How to Grow Revenue Without More Website Traffic | Emina Demiri Watson

#Mastering Digital Growth: 

Strategies from Emina Demiri WatsonIn this episode, Emina Demiri Watson, Head of Digital at Wixen Digital, shares practical insights on diversifying digital channels, measuring success, and aligning marketing strategies with business goals. Whether you're a small business owner or a marketing professional, these tips will help you navigate the complex landscape of digital marketing effectively.

Main topics covered:

• The importance of multi-channel marketing over relying on a single platform
• Managing client expectations within limited budgets
• Essential steps to audit and improve website SEO and UX
• Using topic-based content and entity-focused keywords for better search visibility
• Strategies for content creation, repurposing, and effective promotion
• Setting realistic KPIs and success metrics for digital projects
• Modern misconceptions about rank tracking in AI and LLMs
• Unusual hacks for analysis: Excel formulas, regex, and AI tools
• Common SEO mistakes and how to avoid them
• Practical example of a successful cross-channel growth campaign

What you will learn in this episode:
• Why website traffic is no longer the most important metric
• How revenue can grow even when traffic declines
• Why multi channel marketing is critical for growth
• How websites, ads, and content must work together
• Why content repurposing is more important than publishing more
• How to structure content using topics and entities instead of keywords
• Why user experience and conversion matter more than clicks
• How to approach SEO in an AI driven search environment
• Why measuring the right KPIs changes everything 

Timestamps: 

00:00 Introduction to Digital Marketing and Curiosity
04:34 The Importance of Multi-Channel Marketing
07:40 Understanding Business Needs for Digital Success
10:05 Starting a New Service Business
12:51 Managing Budgets and Expectations
15:13 Defining Project Success and KPIs
18:02 Case Study: IT Support Client Success
23:02 Content Quality and SEO Strategies
29:10 The Importance of Regular Site Audits
29:55 Shifting Focus from Keywords to Topics
33:06 Mapping Your Space of Influence
38:26 Creating Content with Intent
41:56 The Power of Content Distribution
45:28 Measuring Success Beyond Traffic
46:59 Debunking SEO Myths
52:27 First Steps for SEO Improvement

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Transcript

Introduction to Digital Marketing and Curiosity

Rana Shahbaz 0:00

Why uh growing a business or a web digitally and relying on one channel is is not the right approach?

Emina Demiri Watson 0:05

Well, it's it's not enough. They didn't become big brands because they put all of their eggs in one basket. They became big brands because they have gone out there and got their message across to their users in several different ways.

Rana Shahbaz 0:18

Clients have a limited budget second rule of economics. They have a limited budget, but you know, unlimited wishes. So how do you find a sweet spot here?

Emina Demiri Watson 0:26

Managing expectations. So if if you have a target that is really, really high, you have a budget of 500 pounds, and you want to use LinkedIn advertising, then it's about the math. I mean, on LinkedIn, your uh cost per click is anywhere from five to fifteen pounds. If there was one piece of advice that I would give to anybody, is rather than obsessing about word count, what you need to do is go go and have a chat with your customer service or with your sales guys and ask them what the audience would be interested in when it comes to that topic and talk about that.

Rana Shahbaz 0:57

For those who are really worried about the you know traffic drops, which is you know very common nowadays. The IT company come to you, you audit the site.

Emina Demiri Watson 1:05

What did you identify the um with AI, then the internet massive. With AI, it has gone because it's so easy to produce pages now at scale.

Rana Shahbaz 1:18

Uh the businesses who are looking to improve their SEO, what is the first step you will suggest them to take? Welcome to the website growth show brought to you by WP Minds. I'm your host, Rana Shadaz. On this show, we speak with business owners, agency leaders, and marketers to learn what's working to improve their websites and grow their businesses. You built a website, you wrote the content, you followed the laybook, but it's not working. The traffic is low, the conversions are worse. Today's guest, Amina Tamiri Watson, helps businesses fix that. She's the head of digital at Wix and Digital. Her work is simple. Remove the guesswork from growth. In this episode, we talk about why most content doesn't convert. What create websites do differently? How to think clearly in a noisy online world. If your website isn't growing your business, this is where to start. Let's dive in. Amina, welcome to the website growth show.

Emina Demiri Watson 2:09

Thank you so much for having me.

Rana Shahbaz 2:11

Amazing. I'm excited to learn how you can turn your website your number one business growth tool. Before we get into your favorite recipe, can you share what is keeping you going as a digital marketer marketer? What's your why?

Emina Demiri Watson 2:24

My why? Well, I really love my job. I always say I'm too curious to specialize, and that's very true because I really like the fact that I sit across channels. So at Vixen Digital, we're a digital marketing agency based in Brighton, and I'm their head of digital marketing, which kind of goes with this curiosity side of things. And also I'm a big believer in uh understanding what you're doing across channels and measuring what really matters, which is uh business results and revenue rather than vanity metrics. What keeps me going? I think my clients and my team, and then at home, my my daughter and husband and things like that.

Rana Shahbaz 3:09

Amazing. Why are you too curious to be to specialize? Why growing a business or a web digitally and relying on one channel is not the right approach?

