showing expertise on a topic, commenting on your data’s findings or providing insight and tips to a problem or concern your content is addressing.
2. To land media coverage. Journalists are always on the hunt for true experts in their field and getting your client's spokesperson in the media builds up the brand credibility and trust. 

For example, if you work for a pharmaceutical company and you have a guide on how to stop hayfever, this should be filled with a wealth of comments from a pharmacist at the brand. 

These tips can help both your readers to take away information, as well as be shared with a journalist, who in turn can share this with their readers. It will then give you the chance to build links back to the landing page as credit. 

Data-driven insights

The most common form of a ‘digital PR campaign’ is using data and insights to form stories. This style of content has been around for years, and with good reason - it works.

Focusing on data sets that are close to your brand allows you to form stories relevant to the press for your target publications. 

But how do we ensure this data can work harder?

When it comes to creating content that’s helpful, and ultimately ranks, we need to think about what data can be cited organically. 

The dream for us is to create content that drives links organically over time, with no time spent on proactive outreach. To do this, we need to think of data sets that answer common questions, will be useful to journalists and in an ideal world, have some search volume behind them. 

For example, statistics pages. Here at Aira, we’re big fans of statistic pages. Focusing on our client's speciality, we can create pages that include a range of stats that could be useful for a journalist to cite.

Let’s go back to the pharmaceutical client. You could create the following pages:

• Hay fever statistics in the UK
• Prescription statistics in the UK
• STI statistics in the UK

Spoiler alert: We created these pages.

These landing pages can be filled with statistics, data, design and expert commentary forming a ‘report-style’ content piece.

Money.co.uk demonstrates great examples here with their business statistics pieces, which are updated regularly and cited by journalists from across business media.

1. The effect of cost of living on UK business statistics 2023
2. 50+ UK Business Insurance Statistics 2024 
3. UK business statistics and facts 2023

Key takeaways

By combining these strategies, you can create digital PR campaigns that not only generate valuable backlinks but also establish your client as a trusted and authoritative leader in your industry.

If you’re interested in creating content that’s designed to rank and grow site authority, get in touch! 

Getting website traffic is important, but getting quality website traffic is what really counts. Otherwise, it’s like throwing a party and only your weird neighbour who talks about conspiracy theories shows up. You want to attract the right people, those who actually care about what you’re offering.

Whether you’re starting fresh or trying to recover from a sudden drop in traffic, the key is attracting the right audience. We all love a good up-and-to-the-right graph, so let’s talk about how to make that happen.

What is quality traffic?

Not all website visitors are created equal. Quality traffic refers to visitors who are genuinely interested in your products or services and are more likely to convert. This might be making a purchase, signing up for a newsletter or engaging with your content in a meaningful way.

However, quality traffic doesn’t always mean an instant sale. In industries with longer buying cycles, visitors may need time to research before they commit. Some might not convert directly but could refer your site to others who will. The key is that quality traffic has a clear link to your business goals, whether that’s immediate revenue, brand awareness or customer engagement that eventually leads to sales.

So, while it’s tempting to chase big numbers, what really matters is attracting relevant traffic that aligns with your business objectives. After all, 1,000 engaged visitors are far more valuable than 10,000 who bounce immediately without taking any action.

Make sure you can be found

If search engines can’t find you, neither can potential visitors. And if they can’t find you, you can forget about conversions. So let’s make sure your site is in top shape for visibility and more website traffic.

Check out Google Search Console

Think of Google Search Console as your personal website health check-up. This free tool tells you if Google can find your site, what issues might be lurking under the hood, and how well you’re ranking.

It also shows:

• The search queries bringing traffic to your website
• How often people click on your site (or ignore it - ouch)
• Mobile and desktop performance insights

So if you haven’t checked your Search Console in a while, now’s the time to right that wrong. Fix those errors and let Google work its magic.

Set up your robots.txt file

The robots.txt file might sound like scary coding stuff, but it’s actually just a simple text file telling search engine bots where they can (and can’t) go on your site. Sometimes, people accidentally block their entire site - far from ideal.

Check your file (www.yourdomain.com/robots.txt) and make sure you’re not accidentally telling Google to get lost:

If you find that, fix it immediately and re-submit through Google Search Console and the robots.txt tester.

Using Google Search Console to review search queries

One of the best ways to understand how people are finding your website is by using Google Search Console (GSC) to review the search queries you’re ranking for. This can give you insight into what is already driving traffic to your site and highlight opportunities for optimisation.

Reviewing queries for your entire site

By analysing the search queries your site is ranking for as a whole, you can:

• Identify key terms that are already bringing in traffic.
• Spot high-impression but low-click-through queries that could be optimised.
• Discover new keyword opportunities to target in your content strategy.

Checking queries for key pages

It’s not just about your website overall - you should also check how individual pages are performing. Reviewing the queries that drive users to specific pages can help you:

• See if the right terms are leading to the right content.
• Find pages that have ranking potential but need better optimisation.
• Improve existing content to target more valuable traffic.

Answering key questions

Using GSC effectively allows you to answer crucial questions about your website’s traffic, such as:

By leveraging these insights, you can refine your SEO strategy to attract more of the right visitors and ensure your content is aligned with what users are actively searching for.

What does your sitemap say?

Your sitemap is like a treasure map for search engines as it tells them where to go. Make sure it’s up to date, error-free and pointing search engines to the right pages so they can drive more traffic your way.

Structured data (Schema Markup) is becoming even more critical. If you’re not using it yet, now’s a great time to start.

Know your target audience

If you try to appeal to everyone, you’ll end up appealing to no one. That’s why understanding your target audience is essential in digital marketing. The better you know them, the easier it is to create content that actually resonates and encourages people to engage and, ultimately, spend their money with you.

Who are you talking to?

Defining your ideal customers helps you craft the right message, tone and content. But what is a buyer persona and how do you create them? If you’re not sure where to start, use a buyer persona template to map out who they are, what they want, what their problems are and where they hang out online.

What does the buyer’s journey look like?

People don’t just wake up and decide to throw money at you (unfortunately). They go through a process known as the buyer's journey:

If you’re not answering their questions at each stage, you’re missing out on potential customers.

AI chatbots can now help answer these questions in real time, keeping visitors engaged. A handy tool for both you and your audience, as it can free up your time and make sure you provide potential customers with information as and when it's needed.

Using search data to build a seed keyword list

By combining insights from the Google Search Console review with your understanding of the buyer’s journey, you can build out a list of seed keywords. These are the initial terms to track and investigate further through keyword research, as we can assume that the terms your buyer personas are interested in will drive quality traffic. This approach ensures that your content strategy aligns with user intent and business objectives, leading to better search rankings and higher conversions.

Align your marketing strategy to your target audience

Now that you know who you’re talking to, let’s make sure your marketing strategy is laser-focused on reaching them.

Keyword research

If you want free website traffic, you need to rank for the right keywords.

Here’s what you should do:

1. Research what people are searching for.
2. Check if you already have content covering these topics.
3. Expand or improve your existing content where needed.
4. Create new content to cover the gaps.

Google’s AI updates are shaking up search rankings. Optimising for long-tail keywords and featured snippets is more important than ever.

Where should you be marketing?

There are plenty of ways to get more traffic, but not all of them will work for you. Similarly, a blended search approach (a combination of tactics deployed at the right time) can be highly effective. Let’s break it down:

Organic traffic (SEO): A non-negotiable

This is the best kind of traffic because it’s free (and who doesn’t love free stuff?) and sustainable. But it requires work through SEO, such as writing blog posts, optimising your pages and getting quality backlinks. For more information on optimising your content, read our dedicated blog post.

Paid advertising (Google Ads and AI-powered ads): A necessary evil

Sometimes, you have to spend money to make money. Ads are sometimes necessary in highly competitive spaces where ranking might be hard. Paid ads can be profitable if done right as part of a blended search strategy. The key is to target:

• Relevant searches
• High-converting audiences
• The right locations and times

Digital PR: Getting your name out there

Digital PR is all about building brand awareness, credibility and trust online. This includes:

• Earning media coverage from relevant websites and news outlets
• Getting mentioned by influencers and industry leaders
• Writing guest posts to showcase your expertise
• Engaging in online discussions and thought leadership

A well-executed Digital PR campaign boosts your reputation and can help you gain quality backlinks, improving your search rankings and generating traffic to your site.

Social media sites: Yay or nay?

Some businesses thrive on social media platforms, others not so much. Focus on where your audience hangs out:

Short-form videos (Reels, TikTok and YouTube Shorts) are dominating engagement. If you’re not using them yet, it’s time to start.

Referral traffic: Your secret weapon

This type of traffic comes from relevant websites linking to yours. Getting guest posts, industry mentions or collaborating with partners can send a steady stream of website visitors your way.

Email marketing: Old but gold

People might leave your site, but that doesn’t mean they’re gone forever. A smart email marketing campaign keeps them engaged and brings them back when they're ready for your products or services.

There are three main types of marketing emails: 

1. Remarketing emails: These emails help re-engage visitors who have interacted with your site but haven’t yet converted. Whether it’s an abandoned cart reminder, a follow-up on a viewed product or a special offer to bring them back, remarketing emails keep your brand top of mind and encourage users to return.
2. Nurture emails: Designed to guide potential customers through the buyer’s journey, nurture emails provide valuable information at each stage. From educational content to case studies and testimonials, these emails help build trust and move users closer to making a decision.
3. Promotional emails: Everyone loves a good deal! Promotional emails focus on special offers, discounts and exclusive deals to encourage conversions. Whether it’s a limited-time sale or an exclusive early-bird offer, these emails help drive sales and engagement with your brand.

Yes, privacy updates and regulations have made email tracking trickier. But, if you focus on personalised, high-value content sent to an audience that opted in, you'll keep engagement rates high.

Google Analytics: Keep an eye on what's working

If you’re not tracking your efforts with Google Analytics, you’re flying blind. Monitor where your web traffic is coming from and what’s converting, and tweak accordingly.

Fix broken links: Your SEO depends on it

Nothing says unprofessional like clicking a link and landing on a 404 error. Fix broken links regularly to keep both search engines and visitors happy.

Conclusion

Now you know how to define what high-quality traffic is, how to identify your target audience and the channels to use to reach them. With this knowledge, you can develop a strategy that puts your brand in front of the right people at the right time. Whether it’s through SEO, paid ads, email marketing or social media, focusing on quality over quantity will lead to better engagement, stronger customer relationships and ultimately, more conversions. So, go forth and drive traffic that actually matters!

Need help driving more website traffic to your site? Let’s chat about how to level up your strategy.

Have you ever opened a spreadsheet filled with facts and figures and thought…‘huh’? If so, you're certainly not alone.

