Chris Simmance:
Thanks, VoiceOver Guy. That’s the last we’re here of you today, hopefully. And Gareth, how are you doing? Welcome to the podcast again.

Gareth Hoyle:
Thank you very much. I believe this is my hat trick of podcast review.

Chris Simmance:
This is your hat trick. You’ve done season one as agency leader, season two as agency leader. However, we are here for a very different reason today, Gareth, why are we here today for season three?

Gareth Hoyle:
We are here to talk about working with agencies.

Chris Simmance:
Ooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooooo

Gareth Hoyle:
So yeah, something I’ve always enjoyed, if I’m honest. And I think working with agencies has always stood me in good stead. So

Chris Simmance:
Mm,

Gareth Hoyle:
yeah,

Chris Simmance:
mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
I’m delighted to be along to give you the pros and cons, shall we say.

Chris Simmance:
So we’re here from the perspective of the recently minted coveragely platform, but there’s a longer history to your working with agencies and it goes back to even when I first started in SEO actually. So do you want to give us a little potted history of Gareth Hoyle working with agencies?

Gareth Hoyle:
Yeah, absolutely. So I think I started working in SEO 2007 ish, worked freelancing for a couple of years. And to be honest, if you got fed up of speaking to idiot clients, maybe

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
I had the maybe I had the wrong clients, which is why I defined them as idiot clients. But the I really, while I was at university, I taught myself rudimentary Hindi because I was working for GE. And I looked at what I was doing for my, uh, and my brand, brand clients is a, is a loose term, if I’m honest, when I think about that, um, the, I really wanted to work with people that understood what we’re doing. So

Chris Simmance:
Mm-mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
the obvious journey for me was to work with other agencies to help with link links are still needed to rank. So

Chris Simmance:
very much so.

Gareth Hoyle:
that made sense to me. And we created a business called manual link building.

Chris Simmance:
It’s

Gareth Hoyle:
Yeah,

Chris Simmance:
a steadfast

Gareth Hoyle:
that was

Chris Simmance:
favorite

Gareth Hoyle:
a

Chris Simmance:
in 2011.

Gareth Hoyle:
it was. Yeah, I don’t think we knew it would grow as quick and as far as it did. I think we’d have spent more money and time on the logo and the domain name. We knew that. But hey, it’s, I can’t, I can’t fault it, you know, it’s paid for this house. So, um, yeah, that’s a, and I’ve worked, although we worked probably half, maybe 66% with end brands now, I still have a lot of agency clients that come to us for, um, support work, I suppose, whether it’s the links, whether it’s, I just, they’ve got a stack of audits that need doing, or they need some content producing. I’ve just always enjoyed working with my people, shall we say.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Even now when we’re looking at end users, we only really work with end users that have got an SEO team.

Chris Simmance:
So give us a, coverage is a new thing. I’ve had a little poke and a peek with you. It’s pretty cool. So tell us a little bit about that.

Gareth Hoyle:
Thank you.

Chris Simmance:
Bloody hell, Gareth, go on, carry on, the guy’s an idiot.

Gareth Hoyle:
Hello,

Chris Simmance:
Don’t

Gareth Hoyle:
yeah, cheeky bugger, isn’t he?

Chris Simmance:
listen

Gareth Hoyle:
Like,

Chris Simmance:
to him

Gareth Hoyle:
just

Chris Simmance:
and click

Gareth Hoyle:
coming

Chris Simmance:
the link.

Gareth Hoyle:
in and interrupting us. Yeah, so Coveragely. Coveragely is something I’ve been working on. I’ve been live for a couple of months now. One of the things that, as a link builder in digital PR, most of the reports that we do, we send people spreadsheets of links,

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
and it’s just really dull. There’s no metrics overlaid on them quite often.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
And I often think that, you know, we’ve got an accountant or a, you know, a CFO or a CEO that’s above the teams that we’re working with, maybe the client we’re working with is investing five, 10, 15 grand a month into PR and links. And what’s their output? Well, their output, other than the fact that their visibility has increased and their rankings have gone up, is it’s a Google doc or a Google sheet. And. It just doesn’t fly for me really. So what we wanted to do is try and make a visual way of viewing the reports. So we’ve coveragely really simple. You paste your URLs into our tool. Our tool will then go away and screenshot the posts. So you’ve got a nice visual of the, of the, of the, of the, uh, domain or the post that’s been made. But then what else we’re doing is you can attach a Moz metrics, majestic metrics, Hrefs metrics and SEMrush metrics. It took me a long time to convince all four of these companies that I can put their