The Importance of Multi-Channel Marketing

Emina Demiri Watson 3:18

Well, it's it's not enough. Like just think about how you buy. So the other day, what was I buying? So we are very used to thinking of high price items or services, high-priced services as something that we take our time over and we look at a lot of touch points, we look at their LinkedIn, their website, their uh Facebook, their trust pilot, we, you know, but that's happening even for the smallest purchases at the moment. So even when I'm buying like a face cream, I'm going to be sitting there spending some time looking at the brands that I like, looking at the reviews for creams, thinking about what I as a user, you know, considering my age, my my skin type, what do I need? So I think it was a few years ago, and this was like a few years ago, I went uh to a Google Ads kind of meetup that they did at Google in in London, actually. Uh, and they said that there were about eight, average of eight touch points for a user for anything to buy basically anything. So if you think of the user journey that is complex, then you have to know all of those touch points and how they work together and how your brand and your services are actually showing up for your customers across all of these different platforms. And I mean, not to mention the whole thing with LLMs. Now your brand is being surfaced with no context in uh uh LLM-powered surfaces such as AI overviews, uh, you have it in Chat GPT, perplexity, all of them basically. Yeah, it's it's digital marketing is very wide. And I think there is real value in full stack marketers to bring, you know, it's like orchestrating it all together. That's why.

Rana Shahbaz 5:15

Yeah, yeah, I agree. And with all these uh changes going on around in the marketing and digital marketing, it is too risky to keep all your bus eggs in one basket, like SEO, you know, SEO is all over the place at the moment here.

Emina Demiri Watson 5:27

Yeah. It's not it's not just too risky. I mean, it's always been too risky. This is the thing. People think about big brands. How did big brands become big brands? They didn't become big brands because they put all of their eggs in one basket, they became big brands because they have gone out there and got their message across to their users in several different ways. And they understood their offering, they understood their services, they understood their audience, first of all, before they went out to distribute their message. And it's not just one thing, it's it's it's very complex. I mean, and tracking that, I don't know if we're going to be talking about tracking, but tracking that journey across all of these touch points is is it's a bit of a natural.

Rana Shahbaz 6:14

It's complex. It's complex.

Emina Demiri Watson 6:16

It is.

Rana Shahbaz 6:17

When businesses you know come to you, how do you define that uh you can help them win digit in a in a digital world?

Understanding Business Needs for Digital Success

Starting a New Service Business

Emina Demiri Watson 6:23

Okay, so the first thing is really understanding uh the business. So what we don't do is immediately jump into, oh, you gotta do this. So even in the discovery phase, if for example, the lead comes in and we have a discovery call, even in that discovery phase, it's all about listening to the company uh and asking some really logical questions. So, for example, how do you make your money? I mean, it's it's one of the questions that people forget to ask. Tell me how do you make your money? All of the different things that you're doing to uh get your revenue. And then you talk about their audience, you talk about their products, what is the price point, how how do their sales work as well. This is, you know, people kind of think if you're working in marketing, you're not asking sales questions. That's crazy. If you don't understand the sales side of things, how are you gonna understand your pipeline? How are you gonna kind of understand your, you know, time to convert? And without those, you can't plan your marketing strategy. So we dig a lot, we dig a lot into the company, and that's where it all starts. And then obviously, before we get on a discovery call, I will always go on to their website and I will always try and give them some value from within the calls. Like if you don't even go with us, you will get some value out of the discovery call and out of the pitch because I come from in-house and this is the first agency that I've ever worked with. I wanted to give it a go. I've been here for for over four years now. But I very much have this in-house mindset because between you and me and everybody here, I really have this really touchy relationship with agencies. You know, I've recruited agencies for over 10 years. It's a hit and miss. I even had like a procurement framework that was weighted scoring for agencies. So I've always been a bit like iffy, will an agency do a good job or not? So now that I'm agency, I'm really kind of we behave the way that that we would like to, you know, the service and the approach that we would like to have if we were on the other side. So I've gotten an opportunity to actually try and create with my directors an agency that I would like to hire. So you've got to come with some value. You come with, you know, don't give me these pitch decks that are copy-pasted. I want you to go onto my website and I want you to give me some value in that deck to show me that you care about my success and that I'm not just another tick box. So we do that. I will go onto their website even before the call. I'll talk to them what I found. And I might, depending on the discovery call, go back to the website and find a few other kind of low-hanging foods that I can put in in the proposal. And then it's kickoff. In the proposal, you kind of based on what you know, you think about what is the logical first step. So which channel mix do we want to test first? How are we gonna track? I mean, that's a big one. You go into that's the first thing that I will look at. Do you have even the basic traffic tracking setup on your website? If you don't, that's the first thing that we do. Because you can't really run ads if you're not actually tracking them properly. And then, you know, then it's about testing and learning. If the website is pens, and I know Rana, you will know a lot about bad websites, I will also go into kind of the possibility of changing the website. Because I, the team, can do, we can do a brilliant job on the ads, like amazing ads, great engagement rate, you know, best creatives, it really talks to the audience. But when they come to your website, if your landing page is pants, they're not gonna convert. So the system needs to work together. So I will, I will usually, I we're not developers, so we don't develop the site, but I will usually suggest if it's a real mess, I will then suggest going from the beginning. And we do kind of support companies in working with developers. So we'll go and and do user journeys and really map out things and and do wireframing and then work with developers and designers to get into mock-ups and stuff like that. So I'll sometimes often I will suggest the UX side of things as well.