When you're dealing with a lot of data, you might spend a good 10 minutes just staring at a screen of numbers, columns and READ.ME notes before doing anything remotely productive. And this is normal, because our brains aren't designed to absorb an onslaught of figures with no apparent logic.

But fear not. As fun as it is to mindlessly stare at things, there is a better way to digest, share and celebrate data so everyone can understand what it means and the story behind it. It’s a magical thing that makes key trends and stories stand out in a flash, engages even the biggest spreadsheet haters of the world and makes data EVEN sexier (yes that is possible).

It's known as data visualisation, and we'll go into what it is and why it matters below.

Data visualisation

Now, most of us have heard of data visualisation (or data viz, as the cool kids call it), but if you haven’t, we'll define data visualisation for you using this simple formula:

Easy. Kinda.

The problem with data viz, is that design is hugely subjective. Designs, formats and interactive elements that might be super clear and beautiful to you, could be tragically complicated and unattractive to someone else. This disconnect between creator and user is common, you only have to Google ‘infographic’ to see an array of designs that someone, somewhere, at some point thought were great, but which don’t show a clear story and/or are extremely difficult to navigate and digest.

Technically, any visualisation of data is data viz, but there's certainly an argument that any visualisation that is just as bamboozling as the raw data, is less ‘viz’ and more just data. And we need the ‘viz’, guys - it’s the second best part.

Key data viz trends in 2025

Data visualisation has evolved rapidly in recent years, and 2025 is no exception. Here are some of the biggest trends shaping the field right now:

• AI-generated data visualisation – With advancements in AI, automated tools can now generate complex, insightful data visualisations in seconds, helping businesses and analysts save time.
• Interactive & personalised visualisations – Data viz is becoming more interactive, allowing users to filter and explore data in a way that’s meaningful to them.
• Augmented & Virtual Reality (AR/VR) data visualisation – Immersive visualisation techniques allow users to engage with complex data in 3D environments, providing deeper insights.
• Mobile-first data visualisation – More people consume content on their phones, so modern data viz must be designed with smaller screens in mind, ensuring clarity and usability on mobile devices.

Where to find great data viz inspiration

Now that we’ve covered what data visualisation is, here are some fantastic places online where you can find effective and impactful examples:

• Information is Beautiful: A showcase of beautifully designed, informative visualisations.
• Flowing Data: A blog dedicated to exploring how data tells stories through visualisation.
• The Pudding: A site featuring in-depth visual essays using data-driven storytelling.
• Tableau Public: A platform where users can publish and explore data visualisations from across industries.

Next, we'll run though some of Aira’s own digital PR campaigns to dissect them and show how data viz can help communicate cool stories and make data more readable and relatable.

Offshore Wind Turbines

This campaign used data visualisation to tell a compelling story about how offshore wind turbines can power major cities. Given the complexity of the methodology behind the calculations, data visualisation helped make the information more digestible.

We started by calculating the energy consumption of each city using data from the International Energy Agency. We then estimated how much energy a single wind turbine could generate. By dividing the total energy consumption for each city by the output of one turbine, we determined how many turbines would be needed to meet each city's annual energy demand. We also factored in the necessary spacing between turbines to avoid interference.

Despite the complexity of these calculations, we visualised the results in a way that was easy for anyone to understand. Instead of overwhelming viewers with raw numbers, the infographic highlighted three key data points per city:

• % of city area needed for offshore turbines
• Number of offshore turbines required
• Total km² of offshore turbines needed

These figures provided a quick and intuitive understanding of the scale of offshore wind energy required. Instead of bombarding users with complex numbers, the shaded areas on the map offered a clear visual representation of how much offshore space would be needed compared to the city's size.

World heritage sites

This campaign is a great example of aesthetically pleasing data viz. The user can easily hover over the world’s most endangered heritage sites and see the factors affecting them.

The images in the centre of the radial visual representation are eye-catching and the colours are complementary. The main drawback of this visual, however, is...mobile.

Now don’t get us wrong, UX on mobile for this piece is good. The data is still clear and easily readable, the images and the colours are still nice. It works. But when we initially designed it, we started with desktop first. We spent most of our time working out how to make it pretty on a bigger screen and the mobile design was more of an afterthought. The trouble is, 50% of web traffic now comes from mobile devices, so by neglecting it somewhat, you potentially alienate half your audience.

Basically, it’s really easy to get caught up in the desktop design, sitting with a digital artist or designer, looking at an expensive retina desktop display and filling all the lovely space with fun graphics and big graphs, but the reality is that a lot of your users won’t even see that. Sad, but true.

So, design for mobile first.

So what's the key to great data visualisation?

When it comes to digital PR, here are some key principles for effective data visualisation:

• Purpose-driven: A great data viz should clearly highlight the campaign's main message and key takeaways.
• Easy to understand: It should be accessible to a broad audience without requiring expert knowledge.
• Mobile-first: With more people consuming content on mobile devices, designing data viz with mobile usability in mind is essential.

By following these principles, you can create data visualisations that are engaging, informative, and impactful.

Why is data visualisation important?

Data visualisation is important because it allows us to present data in a way that makes complex data sets understandable, helping businesses, present data in a way that means you don't need to be a data scientist or expert in data analytics to understand it. This helps you tell your story effectively, which ensures you engage with your target audience. It's also a great tool as part of a blended search marketing strategy, helping you gain those much-needed links.

By using visual elements and different types of data formats, data visualisation helps you extract meaningful information from data points. This ensures that data values aren't just seen, but truly understood, making it easier to represent data in an impactful way.

So there you go. Hopefully, you have a better idea of what data viz is, but if you have any questions or would like to know more about how to make the best use of data viz, feel free to get in touch for a chat.

So you’ve written a shiny new piece of content and you’re ready to hit publish. The only thing is, it's no good to anyone if your target audience can't find it. Your content is based on keyword research, so you know it’s a topic people want to hear about, you just don’t know how to get it seen by those people.

To help, we’ve compiled an SEO checklist for optimising web content to make sure your content is properly optimised, giving it the best chance of ranking well in search engine results.

1. Choosing your keyword and content target

Before you start optimising your content, you need to make sure you’re targeting the right keywords. Keyword research is the foundation of any successful SEO strategy. Use tools like SEMrush, Ahrefs or Google Search Console to identify target keywords with strong search volume and clear search intent. Aim for a mix of primary keywords, related keywords and long-tail keywords to capture a wider audience.

Once you have your keywords, map out your content strategy. Each blog post or page should fit into a topic cluster. This is a network of related content that helps search engines understand how your pages connect. Not only does this improve your search engine ranking, but it also keeps site visitors engaged by guiding them to other relevant pages.

2. URL

If your CMS gives you the option, update the URL to something descriptive and clear. Rather than ‘www.yourdomain.com/2025/01/12/blog-post’, try to keep the page close to the root so search engine crawlers can easily discover it. Something like ‘www.yourdomain.com/blog/blog-post’ would work well. Include any target keywords in the URL where natural, but don’t keyword stuff.

3. Page title

Make sure your page has a title tag. This sits between <title> tags and tells search engines what your page is about. It’s also what shows up in Google search results as the blue link at the top of your listing.

Most content management systems will let you update the page title with no coding necessary. Try to choose something between 50 and 60 characters (Google still cuts off anything longer), with the format ‘Page Title | Company Name’. Again, if you can add relevant keywords that’s great, but keep it natural.

Oh, and don’t forget about AI-driven search! This is still relatively new, but it's influencing how people use Google to find information. Google is leaning heavily into AI-generated search results, meaning your title needs to be super clear and engaging, otherwise you risk getting rewritten by Google’s AI-powered search engine bots and not driving traffic to your website, regardless of their search intent.

Google can choose to overwrite your title tags, but won't always, so optimising them is important to make sure they’re as strong and relevant as possible.

4. H1

The main heading on your page should sit within <h1> tags and should be something descriptive, naturally incorporating your primary keyword(s). You want to ensure you only have one H1 per page so that search engines understand what the most important topic is. If you have multiple headings, use <h2> or <h3> tags to define these.

Pro tip: Make your H1 engaging. Instead of 'How to Optimise Your Website,' try something like 'SEO in 2025: The Only Guide You’ll Ever Need (Seriously).' It’s more clickable and AI-generated search summaries might pull it directly into search results!

5. Copy

At this point, you’ve probably already written your copy (and you better have done some keyword research), but go back through it to check you’ve included your main keywords. Remember, keep it natural and write for your target audience first and foremost. Try to stick to one main topic and help the user complete a specific task. Long-form, high-value content still rules in 2025, but fluff? Not so much. It's about striking a balance between doing what your competitors are doing, but making sure you bring something new to the table, too.

Also, have a look at who’s currently ranking for your key terms. Google’s search results now prioritise experience, expertise, authority, and trust, otherwise known as E-E-A-T. This means that content from real experts (with credentials or real-world experience) tends to rank better. If you’re a pro in your field, show it off! And if you’re not? Consider adding expert quotes, case studies or original research. This also helps your copy stand out from the heaps of AI-written drivel that you see so much of these days.

You should also consider SERP features, including:

• Schema: Is there a blog/product schema? Does this need to be added or have your devs made an automated/templated solution
• AI Overviews: What and who is appearing in them - what is the overview focusing on?
• Featured snippets: Review the format of the featured snippets and check that your content fits this format
• FAQs: Consider renaming this to 'people also ask' and check you have content that suits this, either as more blog content or an FAQ

6. Links

Internal links and topic clusters

Your new content piece should form part of a topic cluster. Make sure you’re using internal links to relevant pages on your site, as well as linking back to your new content from key pages. Doing this in a way that is natural and helpful for the user will build a strong link structure that passes link equity and helps search engines understand how your pages relate to each other.

Outbound links

You can also link out to reputable resources on other websites where it’s helpful to the user. For example, this blog post might link to Google’s SEO starter guide as a reliable source of information. This helps search engines connect your content with authoritative sources.

Inbound links

Perhaps the most valuable type of link is one coming from other websites back to your content. If other people are referencing your blog post as a source, search engines are more likely to see it as authoritative. But gone are the days of shady link-building schemes! Instead, focus on creating shareable, high-quality content and using outreach as part of a blended search strategy to relevant industry blogs and sites. Download our link-building book for more detailed information on how to do it right,

7. Page speed

Search engines favour fast-loading pages because users expect speed. Google’s Core Web Vitals are still a big deal in 2025, meaning you need to focus on:

• Largest Contentful Paint (LCP) – How fast your page’s main content loads.
• First Input Delay (FID) – How quickly your page becomes interactive.
• Cumulative Layout Shift (CLS) – How stable your page layout is (no one likes surprise jumps!).

