The Affiliate Marketing Podcast - Matthew Hughes (Top Business Tech) & SEO stories

In the latest episode of The Affiliate Marketing Podcast, Lee-Ann Johnstone sits down with Matthew Hughes, Editor in Chief at Top Business Tech. 

They discuss what branded SEO is and why affiliates need to be more aware of it. They also discuss some of the best ways to boost engagement and how affiliates can change their website to be more aligned with branded SEO.

Listen to this episode to get an expert insight into Branded SEO for your affiliate program. 

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Transcript

SPEAKER_04 0:15

As I explore the latest digital and affiliate marketing trends and give you the insider scoop on what's apparent in affiliate marketing. So I'm like to add we explore affiliate strategies, host expert interviews with leading affiliate and tech entrepreneurs and discuss the latest affiliate and digital marketing trends. If you want to stay at the cutting edge of affiliate marketing, you're in the right place. Join me for this week's episode and let's get started. Today I'm joined with Matthew Hughes from Aurora Demand and Top Business Tech. Hi Matt, how are you?

SPEAKER_00 0:59

Hi Leanne, I'm very well, thank you. Thank you for having me on. It's an honor.

SPEAKER_04 1:03

You're welcome. Tell us a little bit about your background and um why I have called you onto the show today to talk about branded SEO, which is a subject that I'm sure most of our listeners probably haven't even heard of, but we're gonna hopefully tell them about it today. So tell us a little bit about your background.

SPEAKER_01 1:20

Yeah, it was quite an interesting topic. So, first of all, I started in the marketing industry when the when I was 14. So I from a very early age, I just met a guy at a bus stop and ended up doing freelance work. Um I know it's amazing how these things happen. And then since then I set up my own marketing agency while I was in university, um sort of teaching myself all the all the things. Therefore, I said myself doing course after course after course to and then working with clients, putting all everything I learned into practice, and grew that marketing agency to be an international business, turning over two million. Um when we won Scale Up Business of the Year Award. I got nominated for was it Young Entrepreneur of the Year Award. That's amazing.

SPEAKER_04 2:02

Goodness me, what a story.

SPEAKER_01 2:05

Um but yeah, and then I stepped away from the agency side of things to run the publication, Top Business Tech. Yeah, some good successes uh within a year. So uh SEO-wise to make it relevant. Um, we were featured alongside uh what was it, the Guardian and N Gadget on the government website.

SPEAKER_04 2:26

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 2:26

Um, because our results were at the top and we were talking about very niche tub subjects, which um we knew that we were gonna rank highly for.

SPEAKER_04 2:34

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 2:34

Had quite a few successes with some quite a bit of our content. And then on the side, I I've been teaching digital marketing for four years.

SPEAKER_04 2:42

Yeah.

SPEAKER_01 2:42

Starting off at university in Bournemouth, and then we moved to London college up here.

SPEAKER_04 2:46

Amazing. So we we're super excited to have you on the show today because we're gonna talk about branded SEO, which was something that up until like two or three weeks ago I'd never even heard of before. And I know I'm not an SEO expert, but a lot of our listeners probably um you know spent quite a lot of time in this space. So I'm really excited to have you on the show. Um, and what I wanted to do to start off with was just to uh get you to tell us about what branded SEO is and why affiliates and operators um should be thinking about this as part of their SEO strategy.

SPEAKER_01 3:18

Okay, so you've had the the famous quote in the SEO industry by Mr. Schmidt of Google um is brands are the solution, not the problem. Uh so basically he's saying that brands are the only way to figure out what good content, where good content content is that's valuable to your users. Because if you put the effort into the brand, then it's actually going to be something that you engage with and connect with on a more deeper level. So Schmidt says brands are the sort of reason, that's how you sort of have the cesspool of the millions, billions of websites that you'll get on Google. Um just because there are a lot of websites out there that don't deliver value, um, especially in the SEO world and sort of the content producers, there's a lot of sites that just produce like windows or sort of marketplaces where people just publish crap content for uh a few links, which don't actually work. Um, but yeah, so it's really important to have brand because when you're dealing with customers and dealing with visits to your website, a lot of those decisions are emotionally led. Because they're emotionally led, if you've got a brand that you've thought about and how it how your users are gonna perceive that brand, it'll be more of a subconscious connection. Whereas users, I mean, we live in a world which is very aesthetic led. Yes, image is very important. So if your website looks like a range of other websites, then it's there's gonna be no differentiation, it's just gonna look the same.