Rana Shahbaz 10:52

Exactly. Basically, as a as a web developer or agency, I think we can create the uh the stuff, but I think it should come from a project manager, from a marketer who understands the whole picture and the copywriting, the images, and so many stuff out there. When they join, then the conversion happens. So I agree. And uh you you rightly mentioned uh the first question, start with the basic. How are you making money? Basic, but highly important question. But those businesses who are just starting out, who are not making sales at the moment, where they they should start. For example, a service business, just to establish a new service business, looking to grow their business, what is the first step you recommend for them?

Managing Budgets and Expectations

Emina Demiri Watson 11:35

First thing is think about your brand. So go back to the basics, understand your audience and what your messaging is gonna be. Now, I know that everybody wants leads and sales immediately. How you approach this really depends on your vertical and your market. If you have a service brand that has a very competitive market, I wouldn't go in and say, oh, you should do SEO. It's gonna take a while. You know, SEO can take anywhere from typically, I mean, I hate saying like timelines, but typically it's anywhere three months up. But I've seen it work in less than that for a very niche, niche company in services or even in e-commerce. But though that pool is smaller and smaller because there's so many companies coming into the market, particularly now with LLMs, when anybody can create SaaS tools, SaaS market has been already saturated, now it's even more. So that's a very small amount of companies that I go in and say, start with SEO. I will go in usually and say, start with paid, because that's the quickest. You're gonna be paying, but it's the quickest way of you getting leads in and converting immediately, basically. And we're talking about usually it's Google Ads because of the high intent. And then layer that with maybe paid social, particularly, you need to work on brand awareness in those first stages. So, depending on your budget, running ads on paid social is brilliant. Even if you're talking about just boosting your posts in your organic social, you know, open up your channels. You've got to open up your social media channels. And then you can do a bit of boosting, put in a little bit of budget just to get the reach, because getting organic reach on social media is uh, I mean, it's it's the holy grail not. Chances of you as a new brand coming in and getting that are slim. The way to do that, and you should be doing that, is if you have an awesome product, really good messaging, and then running a campaign that will go viral. Now, it's very hard to do that. And the campaign needs to be hot. It needs to be something that is on trend, it needs to be something that really gets people going. It's not going to be cheap to run. So perhaps for a new service brand, if you want to do something like that, if you don't want leads right away and you have a very limited budget, then you know, get a really good PR campaign out that you can also use on your paid social to get some amazing reach. I think if I was to choose one, probably that one that would be it. Not everybody has money.

Rana Shahbaz 14:20

Yeah, great advice. Uh, SEO is for the long term. So normally normal people recommend you start with SEO, look at for long-term results, and for the quick results, you come in with paid and these social ideas, which are normally quick to bring results. You mentioned budget a couple of times. So when you are starting a new project, often this is a very difficult part of the process that clients have a limited budget. It's like the rule of economics, they have a limited budget, but you know, unlimited wishes. So, how do you find a sweet spot here?

Emina Demiri Watson 14:52

Managing expectations.

Rana Shahbaz 14:54

Exactly.

Defining Project Success and KPIs

Emina Demiri Watson 14:55

I think it's a big one, and I didn't even realize how big it is till I, you know, went to agency because when you're in-house, you just go and do it. It's just, you know, you have like access to everything, you want something done, you just go and do it. You don't you you're being paid for it, so it's kind of different. It's a tricky one. You gotta start from the beginning, and this is why how you do your your own sales is is really critical here. In that discovery call, already you're starting to get a feeling, a gut feeling around expectations and reality. And even then, and we've been known, I mean, I've been known to say to clients who come to me and say, give me their KPIs, and you know, I always try and be uh be uh positive about it. So I will say things like that's very ambitious, and then I will walk them back. So if if you have a target that is really, really high, you have a budget of 500 pounds, and you want to use LinkedIn advertising, then it's about the math. I mean, on LinkedIn, uh cost per click is anywhere from five to 15 pounds. With a 500 pounds budget, yeah, it's all in the math. It's not gonna, it's not gonna work. You're just not gonna get the amount of audience that you need um to get that conversion. So yeah, it's uh it's a tricky one. Everybody wants to do a lot, but and again, I kind of go back to the brands that you see, those brands started somewhere, and they had to have some kind of budget to be able to get to the budget, the big budgets that they have today. You gotta start somewhere. But it does work for some of the smaller ones. So as I was saying, I we have a um before we started, I was saying that we have a dental client, just a service business in in Brighton, who's smashing it on Google Ads. They started with a very small budget. It was uh, I think it was about a thousand pounds. And now I think they've doubled or tri definitely doubled, but maybe even tripled that, because it just works for them. So uh it's testing.

Rana Shahbaz 17:04

Amazing. Yeah. Yeah, it's a it's it's a it's a difficult one to decide uh uh on a budget. But I would say I think whenever when you have a limited budget, instead of doing everything, it's uh, you know, limit your options, try a few things and see what works, like if in this instant for this dentist client, if paid ads working, then it's uh you know money-making machine if you are putting 100 in and getting 200 out. So only thing you need to do after that is keep putting more money.

Emina Demiri Watson 17:31

Yeah, I mean they do it's it's those examples are quite quite far in between. Uh and I would say that you know, it's not about kind of throwing things and at the wall and seeing what sticks. You have to first do the legwork, go back to the marketing fundamentals, understand your audience. Where is our audience? What do they need? What are their problems, and how are you responding to those problems before you start throwing money at channels?

Case Study: IT Support Client Success

Rana Shahbaz 18:01

So exactly, exactly. With all these answers, uh, depends on various variables. How do you come to agreement with the client on a project success? So, what will happen and how will you call the project when you work? Because normally I think you must be working three to six months plus with every client. And how do you agree on a success of a project?