A quick win, particularly for blog content, is ensuring your images are optimised. Ditch outdated formats like PNGs and switch to WebP or AVIF. They’re lighter, faster and preferred by modern browsers.

8. The last checks

Before you hit publish, there are a few final things to check:

• Check your meta descriptions - They still matter for click-through rates and search engine results.
• Check for broken links - Nothing tanks user experience (and SEO) faster than dead links.
• Make sure your robots.txt file isn’t blocking the page - A simple mistake here can make your content invisible.
• Submit your page to Google Search Console and Bing Webmaster Tools - Search engine crawlers will find your content eventually, but why wait? Give Google and Bing a nudge.
• Analyse your performance with Google Analytics - Tracking organic traffic and search queries can help refine your SEO strategy.

And there you have it, an on-page SEO checklist to help your content have a better chance of a strong search engine ranking and finding its audience. Once you’ve worked through it a few times, it’ll become second nature. Keep tracking your progress, stay updated on algorithm changes and don’t be afraid to tweak your strategy when needed. SEO waits for no one! 

We can help you optimise your content

Need help fine-tuning your SEO strategy and optimising your content to boost rankings, fix those pesky broken links or get you valuable links? Get in touch with our team today to make your website work smarter, not harder. 

On this episode of It Depends, I was joined by Sean Walsh, Head of Marketing at Starpeak Insurance Solutions, who run a number of insurance brands including Protectivity, Sports Cover Direct and Les Mills Insurance. We focused on how to drive high performance during difficult economic times and how the last few years have changed (and not changed) the insurance sector.

Key takeaways

Price is always likely to be a key driver for consumers

Price sensitivity has increased across most sectors over the last few years, particularly in the UK with the shallow recession, inflation and cost of living increases. Insurance is no different but due to the nature of the product, i.e. it's not always a choice on whether you need it or not, consumers can lean even more towards cheaper products. However, even if economic uncertainty continues, this price sensitivity may well remain for the foreseeable and marketing campaigns shouldn't lean away from this completely.

Specialisms can help offset price a bit and drive performance

In some sectors, particularly insurance, specialising or "niching down" can help make you stand out to consumers and potentially offset some of the price sensitivity. This is particularly true for more specialist insurance when consumers are keen to ensure that they get the customised, specialist insurance that covers their particular situation and gives them peace of mind. More generalist, larger insurers aren't always set up for this, so smaller, more specialist providers can stand out more.

Growth needs investment

With many companies either reducing budget, or keeping it the same but expecting growth, it can be hard for marketers to deliver at the expected level. But if you're embracing a growth mindset, then you need to understand that investment is going to be required to deliver this. Of course, things can change over time and a company may then slow down growth and their investment, but if you want to drive growth, budgets need to reflect that.

Budgets and channels are being scrutinised, but that doesn't mean you can't invest in long-term activities

Companies need to look across their activities and clearly understand where ROI is coming from, whether that's SEO, Paid Media, Email or a combination. But sometimes, you may invest in an activity, such as TV advertising and not have the full, immediate picture of what the ROI is. That doesn't mean that you shouldn't do it, because the long-term brand awareness is likely to have value. This is particularly true in insurance where the consumer may not need a policy right now, but will do in the future, so being front of mind when the time comes is important.

And below is the transcript if you'd prefer to read it. Please note that it's been edited for brevity and to make it easier to read.

Transcript

Paddy: Cool. I think we are good to go. So, welcome everyone and welcome Sean to the It depends webinar, I'm Paddy Moogan. I'm the CEO of Aira, a performance marketing agency based in Milton Keynes in the UK. Today I'm joined by Sean Walsh from Starpeak Insurance Solutions, so we'll get to Sean's intro in just a second.

For those of you who are joining today, we will be recording this as well and sharing it afterwards. So if you drop your email address into the registration form, you'll get a copy of this afterwards as well, so don't worry too much about copying down notes. And we'll share blog posts with notes and takeaways, as well. Essentially, what I want to try and do on this webinar is answer difficult questions for in house digital marketers, but also try and balance that against the agency's perspectives, freelance perspectives, and things like that as well.

So you've got a nice balance between an in house perspective on a particular topic or question, but then also an agency perspective, as well. So we could hopefully give you some good things to think about, some good takeaways, and hopefully lots of stuff to think about and take back to your day job as well. So, before we get into the meat of the webinar search, it's about essentially how to drive performance during difficult economic times. Sean, do you want to do a quick intro to yourself?

Sean: Yeah. Thanks, Paddy. Welcome everybody. So my name is Sean Walsh, I am Head of Marketing at Starpeak Insurance Solutions.

We are a specialist online distribution, insurance provider, in layman's terms, basically, we sell insurance online.

We service about a hundred thousand customers per annum. And we have three consumer brands in the portfolio. One is Sports Cover Direct. The other is Productivity.

And lastly Les Mills, insurance.

Been with the company for just shy of nine years, and then prior to the employment here. I worked in the non profit and also some other private sector, all marketing, based.

Paddy: Awesome. Cool. Thanks Sean. As I said earlier, we've got a copy that's been recorded, so, we'll kick straight off into the questions.

So as I mentioned, we want to talk about how you can drive digital performance during difficult economic times. It's probably worth preempting this a little bit by saying we're going to steer as hard as we can away from the pandemic era of COVID and things like that. We know how difficult that was for a bunch of reasons. What we do want to try and focus on a little bit more is essentially post that period.

So obviously a lot of companies saw growth during the pandemic, some, saw less growth. Ultimately, 2022, 2023 onwards. Some companies did bounce back, but what we are seeing now particularly in the UK, you know, we had a shallow recession confirmed for the end of last year. We've seen quite tough economic times, you know, regardless of what happened a couple of years ago with the pandemic with cost of living being quite difficult, affecting brands, like, the ones that Sean works for at Starpeak Group.

And essentially agencies try to work with lower budgets too. But ultimately, this trickle down effect of the economy affecting, you know, what we do as marketers is quite difficult at the moment. We wanna really focus on how we can get around that way so we can think about it a little bit differently as well. So I guess, Sean, you work in the insurance industry, as you mentioned there, it would be interesting to hear about how you've seen this affect that particular industry and kind of how the company's kind of adapted a little bit, how it's changed, how it's had to try and ride wave a little bit, which is a difficult one.

Right?

Sean: Yeah. It is. Yeah. Look, given the circumstances, we've all faced the last six to twelve months in terms of economic instability and volatility.

That's had a kind of direct effect with with us in terms of our consumers and their demands and needs and it's kind of is is how we've kind of evolved and adapted and and for other businesses, wider than ours, to meet those demands and needs, especially when they kind of disposable income of our consumers or the cash flow of our small business insurance customers, for example, whether that's being restricted because of cost of supplies or materials, and therefore not necessarily having the kind of cash flow as they once did for insurance purposes and let's be honest insurance is not something that people want to buy and ultimately it is heavily driven, by price.

Regardless of recession or not, it's just heightened further when there is economic instability.

We've had to evolve and adapt as a as a business in terms of what we offer the consumer, whether that's our pricing or the ability to to to pay for their premiums over a twelve month period on a monthly basis or go the step further and given them kind of ultimate flexibility where It's kind of like a subscription model where they pay on a on a month by month basis, with kind of no cancellation.

Fees or requirements in and around it. So it has been a period where we've had to kind of evolve and adapt, and like I say, meet the demands and needs of a very price sensitive, driven, industry.

Paddy: Yeah. That makes a lot of sense. And you touched on it before with insurance. Yeah. It's not top of the list for a lot of people to necessarily, you know, go out and buy with disposable income, but I know it's something they often need. So, with that in mind and kind of that, you talk there about the subscription model. How's that kind of affected maybe how you market these products compared to maybe a few years ago? Do you kind of lead with that flexibility that you spoke about a bit more than you may have done previously, for example?

Sean: Exactly that. And probably even on those products where it's not subscription based, but it's just like a monthly zero percent APR kind of model, probably more so than we would have done, let's say two or three years ago. That's nine times out of ten, the kind of primary USP.

Definitely it's been at the top end of our kind of comms in our marketing output, because well, in our industry, our experiences, at least in the last twelve months, there hasn't been a huge amount of fluctuation in pricing. Across the board within our competitors.

And if that probably comes down to the fact that we know and our competitors that if pricing does increase, it has a negative consequence to conversion rate.

So that as just to answer your question, yeah, it's always at the forefront of the way that we market our products and making sure that consumers are aware that that flexibility, and those options are available to them, whereas maybe in the past, we would have driven with with other USPs that we thought were more primary.

So it's certainly evolved and, and has certainly been at the forefront of our marketing efforts now.

Paddy: Yeah. That makes sense. And is that the same? You mentioned, you know, the three brands that you work with at the moment: Protectivity Sports Cover Direct, and the Les Mills brand. Is that kind of, you know, positioning consistent across all of them? Does it differ slightly?

Sean: It differs slightly. So just a quick quick insight on our three brands. So Sports Cover Direct is primarily travel insurance for sports enthusiasts, and Protectivity primarily is small business insurance for the public liability for small businesses. We also do some event insurance and some also, some cover for landlords.

So going back to your point about the travel insurance element, we deal with quite affluent individuals that have got the disposable income to go on, let's say, quite costly, adventures and holidays to the likes of Europe or America to do, whether it's skiing or mountain biking.

So that element of price arguably isn't quite as kind of sensitive if you can call it that whereas on a small business, product lines where We are catering to sole traders, entities that aren't doing in the hundreds of thousands and what we're doing within the tens of thousands and as a revenue. And in turn, have got maybe restricted cash flow issues.

That probably sits more at the forefront.

That's not to say that we don't make an effort to, kind of, sing and shout about our pricing to those travel customers, but they probably aren't quite as sensitive as maybe the small business lines.

Paddy: Yeah. And we're kind of seeing that to some extent as well, I mean, because also we're an agency and actually work with a bunch of different clients across different industries. Mhmm. And whilst all inside the we've got a big chunk of kind of more kind of luxury.

You mentioned travel insurance, you know, some people who might be a bit more affluent to go skiing and things like that and don't aren't quite as price sensitive. Like, the clients we do work with, probably, do fall into that market a little bit where there's a bit more disposable income with more luxury goods. So that seems to be in a bit of a bubble right now. I've been reading various reports that are picked up in terms of high end luxury brands and things like that where that price sensitivity is definitely not being felt, and it's still seeing a lot of growth despite being way more expensive than your average products and things like that.

But I guess with insurance, again, it's something you need, isn't it? So if you're not price sensitive, if you're not, you might just grab it because it's convenient, you know, the other USPS you mentioned earlier might kick in more than price if you are at that end of the scale?

