Chris Simmance:
Thanks VoiceOverGuy and I’m very happy to have on the podcast today Josh Peacock from SEO4Hire. How are you doing Josh?

Josh Peacock:
I’m good, thank you for having me on, it’s an honour.

Chris Simmance:
Whereabouts in the world are you at the minute Josh? Because I continuously see photos of you in different places. So where are you today?

Josh Peacock:
My base is Manchester for the time being. I’ve just extended my contract for another year here. So I will be traveling in between, but based in Manchester.

Chris Simmance:
I could make a joke about that’s why you must be traveling a lot, but we won’t do that. We’re going to say Manchester is a nice place. Manchester is in fact a lovely place. It’s brilliant digital culture as well. Josh, this is your perfect opportunity to tell everyone who’s listening, if they didn’t know they’ve lived under a rock for the last few years, who the heck is Josh Peacock and what do you guys do?

Josh Peacock:
Yeah, so I’m Josh Peacock, I own SEO for Hire. So we’re a recruitment company that specializes in just SEO. So we’re one of the only companies in the world that just do SEO. We have an industry-backed vetting process where we bring on podcast guests like head of SEO on Amazon, Binance, Sage, Misguided, some of the biggest SEOs in the world. And we basically get them to review and update our vetting process so that we’re constantly getting it updated. And it just means that everybody we put forward is a very good SEO. Um, so yeah, that’s kind of what we do in a nutshell, but we do a lot around that. So as I mentioned, we do the podcast. My team does live webinars every Friday where you’ve been on a guest on that

Chris Simmance:
have.

Josh Peacock:
before, and it’s called SEO career mastery. So it’s everything to do with basically mastering your SEO career. And we go to loads of SEO events. We hosted our first event on start of June, which was

Chris Simmance:
Which was

Josh Peacock:
good

Chris Simmance:
awesome.

Josh Peacock:
fun. Thank you. It was a, it was a learning curve for our first one. Um, but. I think we’re hooked on that. We’ve got a lot of value from it. So we’re going to continue doing those events. And yeah, that’s what we do.

Chris Simmance:
That’s awesome. What do you think, what was it that got you into SEO specifically as the niche? Was there a good reason for that? Was it like there was a dart board of all the niches?

Josh Peacock:
So I had the recruitment and sales background and I had put my foot into SEO. I am not an SEO god or any expert in that sense, but Craig, my business partner, who I met on a beach in Barcelona, was in SEO for, I think it was eight years at the time. He had an SEO content company, an SEO link building company. And anyway, we started chatting and I was like, right, I’m starting a recruitment company of some sort. And I wanted to go into kind of that digital sector. And it was Craig that said that. I hear it all the time. He went and got screenshots of like tweets saying that like an SEO recruitment company was needed. So we did a few months of research on that and nearly everybody we rang up basically said, look, we 100% need it. There’s so many ways to fluff the CV, answer a few scenario questions once they get in and then they’re out the door within the next month. So that’s how we were born.

Chris Simmance:
That’s awesome. And you’ve got, you’ve got two sides to this really, haven’t you? You’ve got, um, and all recruiters have this kind of, uh, dual approach in the sense that you need to work with the agencies and with the businesses that need people, but you also need to go out there prospecting for good people that you then go through the vetting process for. So presumably

Josh Peacock:
Daphne.

Chris Simmance:
like balancing that’s quite a lot. I saw that Darius has done something like 600 calls this year or something with agencies and he’s, uh,

Josh Peacock:
350 but we can go with 600 if you

Chris Simmance:
All

Josh Peacock:
want.

Chris Simmance:
right, I mean, when this goes out, who knows, it could be that high by then. And

Josh Peacock:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
he must be, you know, consistently talking to people and kind of giving feedback internally about, you know, the general quality of the employment, employee side of things. Who is it that talks to the agencies from that point of view more? And so.

Josh Peacock:
Well, Darius is involved quite a bit as well, just because he does more candidate side. So I want him to meet the agency because you find out more about it on a call or when you meet somebody face to face, it’s like what they’re actually looking for. So I want Darius there from the start so that when he does place candidates there, he kind of has a better idea of like what they’re actually after rather than just reading a document.