SPEAKER_04 4:44

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 4:45

Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 4:46

So brand is very important, I think, for affiliates as well, because uh typically affiliates have always been about driving traffic from one source to another, but actually, in order to stand out now in um you know the algorithms and and the way that Google is ranking sites, brand is going to become very important for affiliates to consider because they need to have that engagement with their customers. So let's talk about some of the best ways to use branded SEO to build that customer engagement.

SPEAKER_01 5:15

Yeah, so first of all, SEO, let's just sort of have a look at SEO as it is now. So, what does it currently stand at? So, SEO isn't something you do anymore, it's it's it's not what it used to be, as in let's just put some links here, let's do some things here, left, right, and center, let's put some social posts out, let's uh optimize the keywords because there's so much more personalization with the algorithm updates that uh are out now. It's more about doing things right and focusing on your customers. If you focus on your customers and you're producing content because you know your customers want it, then naturally you're going to sort of have a website that ranks highly because you're doing the job correctly. Obviously, with a few caveats every here and there. Um, so what can uh your affiliates do? So, first of all, logo. As simple as it sounds, have a logo that doesn't look generic. Have key messaging, think about your tone of voice. So when people come on, I mean copywriting is one of the most underrated methods of marketing. Words are very powerful. Um so think about how you're gonna use that language to sort of improve your user's experience, even things like micro interactions, where uh best way I can compare this or analogy is if you have a spoon, but there's like an engraved message on a spoon, it's like a micro interaction, it's not gonna have much meaning, but it's just that that moment of sort of just noticing something in small detail, which can work quite well. Um, think of the user experience throughout the website. So, how are they gonna navigate? Um, where are they gonna click? Where do you want them to go? Are you confusing your user? So give them an experience that works for them. So don't just sit there and think I'm gonna build a website because I think this is gonna look good. But think about how your user is actually gonna navigate through that. Don't have any blocks where the user can't further their journey. So they're reading content, make sure you can keep directing them to new places.

SPEAKER_04 7:13

Okay, and that really features into the algorithm updates that are happening in Google in terms of um like your page design. Because I know we had you on an earlier show where you spoke a little bit about the fact that you know banners and things and the placements of advertising graphics and things like that on your website needs to change too. So, in terms of like just talking about this branded SEO and the fact that it's not just about the content and it's not just about the design of the website, but it's also about how you take a user on that journey. What are your top tips for affiliates right now who might want to explore this type of SEO more vigorously in order to build their site rankings? Because obviously, traffic is money in our industry. Um, so what are some of the things that affiliates can be doing right now to sort of change their website to be more aligned to what branded SEO offers and does?

SPEAKER_01 8:05

Yep, so first of all, one thing to be what you need to do with a strong brand comes loyalty. So return customers are important. So try and figure out ways to get more return customers because that will give some ranking signals to who's saying, Oh, people actually come back to the site, right? They've got to be doing something right, and then time on the website as well. So if you are just linking people, just as soon as they land on your website and you're linking them out of your website, then that's not necessarily good in terms of a user experience point of view. Google wants to see the website having value, so you want to try and keep them on your website for three minutes or more. That way, Google knows that there is okay, there's got to be some value here. They're exploring the site, they're looking at all these different pages, they're reading an article. Uh, because Google can see that, Google can see exactly how you interact. Uh, you might even have a visual analytics on there as well, such as hotchar. Um, so that's one important thing. Figure out how to keep your use on your site as long as possible. So deliver value. So usually long form articles work quite well as long as you've got a very good narrative in the video content that they can engage with and can watch. Maybe add to a watch list for later on if they're loyalty brand. So that'll be one tip. Next, prepare for the page experience update because it's one that Google has warned us about where they don't tend to warn us about these changes very often, uh, because they're quite secretive about their algorithm updates. Um, I'm sure most of you would have heard of Mobile Geddon, where there was the mass update that scared and panicked everyone. Um, but we have one now which is the PageScript update fully rolled out in January 2021. So Google have put the uh sort of tools and sort of the audit uh ability there already, so you can actually see how your website is performing against these new metrics. Um, so you can start working on your site. But what it basically means is uh it's all about user experience. So first of all, does your website load quickly? Make sure your website is very fast, you're not having all these obstacles blocking, so all these scripts left, right, and center, which is quite a challenge sometimes because you've got especially if you're a publication and you've got loads of ad uh sort of ad networks on there, delivering serving ads to your customers or your readers, uh, it can be quite a difficult thing to manage. So try and delay loading of scripts or use some fancy technical work. That's not my experience. I get my developers to do that. So make sure you are not hindering the journey in any way that is gonna cause friction. So if you have pop-ups or little things that slide in at certain times on the site, which might overlay content in a very intrusive way that's gonna stop a journey or cause a misclick, then that is really so that's really something Google is looking at now.