Sean: Completely right. Completely, right. And we've kind of tried to leverage other USPS, whether that's the insurance partners that we work with being kind of like household names, like the likes of that. So we're very much utilizing that as our own kind of, or leveraging it to get the consumer on board to see us as the preferable option.

But nevertheless, it doesn't matter whether it's travel, whether it's public liability, or commercial lines.

Price is a huge indicator or a huge factor for people buying insurance.

It's just I think maybe, as I mentioned, a slightly lower down scale kind of requirement on the travel as it is to the small business insurance lines.

Paddy: Yeah, definitely. And in terms of kind of, you know, with all of that in mind around shifting these, you know, the marketing focus towards, you know, price sensitivity away from those traditional USPs, does that mean that the targets you set within the brands and and individually across the brands and across the group in terms of what good performance looks like? Has that shifted more towards that kind of price sensitivity? We had to take that into account a lot more. How does kind of goal setting and targets work in terms of, you know, Starpeak as a whole and individual brands in light of it being more difficult at the moment.

Sean: Yeah. I think one thing that we've tried to focus on as a business is our retention and our new business acquisition. The reason I say that, especially when we're going into the end of last year when we weren't completely sure what the economic landscape was gonna look like for 2024. It was kind of like, are we doing enough, for the existing customer base to make sure we keep hold of them.

Should there be any instability at the other end of new business acquisition? But what's been really kind of surprising and interesting for us is that actually the volume of people online looking for insurance in our market is growing year on year. Okay. COVID, obviously, everything went to, kind of a flat line.

But at the moment we're seeing a resurgence in growth again, which almost contradicts a little bit to what you would kind of expect given the climate.

So, yeah, it's making sure that we're retaining that customer base with the potential that that new business acquisition might not have been there in abundance as it was, in years gone by, but actually evidently that's not been the case.

Paddy: Yeah. And with kind of, you know, retaining the, well, I guess that focus being more on that retention piece.

Does that mean you do more in lines of, you know, say CRO on that for new customers kind of retention when it comes to email marketing for existing customers, have you found yourself kind of tactically going more towards those kinds of ways of working as well?

Sean: Yeah. And it's it's, yeah, partly, and also about just making sure where possible we can, kind of stagnate, not fluctuate the premiums i.e. increase the premiums for those existing customer base customer base.

That again is a driving factor to why customers gonna look elsewhere, and the majority of our products that are annually based are kind of all auto renewal, so he has to go through the kind of email journey as such, but, the the the pricing is a big indicator and the point that we need to try and focus on to make sure that that is staying in line with their expectations, but it's difficult because we're a business like a lot of business across the country which are facing higher costs, and we try and where possible not to pass those over to onto the consumer, and we're doing that in the majority of our of our products.

Paddy: Yeah. And do you find, or, you know, in your industry at the moment, do you feel like that's the case across, you know, your competitor set as well in terms of because, like, almost every business is seeing rising costs? Have you kind of observed them trying to focus a bit more on the price point, retention, and things like that as well. Have you noticed anything they're doing particularly differently, that you've kind of also done or done differently.

Sean: What I would say is that there's certainly not been a great deal of fluctuation in or in the competitive space with regards to their rating.

Such early run-in terms that they appreciate like how you do the, the knock on effect that price increases can have, especially the area of the market, which is kind of low value, high volume.

I think, yes, there's probably been a case that they tend to lean towards that kind of pricing push within their marketing.

We know that others have a different pricing model, or business model whereby they might heavily discount upon kind of new business acquisition for those and then upon renewal hike there, their renewal premiums, which we tend to kind of lean lean well, but we don't tend to go down that route. But, to answer your question, it's very much kind of price driven in their comms.

But same time, and they'll still leave with some of their unique USPs, like some providers, for example, we give kind of, added benefits should I say for for buying your purchases or a policy with them, and that will be very much in the forefront of their marketing material when they when they do, publicize that product or policy offering.

Paddy: Yeah. Again, that makes sense.

With, with pricing clearly being so important right now. Again, that almost feels like as a marketer, you've kind of had your not had your hands tied, but the levers you can pull right to grow and to get more customers on board when price is so central to that experience the customer's gonna get and that that decision making process, do you feel like there actually are fewer levers for you to pull now? Because it's so sensitive or you feel like the other levers, yeah, that you can still pull them, but might not be quite as hard as in previous years, if that makes sense.

Sean: Well, I think you're, I think you're right.

I think just adapting and remodeling or evolving as a business as we have done in those last few years with offering those monthly payment plans and given the flexibility, like, two or three years back, maybe we weren't kind of quite so heavy on that monthly premium, communication in our marketing materials. So, yeah, I'd probably say that it is.

Paddy: Yeah. And this is almost impossible to answer, but I'll ask it anyway. Do you think this will change at some point? I know that the again, the UK, was just confirmed to have gone into a shallow recession recently. So we're putting that out of the woods at all yet for the foreseeable, but can you imagine a point where this sensitivity suddenly or not suddenly but starts to ease up a little bit in the future in your particular industry?

Sean: Yeah. Possibly. I mean, if we get if we're two years from now and economic climate is looking more positive, then naturally that has a knock on effect with let's say small business owners and what they are willing to, spend on their insurance premium, that being said, I think price is always gonna be such a driving factor because it is a purchase that, like I mentioned, that majority of people don't necessarily want to buy yes, there is that balance between confidence that they're getting the cover that they need? And we do a good job at that and making sure that we obtain policy offerings that's in line with the consumer's expectations.

So I think it might kind of it might kind of ease, but I can't foresee a day, not in the insurance sector anyway where it's not within within the top two or three, kind of indicators or kind of pull factors that bring a consumer in from being, somebody on the street to be a consumer of ours.

Paddy: Yeah. I guess it's always gonna be there, right, which I guess comes down to, as you said, making, like, your brands, good brands to to be, to be a customer off and kind of that softer stuff that customers want around the experience and things like that. That becomes even more important because, yeah, price is important to them, but if things do start to ease, then suddenly all all those other signals might help a bit more in the future and kind of make people think, well, I could save a little bit money going elsewhere, but actually it's more painful to move. I've gained a good experience already with Know, Protectivity or Sports Cover Direct. So actually, you wanna kind of incentivize them to, okay, you may get it cheaper elsewhere, but actually there's other benefits that might become stronger in the future, I guess if things do start to ease up a little bit that you could play on playing to.

Sean: Very much so. And I think if anybody's listening, it's not necessarily within the insurer space, because as I mentioned, we've come to talk about, length of the price sensitivity of this market. I think ultimately to service the needs, enduring it, the kind of economic difficulty is just listening to or understanding what your consumers' requirements are. If it's whether it's monthly payment plans or whatever it might be or reduction in your in your rates or your your your product kind of RRP, whatever it might be, is kind of just meeting those needs and that's certainly kind of what we've had to do over the, over the last few years.

Paddy: Yeah. Definitely. And without obviously giving away too much about the company itself, but how things are, you know, your Head of Marketing there at Starpeak. How have your budgets been affected?

Because what we're seeing a lot with a lot of our clients is budgets for either kind of advertising spend, you know, media spend, things like that, and or agency fees, freelancer fees have often been kept the same year on year, but targets are still higher. So you're having to do more with less. A lot of clients, they're cutting budgets, you know, laying off teams, that kind of stuff. Some are increasing, so it is a bit of a mix, but generally budgets are tighter than they used to be.

There's definitely more eyes on them. There's more kinds of people who sign them off nowadays than there were a couple of years ago. So what are you seeing from your perspective on that front?

Sean: We are, we are in a growth phase right now, a business.

And for us to achieve that growth is requiring us to spend year on year more money on marketing essentially.

That being said, we are probably more so than ever looking more closely at the return. From our activity and our spend, whether that's from our paid media or whether that's our email or whether it's just from our brand awareness advertising.

So whether we're a bit of an anomaly in the wide picture, I'm not sure, but we're very much intent on growing the business and to do that. We have to put money in the channels that drive it for us.

We've evolved a little bit over the last five or six years where we when we kind of we've been working with you guys with Aira in the past and very much kind of driven by paid media organic, which is still the primary channel for us for selling for new business acquisition.

But try to evolve and adapt into other models where other marketing efforts are kind of like brand advertising, and that brings challenges within itself because when you're being questioned on what the return is from that. And you've got no way really of justifying it other than maybe a few metrics.

It's probably an internal challenge that we have. But no, to answer your question, we were very much kind of on the trajectory or or spending more at the moment, that being said, that could well change in the next couple of years depending on the success of our marketing efforts and also whether our growth rate continues.

Yeah, so there's a few influential factors that will determine what we do in the next twelve to twenty four months.

Paddy: Yeah. And you've actually raised a a good point there and some of the you know, is important to remember, which is if a company isn't that growth that is occupied at the moment, you have to invest into it right, and I think clearly you've got, understanding culture and a company around you who get that and not because they're not just saying we want growth, but we're gonna have your marketing budget. That's not the kind of company you're part of. But if you want that growth, you have to pay for it to some extent, and that's not special to being as opposed to the opposite, which we do see sometimes with some clients.

Sean: Like the commercial direction from those above me, it changes, and there isn't the appetite there for that growth. For whatever reason that might be, or we see reduction in performance from from our kind of current spends, then they say that that that landscape could quite easily change in in twelve months time, meaning that we will be kind of, plateau in terms of our marketing spend, maybe year on year, and again scrutinizing it even further in terms of kind of its its end result and its ability to, perform for us.

Paddy: Yeah. And within that scrutiny as well, or you can imagine as as an agency working across different industries, it's, I wouldn't say it's the same for everyone, but often the vast majority now, they are looking at the different channels that that we work on and kind of asking the perfectly fair question, which is okay, well, what are we getting from, let's say SEO, what are we getting from paid media, and really doing a kind of a like for like comparison. Now they're not it's not the fairest like for like comparison sometimes. But you can see where it's from.

And what we tend to find is that clients and ourselves are more likely to move stuff around than we would have done so it won't move things more quickly. So if it's really clear that, you know, SEO is performing quite better than, say, email marketing or paid media, move the budget across to SEO or vice versa. That feels like it's, like, a quicker decision now that it might have been in the past. Or more time was given in the past to see how things shake out.

Sean: Yeah. I think I think you're right. There's also the kind of conversations that occasionally have whether it's more likely to be a kind of SEO than some of the other channels, where it is such a long term play. It's kind of like, okay. We've gotta invest in X amount for the next twelve months. There's no guarantee whereas if somebody is looking for direct or immediate performance, we can put that money into paid media, for example, get leads or new business acquisition, whatever it might be instantaneously.