Chris Simmance:
And so what is it that, like, of all of the experience you’ve got with agencies, what would you say is something that you love most about working with agencies? Never buying voiceover from Fiverr again.

Josh Peacock:
The shameless plug for Charlie and for you.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, I mean, double time. So what is it that you love most about working with agencies? Because you work with in-house teams as well as agencies, but there’s something pretty magical about agencyland.

Josh Peacock:
Yeah. So we work with all kinds of companies from all over the world. And I think my favorite thing is I’ve always kind of been a people person. I love getting in and seeing what way agencies work because they’re all different. They all work in different ways. And to me, it’s really exciting going in and seeing a company that puts like their workforce or their team at the top. So they’re experimenting with new things. And for their work with some. to the biggest fan of it, but like things like that. And they’re doing all different kinds of things to basically up the morale, up the team spirit and all that. So you can tell five minutes into a call if a company is genuinely passionate about their team or if they just want to see players to like get the job done. So to me, my favorite thing is getting into a company and seeing how much they actually care about bringing their team up basically.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, so there’s parts to this that are kind of cultural led. There’s leadership aspects as well, the right kind of training. And it’s not just about Netflix subscriptions and beanbags, is it really? And the four-day week thing. Some agencies have made it work, but I don’t think realistically it’s as much of a creds or a sales pitch as it used to be.

Josh Peacock:
Yeah,

Chris Simmance:
If you’re looking

Josh Peacock:
definitely.

Chris Simmance:
at If you’re looking at some of these great agencies and you’re seeing some of the stuff that they’re doing that kind of makes them more appetizing to a potential candidate, beyond benefits, what is it that most candidates typically look for? What do you normally put on those profiles that you build?

Josh Peacock:
So I actually, at our event, I did a whole talk about this, but most of the candidates, yeah, you were there. Most of the A-player SEOs that we work with, yes, of course salary is a big factor, but if you look at a normal job description, how can you get excited over responsibilities, requirements, and a little bit about the job? To me, it’s just, I don’t understand how people can get excited at that. So all I see is the salary and maybe the company, and then people get excited. But what we’ve done is we basically, our job description that we do, we build a unique website, we call it the golden recruitment formula,

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

Josh Peacock:
pretty proud of that. But what we do is we try and find out over, over from all these calls with candidates, we’re trying to find out what else motivates them. And a big thing that motivates candidates that we chat to is showing them who’s actually on the team and who they’ll be working with on a daily basis. We’ve had instances where somebody’s worked with somebody five years before, really, really enjoyed working with them. Didn’t know they were going to be part of the team. They’re like, Oh. I really wanted to work with Alan. Alan was my mentor five years ago, bang, bought

Chris Simmance:
Hmm.

Josh Peacock:
into the company. How the company celebrates employee success, what the company culture is like. So basically what we do is we sit down with somebody who’s been there at the company for a while so we can get this and it’s like email formats. So it’s like personal. It’s not just like bullet points or whatever. And so how do you celebrate employee success? Is there a career roadmap? That’s a massive one for candidates. And we’ve had so many candidates recently, Chris, that are happy to take a five, even 10 K. Pay decrease if they know that okay the company has so for instance studio Hawk have a great ones They’re one of our clients. I know you know Anthony and Harry Basically what they have is they have like what you’re here with us for one year. This is gonna be your salary This is gonna be some KPIs we need to hit you hit them. Here’s your two salary bracket Here’s your three and like the titles keep on going on with them as well. So just finding out more about the actual role rather than just responsible for these requirements is a massive one for us.

Chris Simmance:
And I reckon that there’s a lot of agencies that sit there and they go, I’ve put this job ad out. And actually you probably have these conversations because they try and do it themselves first, sometimes successfully. And then they go, why isn’t anyone, why doesn’t anyone want this? There must be kind of like a, well, here’s your diagnosis. Here’s your audit of what it is that’s missing. And it isn’t the salary

Josh Peacock:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
bit because usually that’s missing on most job ads, which it shouldn’t be. But. It’s not just the CV, it’s not just, sorry, the job ad, it’s everything that goes with it, it’s that stuff, it’s where am I gonna be, how do I fit in several years’ time, and I think as an agency leader, you need to be thinking, I mean, as a leader of any agency or of any business, you should be thinking several steps and several years ahead, you should be doing that for the people as well as the organization.