Chris Simmance:
To

Gareth Hoyle:
metrics

Chris Simmance:
play nicely,

Gareth Hoyle:
next

Chris Simmance:
yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
to each other. But the look, I genuinely believe that if you’re going to get a true picture, you need to take into account all the metrics sources. None

Chris Simmance:
Well,

Gareth Hoyle:
of the

Chris Simmance:
yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
metrics are from Google to start

Chris Simmance:
Well, let’s,

Gareth Hoyle:
with.

Chris Simmance:
let’s not forget that quite a lot of these metrics, as good as the platforms are, and I’m definitely not disparaging any of them, quite a lot of their scores are made up from their data and, you know, a DR this and a DA that and a SA this and an SL that or whatever. Though none of those, none of those mean anything, but at the same time they do because you kind of, there’s a benchmark for all of the data they’ve got. But if you put them all together with something else that’s a bit more meaningful, then it shows the landscape, the value of that link, I’m guessing.

Gareth Hoyle:
That’s what we believe, but I mean, you’re totally right that none of these are Google metrics and they’re all based on the individual algorithms, etc. that people are setting up. The way I approach this though is if we’re all using the wrong ruler, it kind of makes it right because we’re all using

Chris Simmance:
Mm…

Gareth Hoyle:
the same wrong measurements.

Chris Simmance:
Yes, yes.

Gareth Hoyle:
So

Chris Simmance:
Agreed.

Gareth Hoyle:
it’s an… Even if you just look at it from the perspective of, we’re a DA50, our competitors are an average DA60, oh, we’ve got some work to do. So even if you’re just taking really top level views

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
like that, but yeah, we are really pleased with Coveragely, we’re pleased with the uptake so far. It just saves time and it

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
just makes things, like we find that you get greater buy-in. from the C-suite,

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
there’s a more of an understanding. When it comes to sharing the reports across departments,

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
it’s just, you know what? Pictures are better than words.

Chris Simmance:
Yes. Well, I mean, the thing I tell a lot of agency leaders is that, you know, you’re selling an invisible thing and you have to, and the reason most clients leave isn’t necessarily because of the results, the amount of agencies I’ve spoken to and they’ve gone, yeah, they left and the results are great and I can’t work out why they left. And it’s like, you were just giving them reports that were numbers and spreadsheets and green lines and red lines and things like that. You’re not sort of explaining what that invisible thing really means to them. And, you know, Fair enough, a few screenshots of where the coverage is isn’t gonna swing the needle, but things like that definitely add value. And if you can make that service a lot more tangible to someone who’s a couple of steps removed from the day-to-day a bit, then when it comes around to talking about budgets and things, you’re not even in contention for the job.

Gareth Hoyle:
It’s just a bit of understanding. It’s better for comms, like shareable reports that

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

Gareth Hoyle:
people can open on any device. Like we’ve worked hard to make sure it works on your phone and on your telly in the boardroom. So Yeah,

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
it’s I mean,

Chris Simmance:
That’s awesome.

Gareth Hoyle:
I just want people to go and you can sign up for a free trial for 14 days. And the free trial is fully featured. So you get custom sub domain, you get all the metrics included. It’s a

Chris Simmance:
That’s cool.

Gareth Hoyle:
check it out, cover it.com. And then that’s the end of I’m not here to sell Chris.

Chris Simmance:
Well,

Gareth Hoyle:
I’m here to share my knowledge.

Chris Simmance:
so, okay, from, I mean, your journey has been running agency, working with agencies, supporting agencies. Now you’ve got the platform to deliver like a product to agencies as well. You’ve got a hell of a lot of experience in, around and with agencies. What do you love most about agencies then?

Gareth Hoyle:
Yeah,

Chris Simmance:
Why do

Gareth Hoyle:
I

Chris Simmance:
you

Gareth Hoyle:
think

Chris Simmance:
love

Gareth Hoyle:
that

Chris Simmance:
them so much, Gareth?