Emina Demiri Watson 18:23

So, usually, I mean the best clients come in and they already have KPIs that they're working with. Uh, we have clients that are in certain industries that use an approach called uh quarterly, what is what are they called? I always I always forget. Um basically on a quarterly basis, they have OKRs. So those are kind of quarterly targets. Yeah.

Speaker 1 18:46

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson 18:47

And then we work backwards from there looking at, you know, what channels we have covering, what tests we have, and uh kind of do a bit of modeling as well for clients. Often clients come and they don't have targets. So some of that fundamental side of things is missing, or the targets that they have are not based on historical data or are not benchmarked against industry, for example. In those cases, what usually happens is there's a bit of a kind of managing expectations where we might start running things and then just to get a benchmark so that we can work with the benchmark rather than with targets that have been pulled out of nowhere. All of that comes back to what I was saying about the analytics setup and kind of the measurement setup. You need to have that in place before you start chucking money at Google Ads and things like that. And so I think that's that's really important. So to kind of bring it back around, sometimes people come to us with KPIs that they already have and we see how that fits into the strategy. And then other times they come and they have no idea, and we try and help them set KPIs that that are realistic for them as well.

Rana Shahbaz 20:01

Okay. I'll try to make this conversation a bit uh slightly simpler for audience who are, you know, small businesses if they are listening. Uh, do you have any favorite client which you, you know, started with and you have the ideally, you know, everything set up as you hoped and the way you achieved their goals and you wish that most of the clients come in that goes through that process. If you have that kind of a success story or a case study to share, I think it will uh it will be helpful to unpack that.

Content Quality and SEO Strategies

Emina Demiri Watson 20:32

Yeah, of course. So I have two different clients that were starting off from different starting points here. One of them is a service client who came to us. They were a small organization providing IT support. And they came to us, didn't do any marketing almost at all. They did have a really capable, really good marketing manager that was in, she was a marketing exec at the time when they came to us. Now she's a marketing manager. Manager and they have hired somebody else in marketing. And I I would like to think, you know, we are part of that success story, really. And they came to us and didn't have a lot. And we started off with just a small retainer for content. So we were creating content for them and doing SEO. That turned into uh actually looking at their website. So, how is how is it optimized in terms of the user journeys? How is it optimized for conversions? We worked with them on a few email side of the marketing side of bits, and and you know, the marketing manager always comes to us for advice across channels. And this is just organic. We've only worked on organic, they are not actually uh doing any ads. And it's been absolutely amazing. I mean, if you look at where they started, it's like 400% growth on on traffic. Now, recently, because we're not getting any traffic because of AI, the traffic. Has reduced, but the revenue has not. And that is the important bit. The important bit is that you're measuring the right things. So anybody, any other client might have been really freaked out by the fact that their traffic is now, you know, I look at now our reports and three months on three months, traffic down 20%. Anybody else would have panicked. But the from the start, we were also measuring conversions, which is the thing that you should be measuring. And those are keeping steady. And people are coming to them, but they're coming direct. So they are finding out about the company online through different channels, including AI. And then they are literally Googling their brand. Their brand's traffic has gone, has been steadily on the rise. So you gotta kind of look at your brand, the awareness piece, but then you gotta also look at your, and that comes from your content as well. You know, that we do, I think it's about, they've increased their retainer, they're double their retainer since starting. And we do anywhere between four and six pieces of really good pieces of content with their team. Uh, and this is after we helped them redesign the website, did all of the technical, and we checked the technical still. And those pieces might, you know, they do appear in AI overviews and LLM AI kind of chats. And I have to constantly remind myself that not everybody will understand. So they do appear.

Rana Shahbaz 23:34

Don't worry, I'll unpack this one. This is a very interesting, exciting story. First, I want to make one comment. You were very happy when you were mentioning marketing executive and marketing manager. So if I get it correctly, I think we experience that as well. Whenever we have a marketing manager we are working with, we have a great success with the project. When we are working directly with the business person, generally there are difficulties even getting content and other stuff. But this is a very interesting story. So let's let's make it easy for people to understand and see how you approached it and whether it can help other people, especially for those who are really worried about the you know traffic drops, which is you know very common nowadays. The site the IT company come to you, you audit the site. What did you identify that?

Emina Demiri Watson 24:21

Well, for them, there was a bit of kind of technical SEO cleanup. We looked at how their website is indexed, if they have pages that are not being indexed, why, how Google is scrolling their website. There's a lot of kind of these. We do like an audit, a technical order. We looked at from a UX perspective, so from user experience, how fast is the website, for example, how their forms are working, are they tracking their forms? How are they tracking their forms? Um, I mean, it's it takes two days to do a full order. It's a really kind of, you know, really looking deeply into the technical. And then you go and look at the content. When we started, they didn't, they had a blog, but they their content production was low. They didn't write a lot. So we help them start writing pieces that will show Google that they are experts in their fields. And that obviously then helps you rank and helps you build this trust and authority in in your area. Um and that really translates then even now when the traffic is, you're not getting the traffic, but that doesn't mean that people are not reading your stuff because they are. A lot of AI is what's called grounded, which means you ask an AI something and it will look online for the answer. Um, and they will come out. Their pieces of content will come up still. It's just that they might not, you know, a user might not click on it and go to the website. But they will remember, they will remember that they have read um something from this brand. They will remember it's a recall, brand recall. Exactly. And then they will go, and when they want to get IT services, they will literally put in the brand into Google. Yeah. So it all kind of works together. So with them, it was a combination of uh technical content production, conversion rate optimization, gutting the whole website and working with the development agency to actually produce something that speaks to their users. We did the whole lot. We did workshop with them to understand their users and develop their user personas. Then we mapped out the website journeys for those two personas. Then we went away and we did, we looked at that and then uh did wireframes for key pages, including the content that's gonna be on there that is all very aligned with who they're targeting. And then it went to the developer for the developer and designer to do it.