Josh Peacock:
When I pitch this to clients, they’re like, oh, that’s amazing. Let’s do that. And as if we’re giving them the website, but they could so easily do it by themselves, put as much time as they could into it. They could put company culture handbooks together. They could do the whole thing and the ROI on that, which is compound over years. So it’s

Chris Simmance:
Hmm.

Josh Peacock:
a win-win.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And is there anything that you normally would, you kind of normally recommend to agencies once they brought someone in, they’ve used you guys, the process is done. Is there any kind of like, say mop up, is there any kind of post placement type of work that gets done? Because I noticed in the years that I was running agencies, first of all, some recruiters you need to avoid and some recruiters you should always keep on hand. So when you have a good experience with a good recruiter, just stick with them. But I found that once the placement was done, beyond getting an invoice, which always made me cry a little bit, and beyond getting the invoice, you would hear nothing, unless there was a problem, at which point you’d be presented with a clause in a contract instead. I always find that, you know, with recruitment companies, there ought to be some kind of like You’re hiring, you’re growing, here’s some support and guidance and whatever that we can offer or even just recommend that comes off the back of that to help you retain that staff member, to make that staff member’s value increase. Is there anything on the horizon around that sort of thing?

Josh Peacock:
So I’ll be honest, there is some companies that just want the recruitment. They’ve got their onboarding stuff, settle down. And they’ve got everything to a T that it is just not a transaction like that. We constantly, we follow up, we see how things are going, but there is the companies that it could be their first time hiring an SEO or they’ve been doing PPC for a while and they want to build out an SEO team or they’ve been outsourcing SEO to an agency and want to build it in house team and still agency side. where we’ll bring on, so Craig loves this. Craig loves going in and seeing like, this is the way you structure your team. And like a big one for us as well, Chris is defining the service. There’s a lot of times a client will come on to us and they’re like, okay, we need this. Like, but we’ll look through and be like, well, actually you need this. And they’re like, oh, well, somebody else told me we need this, but I was like, but we’ve just gone through, we’ve just done 30 minutes of what you actually need. Like, I think you guys need this. So. If something like that does happen, we have got ongoing relationships where me and Craig are on a call every, every month, every two months, whatever it’s really needed. And just make sure everything’s smooth sailing. Is there any help that needed? And that kind of always, I don’t, don’t mean it. We’re not doing it in a selfish way. We’re doing it in a way because we want long lasting relationships. But a lot of the times that does end up being like, Oh, well, actually the person you put in is like smooth sailing has done this. We actually need an SEO exec underneath them

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Josh Peacock:
or we need a content side or something. So yeah, we can’t see like. I even said it on a call the other day. I was on a US call with 12 people showed up to the call for the proposal, which is like the biggest I’ve ever done. I thought it was going to be like two, three people max. But that’s one thing I said is that we’re not here for just transactions. We’re a young company. We’ve only been around for two years. I want long lasting relationships. I want, like even if we don’t get any money from it, I want to be able to bring advice

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Josh Peacock:
or bring whatever it is. And like me and Craig have done that plenty of times, but we’ve gone on a call where we think it might be a sales call. But it just ends up being like, well, look, this is what we do. This is what past clients in the past have done. This is what you should do. And they just take it and go with it and don’t use it as a recruitment company, which hopefully pays off in the long run, but yeah.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, absolutely. And we touched on, you know, what distinguishes some of these agencies as ones that you love working with. And it’s, you know, there’s a plan for progression. It’s not just about, you know, beanbags and stuff like that. And what is it that you, I’m sure you’ve had a few calls with a few caulkers that you’ve kind of sort of thought we can’t, for our own reputation, place people in these places. Obviously not naming names or anything like that, but is there anything that’s like a common thread that you’ve noticed when there’s people that you can’t work with at that point? What are some of those commonalities that you’ve seen?