I can show that return. Those are the types of internal conversations that I'm sure are being had, kind of even today or across the country, kind of like the difficulties and challenges marketers face with finance teams, or the kind of those on board.

Paddy: Yeah. Definitely. And I'd love to chat for another half an hour or so on that brand awareness budget as well and how you measure all of that fun.

Because actually I was chatting with someone last week whose brand does a lot of TV advertising as well. So they're trying to draw, you know, close that gap between, you know, a TV ad goes live and does X number of spots in a month, you know, in a month. And then while it does their traffic, and you can actually see what it does, but then seeing what it actually does in the long term, it's a bit of a well, we think it's having an effect. We know it's dropping people on the website.

You don't always know if it's gonna drive conversions, but somewhere it's a little bit of a leap of faith. Sometimes, but I know that there's definitely more science to it deep deep down, but it's not the easiest one to pick apart when you're spending that much money on it as well.

Sean: No. That's exactly right. And we, we, operate in quite niche markets where we're not going kind of mass TV kind of publication where maybe this, it's of such a significant impact slash intern volume that has knock on effect with traffic, etcetera.

These are in kind of niche spaces where we're doing advertising within whether it's magazines, whether it's online.

And as a business, we just where well, we can do this at the moment, and feel comfortable with it. Again, this doesn't mean that it would be different in twelve months' time, but if the products are growing in line with our expectations, then there's a kind of argument there that we can't completely directly associate an ROI or justify it as such. However, if the product is growing in line with our expectations, then maybe we take the view that it's doing something and it's aiding it.

So yeah, those are ones I could probably spend an hour on just talking about the pros and cons of brand advertising in itself.

Paddy: Yeah. It's that cumulative effect, isn't it? That you, you know, it almost certainly is playing a part somewhere along the line, and you kind of have to trust it, have to trust it a bit, but ultimately, if things are moving in the right direction, yeah, you're probably right. It is playing a part, even if it's a small part, we're not too sure kind of how specific a part it's playing.

Sean: And that's it. And for us, like, you only need insurance when you need it. It's not like a pair of trainers that you could kind of I don't know, just do some advertising for a day and somebody just does a spontaneous purchase. So, it seems for us, it's a long term play as well. Just making sure that the brand is present within the the right space, or the right areas of the market, so that when the consumer does go online and search, for personal trainer insurance and whether it's our advert or whether it's our organic listing, we are there, and there is some common familiarity there because they've seen us whether it's on magazines or whether it's at events or whatever it might be.

Paddy: Yeah. Actually on that, we, you know, this isn't necessarily about, you know, difficult economic times as search, but I think one thing that, you know, Starpeak have done very well over the years with the different brands is that element of niching down. So you just said there about personal training insurance, for example, and on the Protectivity side of things.

If you look at the group of companies and look at the fact you do niche down into specific target audiences How much do you think that's contributed towards, you know, being in this growth phase in an economic, economically difficult time? Because you're not yep, just trying to sell generic travel insurance or car insurance. I mean, you know, you are niche and more than that. Does that make you more robust do you think at the moment or more resilient? Yeah.

Sean: I think a hundred, yeah, a hundred percent. We will more often than not get feedback from our customers about how they came across us and it's a tailored policy offering for their needs. So we're not, we haven't gone down the route of being kind of a generalized insurer where it's kind of an off the shelf product. For the majority of our products, this is, we haven't gone off the I've had off the shelf driven product that, maybe a variety of bigger brands out there bigger insurance brands will offer. Instead, we've gone down the route of really thinking about what the consumer needs, whether you're a small business or whether you're a sports travel goer and needs travel insurance to cater for cycling in New York for the week and and tailored modified, created a product offering that meets the demands and needs. So when they are comparing our offer against some huge household insurer, which has just gone down the route of having a very generalized product.

We certainly benefit from that and leverage that because it provides confidence to consumers that actually what we're offering is far more, equipped to and built for purpose for them as opposed to being something that's generic. So, yeah, a hundred percent, I think so.

Paddy: Yeah. I know we haven't really spoken about that in advance, but I think that's something that does play a big part in people's mindset when, you know, money is more of a concern. Obviously, that doesn't mean it's already because someone's a big brand. They're gonna be the cheapest.

Some might have more leverage, but generally speaking, when it comes to specialist insurance and specialist products, yeah, the best of the big brands or the big household ones aren't necessarily the best people anyway, are they? So I guess it would play a part in their thinking that you are a specialist, therefore. You could well be well priced, but you're gonna get a better product because that's specialism as well. Yeah.

Sean: Exactly that. And it's kind of related to your area because it's a bit like going to an agency that does multiple different kinds of service offerings, whether it's PPC, the SEO, email, etcetera, or going to an agency that just does just one. So it's kind of like the pros and cons of that, bringing it kind of back in for us. It's, yeah, certainly something that we've leveraged. In fact, in the past, we've seen in conversion, our conversion may improve for making modifications where the product it may be from day one has just been, kind of a bit too basic for the demand and needs of the consumer and we've added additional coverage to the product. And subsequently see improvements in performance, conversion rate wise, as a result. So yeah, I think we definitely benefited both one hundred percent from that over the years rather than go and generalize the group.

Paddy: Yeah. Definitely. Cool. We're coming up on time. So if any attendees have any questions, feel free to drop them into the chat at the bottom of the screen. I can get to them before we wrap up.

Final one from me Sean, you actually touched a little bit there around, you know, Aira and the fact that, you know, we do multiple services, but we try not to do all of them. If we're talking about the different brands that you work on, and you've got kind of agencies freelancers. You could, obviously, you do stuff in house as well. What's your current thinking in terms of, you know, splitting those brands in terms of, you know, delivering all in house?

Do you try to get specialists? Just to do specialist things? Do you prefer everything under one roof model? Yeah.

Where's your current thinking and how that thinking changed if you think over the years?

Sean: So we've evolved from being just agency based to a split between agency and freelancer.

And there's a reason. There's pros and cons to both routes.

If you want to go down the freelancer route arguably you're gonna get more bang for your buck just because of the amount of hours that they can do against an agency that's got overheads, etcetera.

But the knock on effect was or the the positive and and and pro of going with a an agency is that with you guys where you've got loads of experts within in house, we could lean on you guys like we have done with other agencies to kind of support us almost like in a in a multi channel, effect whereby you can support us on a paid media as well as well as an SEO.

So we use a mixture of both.

And as I said, there's pros and cons to either or, the negative downside with freelancer from some of our experience has been delivering projects on time because they ultimately haven't got somebody above them that's that they held accountable from, like, a project manager.

And, and therefore, that comes trying to chase individuals for work. It is problematic at times. And also as well, we tend to lean towards or have done in the last twelve months or so kind of, engaging with agencies that are specific within their areas, i.e. on our Starpeak brand for, PR activity and, in a very B2B space. Opposed to the B2C being the Sports Cover Direct and Protectivity facing brands.

We've gone down the route of trying to find a specialist within that area and we could have done a freelancer route. I just think the added air of kind of confidence that an agency can give you if somebody's gone to the effort of creating a business and there's got a large team underneath them, with policies and procedures and methodologies, etcetera in place. There's the additional confidence that that brings that ultimately what you're gonna get from your money is going to be of greater.

Quality than what it would be if it was a freelancer.

Paddy: Yeah. The freelancers who are speaking that he he sounds like he some extent you've done similar to what some customers might do with with Starpeak and your brands, while they go a bit more specialist, that's how that could actually benefit as a benefit of customer as well as benefit of B2B brand as well so we can work both ways.

Sean: Yeah. And also, just the freelancer route is a bit more flexible commercially. So if you've gone with an agency, more often or not, you're gonna be tied in with some kind of commercial agreement, which depending on if you're going through your own a business where you're coming across economic, uncertainty or difficulty, having that flexibility to just kind of opt in and out whether you work with freelancer. Freelancers are certainly advantageous, but, yeah, it's kind of a case by case, kind of scenario, I suppose, you know, depending on what the demands in detail are for us and also kind of ultimately what we want to get from the end product.

Paddy: Yeah, and, we've definitely felt the need to be more flexible on that front as an agency. So I said, typically, you know, our business model is, you know, six twelve, eighteen, twenty four months.

Contracts.

So we've even had to find that those have more flexibility than they used to have. So, yeah, I think it's definitely being felt that way, too. Could we understand that ? You know, we have got downsides compared to freelancers and contractors, but obviously we've got benefits as well, but we've definitely had to be more, I guess, flexible on that front as well in recent years. So you can apply to us all, I think.

Sean: Yeah. It's true.

Paddy: Awesome. Cool. I don't see any questions at the moment, so we'll start to wrap up. For those of you that have attended, thanks again for joining. You'll get a copy of the recording and the notes, in the next couple of days or so. Sean, thank you again for joining us and for being so open and transparent with how you do things at Starpeak as well. Really appreciate it, and I'll chat to you soon.

Sean: Cheers, Paddy. Thanks for your time.

At the moment it feels like, almost daily, we're seeing incredibly powerful and exciting new developments in AI and Machine Learning. Large Language Models like GPT4 are giving normal people, with no expertise in creating AI tools, brand-new opportunities to do things we thought were impossible (or at least very, very hard).

Even so - you can still run into problems where GPT doesn't do exactly what you need it to. Maybe it doesn't know all the information you need it to (maybe it's kind of niche, or maybe it's private data about your company) or you can find that you have to spend ages writing instructions to try to convince it to pay attention to certain things, answer in specific ways, or extract information the way you want.

OpenAI themselves have given talks on how to solve these problems and supercharge GPT's performance.

(Pictured above) recreation of OpenAI's techniques for maximising LLM performance.

OpenAI recommends that everyone starts in the bottom left-hand corner with "prompt engineering" before moving up, or to the right, based on specific needs. While options like "prompt engineering" have been well covered by others in the past, until now, options like RAG and fine-tuning have stayed locked behind specific technical knowledge. That means that the average person can't use these powerful options to get even more out of these world-class tools.

Not anymore! In this post, we're going to briefly explain "RAG" and "fine-tuning" and share some free tools that will let you supercharge how you use GPT, without needing any coding knowledge at all.

Getting extra data into the model with RAG (Response Augmented Generation)

A common problem when working with tools like GPT is that, while they are great at surfacing information, they might not always know the information we need them to work with.

Often the best solution to that is just "put that information in the prompt". We have some great examples of doing just that in this blog post which talks about how different members of our team use some of the latest ML tools.