SPEAKER_04 11:01

And that's quite a big thing in our industry because our entire industry is all about pop-ups and you know getting people's attention and making them move on to an offer. So it almost means that affiliates need to be thinking about the way that they're um you know packaging their content because obviously the end result is to get the customer to click and go play somewhere or deposit somewhere, um, but also thinking about you know what that user journey looks like. So it's not just about you know a piece of content that gets highly ranked and then the customer clicks off and goes to take the offer anymore, it's becoming a lot more complex. And this, I think, is what this branded SEO is all about, and and why I thought it was so important to talk about it today. Um, what do you think the future of SEO is going to look like if we're moving more into this kind of branded SEO space? Um, and with Google becoming a lot more clever in terms of how it reads sites, how it reads user behavior on sites. What are some of the like key things or developments that you've seen recently that have worked really well on other people's sites, outside of this industry, even? Because I think that's important. I think we need to be looking outside of just you know the gaming industry industry. Um what have you seen that's worked really well that could maybe resonate back into this industry?

SPEAKER_01 12:16

So something I would always advocate is producing some really high quality content, not just a blog per se, but something that is gonna attract readers because it's a topic that everyone talks about. Like infographics, which are very easy content to share, very easy to digest. That works really well, especially along LinkedIn and other certain platforms that you create, Reddit as well, always loads of Reddit threads for infographics and share quite a diverse audience. So finding creating little bits of content that is extremely useful and extremely informative will work great. Um, so that's point one.

SPEAKER_04 12:51

But that needs to be like written content, or can it also be video content as well? Will will go will Google pick up the difference?

SPEAKER_01 12:58

Uh yeah, so Google is able to read and analyze your site as anyone else, as a normal user would, because their algorithm is ridiculous. Um they change it 600 times a year, so there's a lot of effort that goes into it. Um but yeah, so they can read your site as a human would. So they'll go through and say, right, okay, you've got text here, oh, you've embedded a video here. So all the code behind the scenes that's all red. So when you build a web page, it's semantically structured so the browser or search and crawl through it and understand exactly what's there. Um so it will know if you've got an infographic, a video, uh, images, uh maybe a quiz, interactive content, but you need to make sure you're defining that in the code. So all tags are very important to you, just say this is an image, this is what the image is of.

SPEAKER_04 13:47

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 13:48

So that's what I would say for the algorithm design effects. Secondly, if the future you need to really focus on possibly voice search, whether you think that's going to be quite interesting, interesting for your audience, obviously make the decision. Do you think your audience are gonna use voice search to access my site? More and more people are now with the I mean, I've got three Alexa in my home. I can hear my next door neighbor's Alexa go off every morning. Um people have a lot of Alexa devices, yeah, Google Home and the pod from Apple. Uh, and it's something that's becoming a lot more prominent. And to optimize it for Google search, most people will um sort of speak to your device in terms of the American sort of grading system. Uh, I don't know what it is in the UK, but it's ninth grade. So you you've got to make sure they're speaking in a certain way in your sort of optimization for voice search is worded in a certain way, not too complex, not too simple. Most people will try and find do informative searches on devices like that, so or navigational, so where is this location? Define this word, uh, or if you've linked up your purchasing platform, you might have to buy certain things from Amazon. Um, but I personally do not trust myself to say things properly of all the mistakes I make on my Alexa device, let alone uh everyone else. But the voice search is becoming a lot more important, and uh to sort of link that to another fact in really important factor is the featured snippet. When you see on Google you type a question or type something in, and you get that box that comes up with an answer or with some images in it, maybe, or a list of questions. That's the most important thing I personally think because that gets like you can get up to 30% click-through rate on that result alone.

SPEAKER_03 15:35

Wow.