Gareth Hoyle:
I love them so much because they understand what I’m talking about.

Chris Simmance:
Haha, he’s bad.

Gareth Hoyle:
You know, as much as we all have SEO jokes are as bad as dad jokes, we get that. And if, you know, as soon as somebody’s staying in room 404, the bloody WhatsApp groups go crazy and

Chris Simmance:
Yep.

Gareth Hoyle:
stuff like that. But for me, it’s just people that get what we do. There should be less stupid questions. And you may note that I said should be because we still get, not every agency worker is equal, shall we say. So we do still get some daft questions.

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

Gareth Hoyle:
But yeah, there’s just an understanding of what we do. There’s a slight more empathy towards, you know, things don’t always go in a straight line upwards. Sometimes we

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
are playing the big dipper. I just, yeah, I just, they’re just my people, our people, like

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
they just understand what we’re doing, they understand why we’re doing it, they understand the risk in what we’re doing. I

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
mean, I could give you an equal number of cons to working with agencies, but

Chris Simmance:
together.

Gareth Hoyle:
I’m sure we’ll come onto that shortly. But yeah, I think that the takeaway is I just love working with people that understand what we’re doing. It’s

Chris Simmance:
Absolutely.

Gareth Hoyle:
just so

Chris Simmance:
And

Gareth Hoyle:
much easier.

Chris Simmance:
I was I was up in Newcastle delivering some training to an agency the other day and stayed in one of the there’s a Motel One brand I think it’s called and stayed in room 200. It was okay. And anyway,

Gareth Hoyle:
But it did.

Chris Simmance:
there you go. Hang on. I think there is a drum thing here. Hang on. I’ll take it. Um, we have fun on this podcast. Um, so, you know, we’ve talked about what you love about working with agencies.

Gareth Hoyle:
Thank you.

Chris Simmance:
What is it that you think kind of, if you were to, if you were to really distill it down, separates the best from the rest, because there’s technically English speaking wise across the world, nearly a million of them, according to LinkedIn.

Gareth Hoyle:
Yeah, so. Everything for me with an agency relationship all starts with how it’s sold into the client. Like there’s only so much I can do with what you give me. And if you’ve made a promise to the client that will be, I mean crikey, you shouldn’t even be using this terminology, but will be number one for keyword X in two months.

Chris Simmance:
Oh, yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Like, well, hang on a minute. Do you know Mr. Sales Dude or Do Dat? Do you know what goes in? to

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
achieving this. Have you looked at the competition? Have you looked at the landscape of the SERPs? The mis-selling at day one,

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
fights me in the ass at day 28. But then the agency loses the client because we might have delivered X amount of links for Y amount of money, which is the commercial agreement that I regularly have in place. But if the site is technically wrong, if the content is not speaking the language of the rest of the search, so the intent

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
of the content is wrong, then there’s only so much my links can do these days, really, like you’ve got to get everything right. And the good agencies sell it right. And I think the… It’s not a case of trying to… And again, I feel like we’re going back in time 10 years here. We’re not trying to con these customers. Like, for a long time, SEO was the snake oil game of like, well, SEO is jammed tomorrow. So you pay me 10,000 pounds a month for one year and we might get some traffic. Like the…

Chris Simmance:
Yep, I’m selling

Gareth Hoyle:
If

Chris Simmance:
you an

Gareth Hoyle:
you…

Chris Simmance:
invisible thing for a large amount of money upfront that will deliver something which you won’t necessarily be able to perceive. We’ll put it in a wooly way, in a wordy report, but I’d like the money upfront before you actually know it’s possible. Thank you.

Gareth Hoyle:
So you’ve been out of agency relationships with clients for too long, Chris, because you said we will deliver, whereas I would say we should. Well, you know, cover your behind slightly.

Chris Simmance:
Behind the times, definitely.

Gareth Hoyle:
I’m only jealous.

Chris Simmance:
So on the other side of that then, so that would be the best bit. What about what you’ve seen some car crashes in your time. What would you say, you know, agency leaders should kind of look out for? What are the warning signs that you’ve semi-regularly seen that have turned out to be a death knell for an agency?