Josh Peacock:
Yeah. So there’s a few companies that we have blacklisted, where we haven’t worked with them. A few of them, I worked in the early days when it was just me on the team doing everything. In my head, I was like, right, sales equals companies going to survive. And it was like everything going forward. And a few of those companies where we had problems were just salary, just, and this, this is only in my experience happened in the UK and in the US salaries. They jumped by all the time, but in the UK, there’s been three companies, I can think off the top of my head, where we’ve gone in and at the start we said, look, you’re not going to find somebody on that salary for what it is. And they’re like, oh, well, we’ve done it in the past. We did it seven years ago. And I’m like, okay, we’re seven years forward. And they just won’t move. And there was one time I remember where it was for an SEO manager role, I think it was a 30K salary. And I brought a few people in, they interviewed them and they didn’t wait until they waited until like the third or fourth interview where it was like coming back to me trying to negotiate with it while this candidate’s gone out on the limb to try and do this. And they just, just don’t budge. And they’re like, Josh, I could find somebody on this. I’m like, go, go do it

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Josh Peacock:
then. And so when it comes to that, like, yeah. As well as that, there’s a lot of companies that come in and they’re like, kind of as I mentioned earlier where they’re like, okay, I want this. And then we go through a few things and we’re like, well, like, I think we’d advise maybe doing this and this

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Josh Peacock:
differently, and they’re just completely stuck to it. And we’ve had instances where like three, four, six months down the line, somebody’s come back being like, yeah, this hasn’t worked. We need to do this.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah. And the problem with quite a lot of this is, you know, agency leaders, I was one, I know what it’s like. You’ve got the most massive ego. I’ve obviously humbled an awful lot in the last few years. But

Josh Peacock:
Definitely.

Chris Simmance:
you’ve got a massive ego is very hard to sort of be told something isn’t quite how you want it to be. So when it comes to know I can do it this way, or I’ve done it this way before, yes, it’s almost always going to be wrong if you come in it, right. pig-headedly, it’s gonna disappear. You aren’t gonna get there. It’s hard.

Josh Peacock:
Well, you know what? I used to be really bad at it. I used to be really bad at it when somebody told me something differently and I’d like invested time into like thinking about it. But I’ve, one of my favorite books called Four Agreements by Don McGuire. And one of the agreements is like, don’t take things personally and don’t make assumptions. And I read it recently and something like clicked in my head. I was like, oh yeah, that thing that somebody’s been telling me, it’s actually to help me. It’s not to like go against me. But I think it’s just nature, especially in men as well.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, there’s definitely that trait for sure. And I think people typically, if you don’t usually start an agency because you’re timid and want to keep out of the way, and usually you have some early success and do quite well, and you then sort of get that kind of belief that your idea must be the best idea because it’s your idea. And it’s really hard to be challenged anyway, because human beings don’t like to be wrong anyway. Um, but

Josh Peacock:
Bye bye.

Chris Simmance:
I, one of the big watersheds for me in my life was just genuinely, genuinely realizing that actually, if I just, if I seek to understand before being understood, then it’s a hell of a lot easier to get more from people and like, just, just work out a nuanced way of doing the thing that you were going to do and share the credit for it. It feels a hell of a lot nicer.

Josh Peacock:
Yeah, that’s one of my favorite books as well, by the way. My dad made me read that when I was like 15, seven habits of highly affected people.

Chris Simmance:
There we go. Books everywhere everyone. We’ve got a load behind

Josh Peacock:
I’m

Chris Simmance:
me, but I haven’t read any of them. They’re

Josh Peacock:
sorry.

Chris Simmance:
just for show, except for the one that I wrote of course, talking about humble. There we go. There it is. So

Josh Peacock:
Bye.

Chris Simmance:
you’ve got a magic wand, SEO for hires. They want to do, you want to do a bit of R&D tax credit reclaim. You’re working really hard and you’ve decided, Craig’s come up with a clever idea to build a magic wand for agencies. but you can only use it once, it’s the test one. So what one thing do you think you’d change about all agencies in one go?