Rana Shahbaz 26:58

Very, very interesting. And you mentioned indexing pages. Used to be like a publishing more was the advice. Now I'm reading and hearing more, is it's not just more pages about a quality of the pages. So do you how do you do you tackle old pages which are not adding values or the thin content? Do you still index those pages or do you no index those pages and keep the quality pages indexed only? Is there any anything working for you here?

Emina Demiri Watson 27:24

So there is, we always try and do like a big content audit every kind of year, or depending on the s size of the site. You do want to cull pages that are not getting you anything. And that has been the case always. It's not only now. I think it's more important now because with AI, then the internet massive, with AI, it has gone because it's so easy to produce pages now at scale. So what that means for Google is that it's much more expensive to crawl. It's much more expensive to go and visit your site. So what they what has started happening more and more is that they are very picky on which websites they actually go and visit. So you better make sure that the stuff that you have on your website is of good quality because particularly now with I don't want to get too technical, but with agentic search and agents coming in and agentic commerce, a user will come to your website, they will try and buy something, or try and fill in a form if you're a service, and the form doesn't work, or they can't can't find the form, or they've filled it in, but they don't know if they've did it go through or not. So really bad user experience. Now, a human, if I really want to hire you, Rana, as a development agency, and I know your agency and know your brand, I'm gonna persist. So I'm gonna go there and I'm gonna struggle with your form. I'm not saying your forms are bad, but let's say as an example, yes. I'm gonna struggle with it and I'm gonna power through and get that, you know, get my contact sent off. Or I'll call you. Will an agent do that? No.

The Importance of Regular Site Audits

Rana Shahbaz 29:09

That's a very important point, yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson 29:11

It's not, they're just not gonna do it. They're just gonna give up. And after a while, it's not gonna, you're not gonna be getting the crawls. You're not gonna be getting getting the visiting your site. Yeah. Sorry.

Rana Shahbaz 29:23

Got it, got it. So we understand, audit the site, which is you know, you need to audit regularly, and uh you don't need to leave the pages or content which is not helping or editing welling any anymore. So it's a it's an ongoing repeat task.

Emina Demiri Watson 29:37

We should have a process, yeah.

Rana Shahbaz 29:40

How do you choose the keywords now?

Shifting Focus from Keywords to Topics

Emina Demiri Watson 29:43

We've moved away from keywords, it's more about understanding the topics and the entities uh that your uh company is showing up against. So I'll give you an example as a content piece. So it is very logical to think, okay, that's that's a keyword, best WordPress agencies, but it's also a topic and it's also filled with entities. So if I have a client that is a WordPress agency and I say, we should definitely write a blog piece that talks about choosing um a WordPress agency, kind of a buyer guide, and we should be talking about your competitors. Oftentimes, companies are gonna come back to you and say, we don't want to talk about our competitors, you know, we don't want to promote our competitors. Why would we promote our competitors? And then they might kind of as a middle ground go with something, they'll they'll do a piece, but it will have competitors that are not doing very well, yeah, or that are not really direct competitors. Now, that is wrong, and you shouldn't be doing that, because of the fact that all of those competitors and all of those, everything that you're mentioning in there are entities. So, for example, if I'm if I'm doing a blog on best um hosting providers, and I put in, I don't know, um EuroDNS, yeah, host, euro DNS uh uh hosting or what Google and AI understands then is that my brand brand, where to position my brand in in relations to everything else. So think of it as a you have a clump of companies that are clumped in an embedding space, in a space that relate to each other because they do similar things. And that's what you want. You want the machines to understand what you do, and part of that is things like talking about your competitors, because then that means that you're connected to their entities as well, and you're in that kind of little bubble. But if you don't want to talk about your competitors and you don't really want to talk about what you do, and you're constantly worried about somebody stealing your secrets, then you're over here with these companies that don't actually do anything that you do, and Google just doesn't understand what you actually do. So when you're thinking about keywords, don't think about keywords. Think about what you do, think about entities, think about the topics, and then provide right content that has information gain, content that is original and not just regurgitated AI slop. Yeah.

Rana Shahbaz 32:24

I I saw the top 10 pieces, and uh for many people it's working remarkably, bringing uh huge amount of traffic. So that is the one type of piece of content or keywords you can look at it. What other types of keywords are or approaches are working at the moment?