Gareth Hoyle:
Yeah, again, the setting the client expectations from the off. This is a multi-year brand building exercise these days in

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
SEO. It isn’t, oh, we’re just going to write 300 words, we’re going to make sure that the page loads fast and then we’re just going to dump some links on it.

Chris Simmance:
and

Gareth Hoyle:
There’s the whole story of… top of the funnel, middle of the funnel, bottom of the funnel, like there. Nothing makes me shudder more than when I hear that the, uh, the agency has sold them 10 keywords. Are we working on these keywords? It’s like, well, no, you’re working on this section of their website, which may or may not have thousands of variations of the keywords that we’re working on.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Granted, we might track 10 keywords. But I don’t think you should be selling it in on the basis of, oh, yeah, I’m just going to. In the same, we see it when people are like, I’m just working on this section of the site. Well,

Chris Simmance:
Well,

Gareth Hoyle:
hang on a minute.

Chris Simmance:
that

Gareth Hoyle:
We’ve

Chris Simmance:
is

Gareth Hoyle:
just

Chris Simmance:
interesting.

Gareth Hoyle:
made the site more authoritative. So surely, rising tides lift all boats. So the whole site should be going up, not just

Chris Simmance:
Yeah, yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
blue widgets. So things like that when we hear that. Again, realistic expectations. I was speaking to an agency the other day, their client wants to rank for Sash Windows. So Sash Windows are bloody expensive windows. The front page is full of the window companies that you see also doing TV campaigns. So big brand. But they came to us. And granted, we delivered the work because it’s an order. for us rather than, you know, we weren’t

Chris Simmance:
Hmm.

Gareth Hoyle:
strategically involved, but they wanted, and I know that Google ranking isn’t just about link account, but they wanted five links a month to this page and their site had no existing authority, the UX was wrong.

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
It’s never gonna rank.

Chris Simmance:
And presumably the anchor

Gareth Hoyle:
Is that

Chris Simmance:
text

Gareth Hoyle:
is?

Chris Simmance:
was going to be sash windows or buy sash

Gareth Hoyle:
Oh,

Chris Simmance:
windows.

Gareth Hoyle:
yeah, all the way, all the way. Not even, you know, the it’s But again, this is where as a service provider, it’s not my job, it’s not Tesco’s fault if you burn your dinner.

Chris Simmance:
Yep.

Gareth Hoyle:
So if you order five links with this anchor text, obviously we’ll send a copy for sign off and all that jazz, then I’m just processing your order.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Like I’m not involved and that’s one of the. One of the biggest challenges that I have with working with other agencies is the lack of comms sometimes with the end client. And don’t get me wrong, we do have some agencies that introduce us as the link partner or the PR partner,

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

Gareth Hoyle:
but others, we do it via their email addresses, or we just do it in the background.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
And it’s, it is like, I can’t control what the account manager is telling the customer. And I mean, the plus side to this is it’s not my reputation on the line because I’m not I’m not even in the in the conversation

Chris Simmance:
The interesting thing though is that expectation management piece, it goes across all facets of an agency. So you hire someone, you set the expectations of what you expect from them. They set expectations as early as they can around, you know, interview and post interview and things like that. You set expectations in your marketing that generates your leads, which should maintain that level of expectation through the proposal stage and the onboarding should meet and stick to the same expectations. And it’s all very. should be very transparent and should be very, very clear. And oftentimes people will, a client will leave an agency because they don’t feel like their expectations have been met. And sometimes when you look back through things, you’re like, well, I definitely understood what they were talking about. They just didn’t necessarily understand what you’re talking about, or you misunderstood what their expectations were because they didn’t necessarily understand how to articulate what their expectations were. It’s crazy.

Gareth Hoyle:
They might not know what they want.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Like they might genuinely, or their landscape could have shifted for them.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Maybe they have a new CMO. Maybe they have more resource in house now.

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
So they want less from the agency. It’s, I mean, the reason I love coverage, agency to agency or client to agency, it’s people speaking to people.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Chinese whispers and things get lost in communication.

Chris Simmance:
Mm-hmm.