Josh Peacock:
Tricky question. It’s a tricky question. My recruitment background is trying to say that they’ll increase their salaries, but I don’t think that’s gonna happen.

Chris Simmance:
It’s a reasonable request, but let’s just say that the magic wand declines.

Josh Peacock:
Okay, right. Well, we need to fix the magic wand then Craig

Chris Simmance:
Hahaha

Josh Peacock:
needs to do a better job. But I think what I would do is I would love for agencies, especially digital marketing agencies to put more. What’s the word, more enthusiasm into an SEO team and to build it out because a lot of the companies that we talk to, they might be big on different side of the teams, but their SEO team is always invested in probably the least. Um, at least that’s my experience in it anyway. But so, and as well as that, like SEO teams, you don’t, you don’t on average, you don’t get massive SEO teams. You know, it’s normally somebody at the top, maybe three or four people helping out. But. A lot of it, I’ll give you an example. One of our clients are the number one health supplement review, sorry, number one reviewed TrustPilot health supplement company, if that makes sense. That was a, that was a nice call. Um, over in the U S but they came to us earlier in the year and they were like, right, this is our budget. We’ve got this and we want the best and we want to build from the pyramid down instead of bringing in kind of average or beginner people. So we placed somebody on, I think it was 115k salary, SEO director, and from them, they’re like trickling down and we’re bringing in people in back underneath them. But like they’ve come back and they’ve showed us the results that they’ve done from SEO and they were always doing SEO. They were just outsourcing it to an actual agency

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, please.

Josh Peacock:
rather than building an actual team. So I guess if I could wave a magic wand, it would be, it’d be that. Invest more into your SEO team.

Chris Simmance:
And final question, haven’t told you this one’s coming. So hopefully this will be all right. What do you think the big trend in SEO teams will be in 2024?

Josh Peacock:
I think we’re going to go more managerial roles, I think. More leadership roles. I think we’re going to go more, I think maybe instead of having one SEO director, it would be maybe multiple at the top helping out. Basically what I’m trying to say is more skilled people on the team. Yeah, I don’t want to get bitten for that one, but I think more skilled

Chris Simmance:
I know.

Josh Peacock:
people

Chris Simmance:
This is why predictions

Josh Peacock:
on the team.

Chris Simmance:
are prediction. It could be wildly inaccurate. I mean, most famous commentators get these things wrong and you see them in the news later on how ridiculous that was. As the guy that said the fax machine,

Josh Peacock:
Yeah.

Chris Simmance:
no, the internet is going to be as good as the fax machine or something. He was definitely wrong. But you know, with the with the way that technology is changing, investment in skills and creative and critical thinking people, management and leadership skills are likely to do better for an agency than say someone who’s going to sit there for 20 grand a year writing a thousand title tags.

Josh Peacock:
Exactly. Well, do you know what? We just onboarded a client recently in the last month and they don’t have a big SEO team, but they’ve got six SEO managers, which is quite big. What’s also cool as well is on a Friday, they put down their actual client work and they all get together and build affiliate sites together.

Chris Simmance:
I like that idea.

Josh Peacock:
Well, that was pretty cool.

Chris Simmance:
That, that, um, learn, learn through doing stuff is, I think that’s where, um, some of the best SEOs ever will come from. Um, because you break stuff and you learn from it and you build something and you see the results and if you can make a few quid from it, obviously great. But if you learn as you go, it’s a brilliant way of proving that you actually have skin in the game rather than it’s just a job.

Josh Peacock:
100%.

Chris Simmance:
Josh, thank you so much for coming on the podcast.

Josh Peacock:
Thanks for having me, Chris. It was good

Chris Simmance:
Yeah,

Josh Peacock:
fun.

Chris Simmance:
in our next episode, we’ll be speaking with another agency recruiter probably. No, we don’t like other recruiters. We only like Josh and the SEO for hire team and all of the other recruitment partners, of course.

Josh Peacock:
Hahaha!

Chris Simmance:
Thanks very much for listening and speak to you all soon.