Mapping Your Space of Influence

Emina Demiri Watson 32:40

At the moment. Well, it really is about mapping, mapping your space of influence, really, and your space of topics. What we usually do for the client that I was talking about, uh they sell IT services. Within that, they have a few service offerings. Uh, let's say one of them is um Microsoft 365. That is obviously the topic that they are very interested in. Now, it's not about me trying to rank number one for Microsoft 365, because that's not gonna happen. It's Microsoft 365 who's gonna be ranking for Microsoft 365. You know, it's not like it's just not gonna if I was thinking keywords, I'd say, oh, you know, we don't like, you know, that's that's not a keyword that I'm gonna go for. But if I think of it, think of it as a topic, an entity that I want my company to be associated with, then I start thinking about my audience and I start thinking about my services. And all of a sudden that content becomes, okay, Microsoft 365. Let's create a really amazing guide that has, if we're working with the charity sector, let's create a really amazing guide for charities who are looking to buy Microsoft 365. And I don't know if you've heard about like the pillar page approach. Yes, but that's kind of like something that still works. So you have a guide about a topic that's very connected to your audience and has the stuff that you provide, but mostly it's driven by what your audience needs to know. So in in this case, Microsoft 365, and then you have satellite pieces of content around it. So for example, you might be, you might have a piece on Teams. So you have a blog that says how to organize how to use Teams for fundraising, or how to use Teams for organizing your team or managing your donors or whatever it may be, and then you plug that in into the Teams section of your ultimate guide on Microsoft 365, for example. So that strategy still works, but that doesn't come, you know, it starts with looking at the topic and then looking at the entities within that topic, and then thinking about scale as well. So you're no longer looking at one keyword, you're looking at a whole topic and the little, you know, the the topics within it and all of the possible kind of keywords, entities, everything that comes under it. So if it's Microsoft Teams, you expand on that subtopic. You think about what's in there and you prioritize by doing your keyword research around these topics. And it's about the intent rather than the volume.

Rana Shahbaz 35:26

Exactly. And this is this is how you organize the content for this IT company as well.

Emina Demiri Watson 35:30

Yeah, it's intent. It's kind of thinking about why, what's the intent behind behind the query, not necessarily some random volume from from a tool, which isn't correct really, anyway.

Rana Shahbaz 35:43

So what what where does this uh keyword research tool come into play on this thinking about your audience? Keyword tools are still important to organize this map, or are they Yeah, you do use them.

Emina Demiri Watson 35:55

And they have been moving more towards kind of topical coverage. So if you look at Semrush, for example, you have a topical map within it that groups your keywords. So you would still use it, but take it with a pinch of salt. What I really like doing is so there's a really good AI tracking tool called Vake, which is done by the same company who does in-links, which is another really good tool. And they are really big on semantics SEO. So they talk a lot about entities and things like that. So if you want to track your LLM traffic, I don't, by the way, I'm not like I don't have a link or anything. I just like the tool and I know the guys behind it. So there's no affiliation or anything. Then I would recommend that because the way that they approach it is through semantic SEO and through entities and thinking about, you know, for example, I for one of our clients, I discovered uh one of the topics that we don't really write enough about is uh compliance and kind of the legislation side of things. Um I got that by running uh the tool through a few prompts and looking at, you know, the topical areas where the company appears or doesn't appear connected to those prompts. And it it was really it was something that I didn't even think about. So yeah.

Rana Shahbaz 37:15

No, very very helpful. Thank you so much for you know very generous. So I hope this will be information is very practical and informatic, and I hope this will help many people. So we got the keyword side sort of technical audit, keyword sorted how to map out the keywords. Now creating content. As you mentioned earlier, it's very easy to create content, so which means it's easier to overdo it now. So we started with you know 500 words blog post, then it went to 2,000 word blog posts, and then skyscraper techniques for 10,000 word article and stuff. So, what is the right approach to using these keywords to create first of all guides? Do you have any wireframes or briefs, how you approach? Do you do you go 10,000 words, or do you just cover what needs to be covered and then support with blog posts?

Creating Content with Intent

Emina Demiri Watson 38:03

So I always start from intent, so I don't start from volume. I do look at the SERPs. So I will look at the Google page to see what's ranking because that's part of kind of the process. I think the most important thing is again to answer the questions that your audience has regarding whatever topics you're covering. Now, it's not about the word count. If there was one piece of advice that I would give to anybody, is rather than obsessing about word count, what you need to do is go go and have a chat with your customer service or with your sales guys and ask them what the audience would be interested in when it comes to that topic and talk about that. So, you know, have a look at what's ranking, obviously, but it's be different. Provide something unique, provide something valuable, provide something that your audience actually has not read on every single article out there that's been churned out by an AI. Be helpful, show up, you know. So yeah, there's no we do briefs. So what we usually do is we will do a brief and we will do all of the usual uh research that you do looking at the subs and looking at the topics covered, looking at the questions. So people also ask questions are really good. There's a really good tool called also asked that pools people also ask questions, even at scale, which is really, really good. And I would work again, not affiliated. And uh just to make sure, so people don't think I'm selling tools here. So we do the usual. We will tell them uh have a look at these three pieces of content that are currently uh ranking, do your internal links, these are the links that we would suggest. These are a few external links where there's really good, for example, stats around your topic and things like that. So the usual. But then we also ensure that they are providing additional value. So for this client that's in IT, they run webinars. I mean, their webinars are absolutely amazing when it comes to value, that it's nowhere, nobody else can come, you know, provide that. This is their experience from working with companies for, you know, 15 years. So what we do is we will run the transcript of their webinars through a notebook LLM, and we will ask it to give us, you know, what is it about, give us some learnings and things like that, and we will pop those into the brief. And we will say, embed the video at you know, five minutes 10 here to and put it in the text. So it's also multimedia as well, and it's providing something valuable.