Gareth Hoyle:
And especially where we’re doing, because for some of our agency clients, we run their PR campaigns and we run their PPC trading activity. But that’s harder to do from behind the scenes.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Like it is much easier if we can be in a shared Slack channel where I’m Gareth at marketing signals rather than Gareth at agency app.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
It is just so much easier sometimes.

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
And it’s almost like the client doesn’t get the full plethora of our knowledge, shall we say, because with the secret, aren’t we? With a dirty little secret that nobody wants to admit to.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
Whereas reality, we’ve been called in by that agency because our core competence is what they can’t deliver. but they need to deliver it.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
And it’s, I don’t know, I also think it’s just a circle of lies that

Chris Simmance:
Yes.

Gareth Hoyle:
just digging ourselves a bigger hole as the, you know, we’ve got some of our agency clients, we’ve been working on their campaigns for like three or four years. Like what, imagine the customer found out,

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
like maybe they wouldn’t care,

Chris Simmance:
But

Gareth Hoyle:
but it just.

Chris Simmance:
it really does depend. Typical boring answer. It does depend, but so I’ve got final question for you to round off this. So you’ve coverage Lee is doing really, really well. It’s, it’s running all by itself. Now you’ve got a team in place that are all running it for you. Anyway. Um, you don’t need to be involved as much. And you think, oh, I need to get some new hoodies with some new branding. I’m going to come up with a new, a new business to solve an agency’s problem. You’re going to put loads of years of R and D into it. And you come up with a magic wand and it’s a magic wand that can only ever be used once because you didn’t put a lot of time into the R and D you priced it up well, but you didn’t, didn’t put a lot of time into

Gareth Hoyle:
I’m

Chris Simmance:
it.

Gareth Hoyle:
sorry.

Chris Simmance:
Um, and it can only ever be used once. So you get to use this magic one time to change one thing in all agencies in one go. What is it?

Gareth Hoyle:
Oh, you know what, you will training.

Chris Simmance:
Yes.

Gareth Hoyle:
It would just be training based and standards and just raising that general knowledge

Chris Simmance:
Mm.

Gareth Hoyle:
within. Because again, not necessarily, I know a lot of very talented SEOs. I know a lot of dangerous SEOs, shall we say. But the… the training is you’re trying to get something across to the developers that are making the new site. Well, if you’re not trained well enough to explain what you want, then it goes over to the developers with the wrong spec.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
And it could be using the wrong type of schema. It could be focusing the developer resource on the wrong part of the site or the wrong part of the technical audit. So yeah, just train your people. And it’s something that I’ve always been a massive investor in.

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
in my people to just get them up to the standard

Chris Simmance:
Yeah.

Gareth Hoyle:
that I need.

Chris Simmance:
And I think there’s, there’s different types of training, isn’t it? There’s training for skill training for mindset and training for kind of, uh, things that it’s a lifestyle types training as well. So, you know, the, the skill stuff. Yeah. A course for this, a course for that to do better at SEO or PPC or whatever else. And then there’s the, the training, which helps you think better, speak better, present better account, manage better. And they’re softer skills than the than you know, the typical kind of say hard skills, then you’ve got the other skills which are which are incredibly important around like keeping your mind right in and out of work and like good use of a magic one there.

Gareth Hoyle:
Yeah, well,

Chris Simmance:
Oh,

Gareth Hoyle:
it’s

Chris Simmance:
and everyone’s done it. That’s great.

Gareth Hoyle:
needed as well

Chris Simmance:
I can

Gareth Hoyle:
really.

Chris Simmance:
feel the phone ringing off the hook with people coming to book training now. This is great.

Gareth Hoyle:
Well, good for you!

Chris Simmance:
Thanks so much for coming on Gareth and really looking forward to seeing how much further Coveragely does because it’s a great platform already and it’s relatively young, so it’s got a long, long life ahead

Gareth Hoyle:
Thank

Chris Simmance:
of it.

Gareth Hoyle:
you Chris. We have big plans for it so watch this space coveragely.com free trial, sign up. If you don’t like it drop me an email.

Chris Simmance:
Brilliant. Thanks so much for coming on. And in our next episode, we’ll be speaking to another coach, advisor, trainer, mentor or partner. In the meantime, thanks very much.