SPEAKER_01 15:35

If you have sort of structured your web page in a way that Google is able to read it and display it like that. So having a list of H3s looking at your heading tags in your actual page, having H2 heading, H3s down will indicate that's the answers to that question. So we did it for an architects company. Uh I can't remember what the question was in particular, but we posed the question out there is why do we need architects to something really broad and generic? Um, and we got then on top of feature snippet. That was the most popular page afterwards because it was a common question, and lots of people would visit it. And because it's that feature snippet, it's like that trust or the accreditation that Google Trust this page because it's displayed in a unique new way.

SPEAKER_04 16:25

And that's that's something else that I wanted to actually talk about because one of our biggest um you know casino affiliate sites is a site called askgamblers.com, and they actually have a lot of reviews on their site from customers. And does that sort of feed into the whole branded SEO um aspect as well, where customers are actually contributing to content on your website as well? Does that feed into the sort of ranking and algorithm too?

SPEAKER_01 16:49

Yeah, in any any any format, uh social proof is really really important. If you have reviews, Google is able to read them. So you have um with such SEO, you've got something called schema, which is a markup language for HTML to make it a bit more have give your code a bit more meaning. So you can actually embed reviews into your SEO listing. Let's say uh I was selling products, you can organically have reviews in those in that listing um based off the schema. So schema.org is the website, and it's got ridiculously complex in terms of all the amount of terms you've got, but definitely worth having a look.

SPEAKER_04 17:27

Okay.

SPEAKER_01 17:27

Really important.

SPEAKER_04 17:29

Thank you so much for sharing all of this knowledge about branded SEO with all of our listeners. I'm pretty sure that we can kind of you know move this subject forward in for a number of hours ahead, but we've only got 15-20 minutes at this point. And one last question that I wanted to ask you is just where do you think SEO is going to be headed? You spoke a little bit about voice, you spoke a little bit about um you know, user journey and and branded SEO, but what else should people be looking at right now for like 2022 and beyond?

SPEAKER_01 18:00

Well, as a person who runs a tech publication, I get quite a bit of insight into the latest new upcoming tech out there. Um, and it's definitely AR, I think, is going to be a huge thing.

SPEAKER_03 18:12

Totally.

SPEAKER_01 18:13

So voice search is gonna be combined with augmented reality, so definitely understanding. So I don't know how it would work. I imagine you'd voice search and you'd have a few different screens come up, uh, depending how I don't know what Google are doing with this at the moment. So I I need to sort of see if I can dig it out and find some more information. But definitely AR is gonna be a massive thing. Alternatively, as well, image search. So AI is getting smarter and smarter and smarter, it's now able to define images. I've got a slight obsession with house plants, so I have to identify them and figure out how do I how do I look after these plants? So I take pictures of leaves, put it in an app which searches and defines the plant for me.

SPEAKER_04 18:50

Amazing.

SPEAKER_01 18:52

And I think that's gonna be a lot more common because if you can upload videos, images uh to Google, then you can get where they come from, source-wise, uh, all the information you can from them, um, whatnot. I mean, I think that's gonna be a huge thing.

SPEAKER_04 19:08

And that could work in both casino and sportsbook. I can see how that could work very easily, you know, like who is this player? Picture, upload, tell me about his stats, you know, whatever the case may be. Or even for a casino game or a or a you know, any kind of game that you've played before that you want to know, oh, can I play that anywhere at an online casino? I think that's really, really um a cool piece of advice, and and hopefully affiliates that are listening to this will kind of pick that up and and see what they can do with that right now. But I totally agree. I think you know, we've moved past AI now, which has kind of segmented itself into marketing in a in a big way over the last kind of three to five years, but now we're moving into um you know virtual reality. So I do think that that's going to have a massive impact on our industry as well. But I just want to thank you so much for sharing all of your insights today on SEO and branded content and how this can help you rank better. Um, it's been an absolute pleasure to have you on our podcast, and uh, we're looking forward to inviting you back to talk about AR once you've dug up some more information on that. Um you've just signed yourself up for another podcast.

SPEAKER_01 20:10

Happy. Yeah.

SPEAKER_04 20:12

Thank you so much, Matt.

SPEAKER_01 20:14

Well, thank you very much for having me, Liam.

SPEAKER_04 20:16

And we look forward to seeing you again soon.

SPEAKER_01 20:18

Hope so. Speak soon. Thank you.

SPEAKER_04 20:20

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