The big problem is that sometimes we don't know exactly what information is the most relevant. Say we want GPT to answer a series of questions using internal data from our company. We've got a couple of options. We could;

1. Copy and paste in all of the information that could be relevant (but then the model tends to miss the actual relevant information about 40% of the time).
2. Pull out the most relevant information for each question (but that takes a bunch of time, and we were really hoping systems like GPT could do that sort of work for us!).
3. Use the same kind of tech that powers GPT, to dynamically pull in the most relevant information each time we send a question.

(Spoiler alert - what we're offering does number 3 for you).

How do we make our information accessible to GPT?

One of the things that makes GPT so powerful is you don't have to use exact words to find the information you need. You can describe things how it makes most sense to you, or misspell things, and the system will still understand what you're talking about.

That's because, when you send a message to a tool like GPT, it doesn't actually see the words you've written. Instead, your words are converted into a big long string of numbers that represents the concept of what you wrote down.

This is the concept of "mouse" and the concept of "elephant" converted into numbers the way GPT understands them.

What's really useful about that is once words are converted into numbers you can plot them on a kind of chart. You can say, "Here are all the mouse-like words, elephant-like words are a bit further away, and right now I don't want any of that stuff - I want the sentences that are about last year's revenue".

So, basically, RAG involves;

1. Converting all your important, potentially relevant, information into these numbers and saving it in a special database.
2. Every time you want to ask a question to GPT you convert that question into numbers too and you check your database to see if there is any saved data with similar numbers.
3. Dynamically add that data to the prompt when you ask GPT to answer your question.

Before now - that's required writing code to do advanced data pipelining, to work with specialised APIs and databases. Now you can create your own, disposable version of these RAG databases just by opening up a GSheet, pasting your important data into a table, and clicking the buttons on our free, custom, extension.

If you want to learn more - here are some videos of me explaining how the tool is useful and how to use it;

Teaching the model to behave differently with fine-tuning

While RAG helps add extra information to the model, fine-tuning helps change the way the model behaves by giving it new examples to learn from.

The idea here is more straightforward than RAG. When we're working with a tool like GPT we're basically trying to give it the right instructions so that it gives us certain outputs. The default way to do that is to write those instructions straight into the prompt - this is a big part of "prompt engineering".

Sometimes those instructions end up having to be quite long and complex, and sometimes just writing them into the prompt isn't enough. Something you've probably noticed in the past (I certainly have) is that when you're trying to get someone to do something specific, the best way to get on the same page is to give them a bunch of examples of exactly what you want.

That's the idea behind fine-tuning - instead of writing out loads of instructions, you just give a bunch of examples and you create a custom version of a GPT model that is trained on your examples on top of all of the training and knowledge that was included to begin with.

OpenAI has its own clients and has found that fine-tuned versions (even based on older models) often outperform the most cutting-edge models, just because they are better suited to the task.

Normally you would have to do coding to construct your examples, use APIs to start fine-tuning, and use a specific API to work with your fine-tuned models - but not any more!

We've created another free sheet for you where you just paste in a bunch of example questions and answers to a tab.

If you want to learn more - here are some videos of me explaining how the tool is useful and how to use it;

Conclusion

So there you have it - two free tools that will help you take your use of GPT to the next level.

At Aira, we believe that the more people have access to more tools, the more we'll see amazing and creative ideas for what to do next. We can't wait to see what you do with these!

I was joined on this episode of It Depends by Chloe Gilston, Marketing Manager at Vital Energi Utilities. We discussed the pros, cons and considerations of hiring a single, multi-service agency vs. hiring a number of specialist agencies to cover various services. We even ventured towards whether you should hire a freelancer or an agency. The video is below, along with the transcript of our conversation.

Key takeaways

People matter more than services

The conversation led us in a direction where we realised that most of the considerations for answering this question were more about working with the right people, as opposed to where those people worked. Working with the right team, whether they are a team from a single agency, a couple of agencies or even freelancers, is more important than the question itself.

Don't try to be all things to all people

Agencies can often be tempted to take on more services than they are qualified to deliver and should avoid trying to oversell. Marketing managers (particularly those who have worked agency-side themselves) can usually see through this and it will damage the relationship. It can also damage existing services, even those where you've historically done a good job because overall trust is compromised.

Focus on the outcomes and then get people who can help with them

If you're working in-house, be very clear on what success and good outcomes looks like and these should be the focus of your work. Whether you hire one agency, several agencies or freelancers, focus on the outcome you need and resource your work based on that. Once you get your resource on board, get them focused on the outcome too - especially if you have multiple agencies.

Don't be afraid to say what you can't do

Agencies and freelancers should be clear on what they can't do when it comes to services. There will be things that are naturally outside of their specialism and that's okay. Marketing managers appreciate it when they are open about this rather than trying to say that they can do something and then fail. Be prepared to say no, but be helpful in trying to find someone who can help instead.

Freelancers (like anyone) will have strengths and weaknesses

We can fall into the trap of thinking that freelancers will be both excellent at day-to-day execution of work, but also be excellent at softer skills such as building relationships, communication or strategic thinking. Of course, some may be capable of this but like anyone, many will lean in one direction or another. We should be aware of this when working with freelancers and try to use them in the right way that leans into their strengths.

You can watch the full webinar (it's about 30 minutes) with Chloe below.

And below is the transcript if you'd prefer to read it. Please note that it's been edited for brevity and to make it easier to read.

Transcript

Paddy: Awesome. Cool. Good morning, everyone. Welcome to It depends, a performance marketing webinar from Aira. I'm Paddy Moogan, I'm the CEO of Aira.

These webinars are designed to answer difficult questions that are faced by in house SEOs, agency SEOs, PPC, marketers, content marketers, whatever service or specialism you have, you've always got difficult questions that kind of go beyond our services and the things that you do day to day.

So we're trying to really answer those questions in this series of webinars that we're doing over the next couple of weeks or so. Today, I'm joined by Chloe Gilston from Vital Energi, and we're going to focus on a tough question that's faced quite often by in house SEOs around whether to choose a single agency who deliver all of your services for you, or whether you should actually go with specialist agencies for those various services as well. And it's not that there's not really a correct answer as such. Obviously, everyone's a little bit different, but we're going to try our best to get through the next half hour or so without using the dreaded words, it depends.

And even though it kind of does depend, we want to give you more solid answers than that and give you some solid takeaways to really try and give you some some stuff to think about whether you're in house SEO, whether you're an agency, or whether you're a freelancer. So firstly, welcome, Chloe, and thank you for joining us for the webinar today.

Chloe: Thank you for having me.

Paddy: For those of you who don't know Chloe and know Vital Energi. Do you want to give us a quick overview of the company and your role?

Chloe: Yeah. Of course. So, Vital Energi, we're an energy services company, which basically means that we help businesses and organisations on their road to net zero, and that's done through multi technology, projects.

So we have projects up and down the country, and, my role really as the marketing manager for projects North is to manage those those projects overseas, a marketing and communications element, of those projects have been down in North and Scotland.

Paddy: And you work in house now, but you actually used to work agency side as well. So you've actually got that little bit of experience from from both sides. So, starting there, knowing that you've got that background in the agency world, but now you're working in house, where would you say you currently stand in terms of this, I'm not going say argument, but the question as to whether you go with a full service agency or a single agency with key specialisms. Where do you say you currently stand?

Chloe: I wouldn't say that I have a defined answer as to whether you need to do one or the other, I think there's times for both or a mixture.

So I don't really see it necessarily as being you must do this, or you must do that.

I think throughout my time, as you mentioned, working in house and also agency, I would say that, my mindset and my experience, have changed some of those views.

Particularly, I would say, before I worked at a digital marketing agency, I was quite skeptical to the idea that one agency can do everything.

And I felt that as a marketing manager, it was, you know, a kind of marketing ploy to get a manager on board with an agency because it's a case of "we can do everything".

And I've worked for businesses that also do the same thing, who say, we can do everything.

So I think sometimes that can actually get your back up a little bit, because really, that's a lie.

And I think throughout my experience working at a digital marketing agency where we didn't necessarily say we can do everything. But I think it's more of an approach with a client or a customer to say we're here for you and not necessarily that we can deliver everything. But we are here to help you achieve what you need to do, and we'll find the right people along that journey to help to achieve that.

Paddy: That makes a lot of sense. I resonate, obviously, being an agency owner at the moment and kind of being on that side where we've been tempted in the past to say, we do it all. We can do everything because when you've got a client in front of you asking for something, particularly if you got a good relationship, you don't really want to say no to them.

But I get the temptation and going back into the history of Aira, we used to do things like web development, we used to do social media management, and organic social, that kind of stuff. And we could deliver them, but we knew we weren't necessarily the best at those areas compared with others. So we took the conscious choice at various points in our history to say, actually, no, we don't do those. And there's something quite nice about being able to say, no, we don't do that as well. And I think that as tempting as it is to say we do everything, it can be quite powerful to say no sometimes and say, well, actually, no, it's not us. We do this very well, but we don't do this.

Chloe: Yeah. A hundred percent, and I think there is real power in being able to say no.

And I think that actually really builds upon the relationship.

I've been in operations and and customer services roles with with the agency and was very much in those positions in meetings with the client when they've said, can you do this? And we want to say yeah because we want to be able to do that, but we've said instead - do you know what? That's not really our bag. And actually the client's been like, completely respect of that and said that they really appreciate us being totally transparent and honest with them.

I think there's times like those when you can say, we specifically can't help. We can help you to find the right person, and whether that's another agency or whether that's a freelancer.

I think that's really why you start to build that relationship with that customer. And I do actually see, a shift in the agency industry where I think it's not necessarily you versus us. It's actually, a collaboration and they can say that they're specialist at that, but not at this. Let's work together for for that end goal for the client.

Paddy: It's probably more about focusing on the right outcome than opposed to saying, oh, we can do this. We can do that. If the goal for the client is to grow market share or to generate more leads, more revenue, whatever it might be, if you can help them get there, then you still look good to those agencies.

Chloe: I guess there's two risks really. There's one risk that, you're going to try to do it and probably underdeliver and not necessarily meet the outcome of the client and potentially ruin the relationship that you've built so far. And then the second one being the agency might go to a freelancer and ask them to support the agency with delivering that without telling the client. The client gets wind of it and if you've not been transparent with that from the beginning, that that can also jeopardise your relationship because they ask why didn't you say that to us?

Paddy: I'd love to come back to that freelancing point in a bit because I'd like to go into freelancers versus agencies as well, so let's park that and come back to it. But your first point there, we've actually kind of experienced that a little bit ourselves. For example, we do SEO and and paid media and specialise in those services. If we work for a client just on their paid media and we've done a really good job, worked with them for a couple of years, and then we talk about bringing in SEO.