Rana Shahbaz 40:42

This is uh you know, fantastic advice. And uh also I'm involved creating our own content as well. So I always speak with the team and I normally yeah, so uh this stuff. And I I think I have a mental note is with all these tools available, when you producing content is so easy, I think your uniqueness, your creativity, and per word value, the more per word value you are providing, the better your chances are to get authenticity in return.

Emina Demiri Watson 41:09

Yeah, yeah, exactly. And these possibilities are the same.

Rana Shahbaz 41:11

Authenticity and value, value, basically value. The shorter the content, the quick value to the point one to three, we can do that. I think generally that's what everybody is looking to do, do more. So fantastic. So we got the create the content. So after that, how did you promote the content? Did you do any link building stuff or any promotion or doing research? Producing good quality content was enough to move the needle.

The Power of Content Distribution

Emina Demiri Watson 41:35

It's about repurposing. I mean, one of the things that I see companies do wrong all the time is producing content before they thought about distribution. You know, distribution and repurposing is where your content lives or dies. You could have the best amazing piece of content, particularly now when when you don't get the traffic, and you create it and then it sits there on your website, and uh three years down the line, somebody, you know, two years down the line, somebody's creating the same thing without even noticing that you actually have it. So, what you need to do is think about that piece of content. How is it gonna work harder for you? So, as an example, we have we also have a podcast. It's called SEO's Getting Coffee. One, this is how it should currently we're very busy, so we are a little bit behind. But when we planned, it was one podcast. What does it get us? It gets you all of the organic social media posts, it gets you, you know, five little shorts for YouTube. It gets you, you have to go onto your website, do a search, see what you have written about this topic previously. So you update older content with learnings that you have from that one podcast episode, as our guest said in this, and then you link it and you put it on put a video in or the short within that old piece of content. So everything that you do, how can we repackage this? Can we take I'd love to have time and go and review all of the podcasts we have done and group them, use an LLM to group them into topics, and then I'd love to do like a guide that's based off of, let's say we're talking about indexing in in 20 podcasts, you know, what experts are saying about indexing and you know, using those podcasts as a basics. And then once you have the guide, you're thinking about okay, do I have some graphs that I can use on social media? Can I push this guide to uh get get me mentions and get me links? How else? You know, milk it basically. Every piece of content that you have, you gotta milk to the maximum to get the value out. And that happens before you start writing the piece of content.

Rana Shahbaz 43:52

Exactly. Thank you very much for revealing my secret of you know doing this podcast. And I couldn't explain this to my team. Better than what you did. So that's what I'm saying.

Emina Demiri Watson 44:02

I have a graphic for it.

Rana Shahbaz 44:04

I would love to have that because this is what we are planning. Currently, we were writing blogs separately, newsletters separately, and podcast this one. So I'm I'm telling my team members, okay, let me produce this podcast only. And you should, you know, base everything out of this, which can be very helpful for everybody and less work. So amazing. I agree. So after that, publishing content, this is what you do, you repurpose it, and this is how you promote it. And the results were 400 plus percent growth. Yeah.

Measuring Success Beyond Traffic

Emina Demiri Watson 44:32

Yeah, for for one work. I mean, I I don't know the exact numbers. I do have a case study from another client which I'm gonna be presenting. So I presented Brighton SEO, been um I presented last year in Octo no, in April, and I'm presenting this year in April as well. So I'm like a speaker as well, and I'm gonna be presenting like a multi-channel strategy for one of our clients. Um, and they have, you know, they have Meta, they have Google Ads, they have uh SEO with us, and I was looking at their results, so because they are an established brand, it's very, it's kind of um, you know, if you're starting off, uh, a 400% increase when you're starting off of zero isn't, you know, like those numbers look impressive, but it depends on what you started on. For this particular client, I mean, this is an established brand, and by using our approach that is very audience-centric and um channel aligned, we've increased across all of the channels. We've had a hundred and sixty-four percent increase in revenue, talking revenue on Meta, for example, and at the same time you had a 44% um decrease in CPC. Same with Google Ads, more than 100% Ross uh increase. And it's interesting with SEO, the last time we were looking at uh uh this is six months and six months, um, they had a 26% decrease in sessions, but get this 52% increase in revenue from SEO. That's what matters.

Rana Shahbaz 46:10

That's what matters.

Emina Demiri Watson 46:11

Yeah, exactly. So do I actually like, yes, of course I would love to have the traffic back because every once in a while, you know, you you you want that as one of your KPIs and you want to check it. But am I like particularly worried that it drops 26%? No, because my revenue is up.

Debunking SEO Myths

Rana Shahbaz 46:28

Exactly. And uh the case study we discussed, I think that's an excellent case study for many small businesses with a limited budgets who are trying to improve their SEO and working on a long-term plan. So I think that can work for many, many businesses. You've been on to lots of uh SEO conferences and one reason or another, although you hate to specialize, but we ended up, you know, discussing the SEO case study. So SEO is very hot topic with AI, all these changes. Any SEO myth you want to burst today, which is your favorite one?

Emina Demiri Watson 47:00

Oh my god, uh, don't get me started. There's so many. I get really like wrong. Just one, just one.

Rana Shahbaz 47:05

We are conscious of time.