Even though that's a specialism for us, we're still quite careful bringing that in because we don't want to do damage to the the the work we've been doing already by not bringing it in at the time with the right budget, with the right focus, because we may well be specialists in it, but end up still not doing as good a job as we could do if we haven't introduced it at the right time. So even for that, in that scenario, we're quite careful not to to tag something on. If we're not sure that we can do a really good job at it.

It's even more risky because if you end up losing the whole lot because you got a bit greedy, that's not good for anyone because the agency loses a client. The client then has to go and find another supplier, which isn't the easiest process to go through sometimes. It could take a lot of time. No one really wins when you're trying to oversell something.

Chloe: Yeah. Absolutely.

The most important thing is delivering the outcome for the client.

Paddy: To go back a bit. There's times when we may say we can't do this, but we can bring someone else in to do it and because you've got that strong relationship, they trust you and take your recommendation.

What things are really important to building that kind of relationship to the point where clients do trust your recommendations if you are going to bring someone else in.

Chloe: Yeah. I think it's a good question. I think building the relationship in time is obviously important.

And if you don't necessarily have that. I think it's a crunch moment in the relationship where you can probably either lose them or build that trust. So Certainly for me and from my experience, I would always go with transparency.

I would always be honest with them. And if that results in you not getting the work, then that's fine. But you've built that relationship. They know who you are, what you can deliver, and it might not be that the project or that campaign fits your agency at that time, but they will leave that meeting and know who you are, what you do, and I guarantee they'll come back to you.

I think that's probably a key learning from me because as you say, sometimes you probably can get a little bit greedy, can be a little bit like yes, yes, yes. We can do that.

Ultimately I think really explaining that process and working with the marketing manager or whomever stakeholders, to say this is our plan and to get them on board with it.

Paddy: If you've got a single agency doing multiple services for you, but then they bring in someone else to do organic social media, but they don't do it themselves, but they're going to bring in a freelancer to do that. And then that works quite well. Then they bring in someone else to maybe do email marketing. So you end up with a few different people involved in the project from different agencies or freelancers.

How would you bring them together and make sure that they are all on the same page that they are kind of moving in the right direction? That they understand the brief you're giving them? Do you do annual or quarterly or monthly strategy meetings or brainstorms? How does that look if you are going to bring multiple people together?

Chloe: I'd probably say it's a blend of that. And, I think we can hopefully say it depends now. Because we've got past the five minute mark.

And that it kind of does?

In this instance, I think it does depend on the campaign project, whether it's something that you're working specifically toward on a campaign or whether it's part of a wider strategy.

But yes, very much saying everyone should be on the same page. So that does need to be bringing everybody together.

And I also think it's important to understand those roles and responsibilities. Is it down to the client or down to the marketing manager, to be able to manage those agencies and freelancers, or is it down to one agency to manage that project management and kind of just keep the client more up to date on how things are progressing.

I think that kind of understanding and transparency is quite key.

Really understanding the roles and and those specialisms, but very much bringing everybody together.

Paddy: Essentially it comes down to really good communication, which isn't easy, the principle is easy, but doing it isn't isn't that easy necessarily.

So in terms of that, the central piece of communication, whether it's face to face, whether it's over Zoom, you'd expect an agency or a freelancer that you work with just to be open with the communication, be very open about working with people.

I’m wondering what prevents agencies from doing that. Sometimes you think of freelancers because, again, from our perspective, the last thing we want to do is tell a client, oh, yeah, we're doing it ourselves, but there's actually someone else being kind of brought in to do it. We're not telling the client about it. 

But why do you think agencies might do that or freelancers might want to not be open with communication or want to cover it up. You know what I mean?

Chloe: I think there's an element of, if they do see this, are they going to run, you know? And I think that comes back to whether you have actually been open with them from the beginning about whether you're bringing somebody else in or not.

And I also think from a communication perspective, it's managing those expectations, and managing what the communication levels look like, what channels you're going to be using, how often the marketing manager should be receiving updates, and really getting that read from them.

I think sometimes agencies will have their own processes, their own account management processes, and that they're kind of stuck in that way. And so when a new client comes on board, it might be a sense of It's a new client. We need to, you know, obviously do what we can to get them to get them, like, on board really quickly and that kind of thing.

And so your communication levels are probably going to be higher at that point. And then I think as you start to run through that relationship, if your communication levels are going to naturally start to drop, is that okay with the marketing manager? Are you still checking in with them? Are you still understanding if they're happy or not?

Because there might be a lot of communication upfront, which is probably more natural, but then how does that look in three months, how is that looking in six months? How is that looking in twelve months? And I think it's really important for them to understand that as much as you. You need to ask them what communication they want and how often via what channels.

Paddy: And from an agency perspective, it's absolutely fair. I think what we struggle with sometimes is that every client is completely different, which is how it is. It's fine and expected.

But then sometimes the way we try and work is. Okay. Well, this works very well for this client. We can make the mistake of thinking that it will work just as well for another client with no changes or tweaks.

A reporting template for one client, you think it's going to work for another one and that gives you some comfort, whereas if you need to change it for every single client, it makes you a bit more uncomfortable, but I think it's the nature of what clients expect, where clients expect to be communicated with in a certain way. And I think again going back to the question here and building that relationship, most relationships will start to fail. If I have to say six months, you start to take your eye off the ball. And it's kind of like most agencies that work with a client for a longer amount of time, you kind of have that peak at the start, then it can plateau a little bit, and then naturally things can go backwards when the agencies start to not put as much effort into communication.

And that's a really difficult thing to break out of. And so trust goes to the heart of not letting that happen and communicating all the time.

Chloe: Absolutely.

And I'm not necessarily saying that  what works for one client won't work for another one because it quite possibly will. And we can certainly take learnings from what's gone well or what's not quite gone well with one client and then, you know, obviously carry that across to another client, and their reporting.

I mean, gosh. Yeah. That's a whole other topic that I don't wanna necessarily get into in today's webinar!

Paddy: We need over half an hour for that.

Chloe: But what I would say again is just managing those expectations and just having that clear and open communication from the beginning,

Paddy: Definitely. We've been talking for about twenty minutes now, we've we've barely spoken about the skills themselves of SEO, paid media, content it's all been the stuff that kind of almost transcends that right. We've probably said, you know, transparency, a lot of communication and relationships being really important.

We've not really gone towards things like hiring the best SEO agency or hiring the best paid media agency. Instead, what we focused on quite a bit, is the softer side of that relationship. So it kinda feels like, you know, trying to get to us somewhat of an answer here a little bit. I wouldn't say it doesn't matter, obviously, they need to know what they're doing.

It feels like what matters more is their ability to communicate their ability to be open and honest with you as an in house marketer, and it's kind of like the softer side of the agency client relationship that matters as opposed to the skills. So do you think that's fair? Because it feels like we've focused very much on that as opposed to the channels themselves?

Chloe: Yeah. I do. Well, I do think that's fair, and it's a very good observation.

And actually, I did have it as a note when we kind of touch more on freelancers that I think there's a time and place hundred percent for freelancers. And there's many of my friends who are also freelancers. So I'm certainly not kind of going all negative on freelancers, but I think some freelancers and not all, do some do sometimes lack those communications and softer skills, and I think that's really where they will fit into a team, whether that's multiple freelancers, single agency, or whatever that looks like.

I think from my experience it's good to have that specialist freelance within a wider team because they might often not be up for those communications or those reports or those face to face meetings, as much. So I think understanding those skills and those people, you know, are they happy to be quite task driven, you, such as we want you to do this, we want you to do that. That's fine. There's a time and place for all these people. We need those people. So I think it's getting the right people in that room and around that table to help you. You know, you want somebody that is going to be able to communicate and whether that's from one agency or multiple agencies off by freelancer, that's fine.

Paddy: Yeah. I'm so glad you guided us towards a freelancer conversation. So we talked about it a little earlier. Like, because it's just as valid a question, isn't it to say, should we hire an agency or freelancer, or agencies and freelancers or combination of both.

But it's not very often we think of a range of freelancers. So some of them are more like, just head down. Here's a list of tasks: crack on and get it done versus someone who they've got more skills around sitting in the room with you and brainstorming for a couple of hours and come up with a strategy or they'll come out with a new way of thinking.

It's sounds funny, but maybe we expect freelancers to be both sometimes or we expect them to be able to do both, but it's like anyone, and we all have strengths and weaknesses and things that we enjoy more than others, but with, for some reason, freelancers, it's never really, occurred to me immediately to think we're this person might not be the best person to come to an all hands agency meeting, for example, that may be someone just who can crack on and get things done. And I guess that's also changed a lot or grew a lot during the pandemic as well, right, in terms of the growth of freelancers, similar to yourself, who have got friends who freelance.

Because the new ways of working that we've all kind of been forced into in some ways, but a lot of us are embracing it and it is a freelance world at the moment. So I guess, when it comes to, say, your current role of Vital Energi, if you are looking at freelancers versus agencies, what might tip you one way or the other in terms of where you may go for certain tasks or certain types of work, whether it be the the day to day task stuff or the the more bigger thinking, bigger picture stuff?

Chloe: If I'm honest, I don't see it as, as you're a freelancer, you're an agency.

I very much see it as are you people that I want to work with. Do I think that you're gonna be able to do the job for me? Do I trust you?

And that's pretty much it. If I'm being completely honest.

I want to kind of understand, you know, a bit about what you've done before, some of your case studies and what some of those specialist skills might be, what you can bring to the table.

What I will definitely be asking those questions around are things like: what can you bring? How are you going to be communicating with me? How often can I see you, when are you available?

And it is the kind of question really on those softer skills that I think would outweigh any sort of decision.

Paddy: Yeah. Which, again, feels like that's similar to the single service agency or multi service agency question. Right? It's less about the skills. I guess we could say at this point that the skills are kind of a given. You have to be able to do the job, but it's beyond that that your decision making goes into, as opposed to, yeah, you're a good SEO, a good PPC person etc.

So it's kind of a similar kind of outcome, I guess.

Chloe: I think that's probably where you're looking at. Well, what do we actually need to achieve here? Who's the right person? Can we trust them?

And seeing it really from a what are we what are we trying to achieve perspective.

Paddy: Yeah. And again, it comes back to that, the basics of working with people. I love the idea that, something you said there around it's about the people not freelancers or agencies. If you have a call with someone, if you just click with them, if you think, yep, I could work with you.

That's more important than whether you happen to be an agency or happen to be a freelancer. So obviously there's going to be some kind of budget considerations and things like that. But ultimately it's about the people that you work with.

Chloe: Yeah. I've worked with people that have worked at an agency.

And then, you know, they've left that agency and gone to another agency.

And sometimes we've followed them because it's the person that you want to work with. Not necessarily the agency. Or another example, I've worked with, you know, worked with someone before and they've then gone freelance.