Emina Demiri Watson 47:06

Um, I think I would go for um tracking rankings in uh LLMs in AI. There's no such thing as tracking rankings in AI. This is we're talking about uh you know non-deterministic probabilistic models here. Um so without getting technical, every time you ask it a question, it gives it will give you different answers. So if you're tracking actually where you rank on that list of whatever your you know best, best SEO agencies, and I'm going to be tracking where RICS and Digital is on that list, it's just crazy. It's it's complete, it's a myth that you can actually reverse engineer a neural network and that you can actually track ranking in LLMs. That doesn't mean you shouldn't be tracking LLMs. It just means that you need to think about it differently, thinking about it around visibility and how you're presented rather than a random number in a list.

Rana Shahbaz 48:06

Got it. So focus on providing value. I think you will get to better results from LLMs. Brilliant. During all these experiences, you worked in agencies, uh, you know, working as a uh digital marketer as well. What is the unusual habit or hack that really helped you, you know, with with your work?

Emina Demiri Watson 48:24

Unusual hack. It's a it's a tricky one, that one. But there's several kind of tools and things that that you should be using. As you know, I always say, one of the one of the secret weapons of any digital marketer is something called index match, which is actually an Excel formula. And it's brilliant. If you can if you know how to do index match, your analysis skills are gonna be, you know, you're like halfway there because you're always working with several spreadsheets and you need to merge things together, so it's your best friend. Don't use vLookup, use index match. So that's a secret weapon and kind of one habit, kind of understanding, kind of these little formulas and things, which is quite easy now. Also regex, using regex when you're trying to do your reporting. Another one. LLM's brilliant at giving you regex to use in your Google Analytics. Um, I'm terrible when when it comes to kind of I I wish I could say uh the habit is turn off your computer at five o'clock because you want to have your life family time. I am notoriously bad at it, but partly because you know, I really enjoy, I love my work. So for me, it's actually relaxing at nine o'clock to read like a blog or a paper on LLM or whatever it may be. So perhaps secret weapon is be authentic to yourself, just be yourself, and don't like do you really and show up as you.

Rana Shahbaz 49:56

Be kind to yourself as well.

Emina Demiri Watson 49:58

Yeah, exactly. That's it.

Rana Shahbaz 50:00

And the uh next one is what are the couple of uh biggest mistakes you see clients making, particularly we discussed more about SEO. So when it comes to SEO, any any common patterns, biggest mistakes you see people making, which you can point it out to help them avoid doing it?

Emina Demiri Watson 50:19

I think biggest mistakes are not tracking uh what matters. So being too bothered by tracking everything and anything and not actually thinking about what your KPIs should be. I think that's and not having it set up properly. So that's one. The uh second one is silos. I think that's a big problem. I think there's still, we always talk about aligning across channels, but it's very difficult and it's a mistake that everybody makes. We spoke about content and not thinking about your distribution and repurposing frameworks. That's a big one. And on the tracking, thinking that there is such a thing as correct attribution, there isn't. They're lying to you. All those platforms are lying to you, there is no such thing. Doesn't mean that you shouldn't be measuring things. I think those kind of three are the ones that I see over and over and over again. And and just not being able to communicate with your C-suite as well, and communicate with your stakeholders more widely, developers, people or companies not being able to communicate with their developers.

Speaker 1 51:27

Yeah.

Emina Demiri Watson 51:28

Buy them cookies. Excellent. That works.

Rana Shahbaz 51:30

Yep. Yep.

Emina Demiri Watson 51:30

Cookies.

Rana Shahbaz 51:31

Excellent. So to wrap up our conversation on this SEO, the uh the businesses who are looking to improve their S SEO, what is the first step you will suggest them to take?

Emina Demiri Watson 51:41

Well, other than going to our website and and filling out a form.

Rana Shahbaz 51:46

Yes, on top of that.

First Steps for SEO Improvement

Emina Demiri Watson 51:47

Yes, on top of that. Okay. Be sure that SEO is the the primary channel, you know, the channel that you want to use. Uh do all of your basics right. And then, as we said, do the fundamentals right. And then, if it is SEO, then it's about thinking, again, going back to what we were talking about, thinking about your website, and and your website needs to be providing that SEO value. But it I need to look at it. It's it it really depends. Sometimes it's technical, sometimes it's content. The technical, sometimes I go in and I see a website and I think there is no point of spending two days on a technical audit here because I can see already that it's not a priority. So let's try and do content right away. Other times I log in, the website is an absolute mess, and I need to spend the first month just doing technical, just to get it in a state where it's alright. So it really depends.

Rana Shahbaz 52:42

Great advice. So first you need to decide on a strategy basis what what is important, what is the priority channel to you know, grow your website and make this website as your number one business growth tool. Amina, where can people uh find you and connect with you?

Emina Demiri Watson 52:57

I'm on LinkedIn. LinkedIn is my kind of primary channel. So if you want to connect, you can find me on Amina slash the Miri uh on LinkedIn or go to our website. Our website is vixendigital.com, all one word, vixendigital. And yeah, just send me a message, send me a DM. I'm always really happy to talk about things. I love AI, absolutely obsessed with it, but I'm also very skeptical of it. So it's a good combo.

Rana Shahbaz 53:25

Amazing. Amina, thank you very much for your you know generous answers. Very helpful. Uh I'm sure this this uh you know discussion will help many businesses to simplify their digital marketing and to uh achieve results. So we appreciate your time.

Emina Demiri Watson 53:41

Thank you for having me, Rana.

Rana Shahbaz 53:43

Thank you very much. That's it for this episode of the website growth show. If you find it helpful, please consider subscribing. Until next time, keep growing.