And I've continued that relationship with them.

I think it's more around asking those questions on who do you want? Who do you want to work with?

Paddy: Yeah. That's a great answer without using the dreaded words.

I know we're coming up on time, so to start to wrap up a little bit, but I think that the point is there around as well following people around agencies or freelancers.

It works with us as well. Sometimes we work with a client who might be the Head of Marketing or the CMO, then they leave and go somewhere else, and they bring us with them. And again, I think, we've had that sometimes with clients. So they’ve taken us to three or four different brands that they've worked with across five or six years.

And it's more about that individual relationship. And when they go somewhere else, we're like, oh yeah, let us know how you get on. We'd love to work with you again because once you know how to work with someone you don't want to lose that. If you can get a new point of contact, they might not be quite the same. So, yeah, it can definitely work both ways for sure.

Chloe: Yeah. Agreed. Yeah. I think ultimately, people do business with people. So that's I'd say that's probably the key message.

Paddy: I was gonna say to you, I think you've just done a great job wrapping up all the key points there, and do my job better than I would have done it. But, yeah, I think it's all about that really, that we've not really talked about the skills of SEO, PPC or anything else. It's about people working with people. So I think when it comes to that question, do you hire a single service agency for different things, or do you hire a multi service agency? I think ultimately it sounds like it comes down to, it does depend, but it depends a lot on the people who you're going to be working with. Their ability to be transparent, open, and build a relationship. If they've got those things, either option can work, I guess is what we're saying there. So it's different for everyone.

But it does depend on the people, ultimately, because people work with people.

Chloe: Absolutely. I agree with that.

Paddy: Cool. Awesome. So thank you everyone for joining. And thanks, Chloe, for joining. For the very first, it depends webinar. Thirteen minutes is currently the record, in terms of saying it depends for the first time.

Are you struggling with the fact your GA4 data doesn’t stretch back as far as you’d like?

Perhaps you're struggling to join up your UA data that stopped dead in July last year with your GA4 data. Or maybe you’ve noticed real significant discrepancies between your GA4 sessions and your UA sessions?

If so, then this Google Sheet, is for you! We’ve put together a sheet that helps you blend together your existing GA4 data with historical UA data. Our Historic GA4 Sessions Generator creates backdated, estimated GA4 sessions going back to the starting period of your UA data.

This allows you to maintain a consistent analytics history which is really useful for reporting, forecasting and general data analysis. 

Make a copy and download the sheet here

Why is this tool required?

In July 2023, Google phased out Universal Analytics (UA)  and transitioned to Google Analytics 4 (GA4). With the discontinuation of UA, many found themselves missing historical data, as they hadn't implemented GA4 tracking going back that far.

This may lead to challenges, such as: 

• Generalised reporting - If you want to examine session data over time, you are limited to only the period where you have GA4 set up. 
  
• Forecasting and Causal Impact testing - For these, you will generally require at least a year or two of data for the model to understand seasonality and yearly trends. 
  
• Comparative analysis: Comparing current performance with historical performance becomes challenging. For folks who were late to set up GA4 tracking, it can be difficult to draw direct comparisons between past and present performance metrics.

So what’s the problem with just simply joining together UA and GA4 data?

It may seem easy enough to just get your historical UA data and blend it with your GA4 data with a date of your choosing, but there is one pretty fundamental problem. Even with early GA4 setup and concurrent running with UA, you’ll notice discrepancies.

This discrepancy comes from the fact that 'sessions' means different things across UA and GA4 with their differing capabilities in tracking user activity across various devices and platforms.

The solution? Generating backdated “predicted” GA4 sessions.

How does this Google Sheet generate “predicted” GA4 sessions?

This sheet generates these backdated, historical GA4 session numbers by looking at the average proportional difference between UA and GA4 sessions for the periods where both are tracked simultaneously. 

From there, the historical GA4 sessions are calculated by multiplying the known UA sessions by this ratio and “voilà!” you have your backdated GA4 sessions. 

Benefits

• This sheet is straightforward to use and is based on simple calculations.
  
• All calculations and data are handled in Google Sheets as opposed to a colab etc (and who doesn’t love Google Sheets?)
  
• The visualisations allow you to see how the backdated GA4 sessions compare to: 
  a) The recorded UA sessions
  b) The recorded GA4 sessions. 

Limitations

• This does require having a period where both GA4 and UA sessions are tracked simultaneously (the longer the better!)
  
• These backdated GA4 sessions are estimates based on the proportional difference between known UA and GA4 sessions. 
  
• This sheet does require you to pull in the UA and GA4 data. Though you can use the Google Sheets Add Ons to help with this.

How do I use this tool?

This section provides a step-by-step guide of how to use the sheet.

Step 1: Make a copy of the Google Sheet

You can make your copy of the Google Sheet here.

Step 2: Navigate to “UA - Raw Data tab” to provide Universal Analytics Sessions data.

You will need to provide historical Universal Analytics data in the “UA - Raw Data” tab. 

This sheet is ideally designed to work using an output from the Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-On with the data starting from row 15 (though can enter it in manually).

For this sheet to work, Column A should be Date and Column B Sessions.

This data can be inputted by either…

Option A - Using the Google Analytics Spreadsheet Add-On. This is the easiest option.

This requires you to have downloaded the Add On, set up the Report Configuration using the template below and then run the report. This will auto-populate the “UA - Raw Data” tab.

Option B - Manually copying and pasting in the sessions data from the Google Analytics interface or from a Looker Studio Report.

Important notes

• You will need to ensure that the data is formatted the exact same way as the existing sheet which includes:
  • The data starting at row 15.
  • The data column is in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
  • Column A being Date and Column B being sessions

Step 3  - Navigate to “GA4 - Raw Data tab” to provide GA4 Sessions data

You will need to provide GA4 data in the “GA4 - Raw Data” tab.

This operates in a very similar way as the UA sessions data, ideally using a similar output from a Google Sheets add on. In this case, the Add on is Adformatics Google Analytics 4 Google Sheet Add On. with the data starting from row 15.

For this sheet to work, Column A should be Date and Column B Sessions.

This data can be inputted by either…

Option A - Using the Adformatics Google Analytics 4 Google Sheet Add On.

This requires you to have downloaded the Add On, set up the Report Configuration using the template below and then run the report. This will auto-populate the “GA4 - Raw Data” tab.

Option B - Manually copying and pasting in the sessions data from the Google Analytics 4 interface or from a Looker Studio Report.

Important notes

• You will need to ensure that the data is formatted the exact same way as the existing sheet which includes:
  • The data starting at row 15.
  • The data column is in the format yyyy-mm-dd.
  • Column A being Date and Column B being sessions

Step 4 - Review the outputs

Once you have loaded in the UA and GA4 data, the Google Sheet will do the magic in the background. 

If you want to see what’s going on in the background, see “How do these calculations work?” section.

There are a number of outputs which allow you to compare how the sessions compare between the different sources.

The raw numbers

The first output to have a look at is the tables which contain the raw data broken down by date. This includes:

• UA Recorded Sessions - These are the known UA sessions.
• GA4 Recorded Sessions - These are the known GA4 sessions. 

GA4 Sessions: Recorded + Backfilled Estimates - These combine the known GA4 sessions with the “predicted” backfilled GA4 sessions. These numbers are calculated using the average ratio between UA and GA4 sessions for the period where there is the overlap.

Comparing UA Sessions To GA4 Sessions

This section allows you to see the proportional difference (or ratio) between the GA4 sessions and the UA sessions. 

The is broken down into:

• Classic Average - This is the average of the proportional difference between the GA4 sessions and UA sessions throughout the whole time period. 
  
• Weighted Average - This is the average of the proportional difference between the GA4 sessions and UA sessions throughout the whole time period but this time weighted by the recorded GA4 sessions. This means that the average is going to be more impacted by days with higher sessions recorded. 

By default, this is set to use the Classic Average, but this can be updated in the ‘[HIDDEN] Calculations’ tab. 

"GA4 Total: Recorded + Backfilled Estimates" vs UA Recorded Sessions

This graph allows you to compare how the GA4 Sessions (including the backdated “predicted” GA4 sessions) compare to the recorded UA sessions for periods. 

This allows us to compare how GA4 sessions generally compare to UA sessions - you’ll often see that one is consistently higher than the other. 

Recorded GA4 Sessions vs Recorded UA Sessions

This graph allows you to compare how the known GA4 Sessions compare to the known UA Sessions. You’ll most likely see that UA Recorded Sessions are cut off at a specific point, before just GA4 sessions are recorded.

Recorded GA4 Sessions vs "GA4 Total: Recorded + Backfilled Estimates"

The graph displays the Recorded GA4 sessions (green) and allows you to compare them with how the backdated GA4 sessions look.

This enables you to see when the transition takes place from recorded to predicted which is useful - especially when it comes to forecasting and adding regressors.

GA4 Total: Recorded + Backfilled Estimates - Mapped Over Time

The graph displays the main data and output that you’ll want from this Google Sheet which is the Recorded GA4 Sessions alongside the backdated GA4 Sessions.

The surrounding graphs are primary there to provide the context to these final figures,

How do these calculations work?

There are six key stages in generating these figures: 

• Step 1 - Generate the earliest Start Date and End Date for the GA4 and UA data. 

• Step 2 - Use these start and end dates to generate a date range from the starting point of the UA data, to the end point of the GA4 data. 

For those interested, SEQUENCE is the magic formula to be able to do this.

• Step 3 - Pull in the UA and GA4 data for each of the days in the date range.

A simple VLOOKUP is all that’s used here with an IFERROR to catch the gaps.

• Step 4 - Calculate the average proportional difference between UA and GA4 sessions (we’ve done this as a weighted average, and just a classic average to provide several options.)

The first step here is calculating the proportional difference for each day between the UA and GA4 Sessions which I’ve done using an ARRAYFORMULA.

The second step is then using this column to generate the different averages.

• Step 5 - Multiply the historic UA sessions by the calculation by the avg ratios of UA sessions to GA4 Sessions to generate our backdated, predicted GA4 sessions numbers.

We can then decide which average we’d like to use, using the checkbox which dictates which column populates the final “GA4 Sessions: Recorded + Backfilled Estimates” column.

• Step 6 - Once we have generated these numbers, we are then able to pull these final figures into the final Outputs page to generate our graphs and final GA4 Sessions with the predicted backdated sessions.

Final takeaways

This tool is a practical solution for bridging the gap between Universal Analytics and Google Analytics 4. Not a perfect solution, but a way of filling the potential void in data using a somewhat more intelligent approach that just pulling in GA4 and UA session data in together.

Reach out to me @da_westby on X (formerly known as Twitter) to let me know what you think.