Chris Simmance:
Thanks for going on the podcast. I’ve got Andy from Keyword Insights. How are you doing, Andy?
Andy Chadwick:
Yeah, very good Chris. Nice to be here again, I think. Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Andy Chadwick:
How are you?
Chris Simmance:
I mean, a couple of hats. This is the major hat. This is the real hat. What’s your role? Is it CEO, Keyword Insights?
Andy Chadwick:
Yeah, we were about to put out a little announcement. I’ve officially taken on that role now. Um, before
Chris Simmance:
Woohoo! Real
Andy Chadwick:
it was,
Chris Simmance:
hot!
Andy Chadwick:
yeah, I think it was a more of a coin flip between me and Sagantha and I was, uh, we, we decided that I was better placed in the, I guess the vision and where is going and Sagantha is better
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
place at just getting an awesome product out. Uh,
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
and Mikola is obviously in a better place to make sure all the code works. So. I’ve taken on that role officially. We were about to release a thing on that actually. So yeah, I guess that’s the title now.
Chris Simmance:
Well, the good thing is when this goes live, that announcement will be several weeks old. So hopefully everyone’s going, oh, we already knew that Andy, and we expected to hear
Andy Chadwick:
Hehehehe
Chris Simmance:
this. But in every business, whether it’s an agency or anything that has like a long-term view, you need a visionary and you need an implementer. So that makes a lot of sense, given what I know about the both of you. So for those of uninitiated, for those who have been under a rock on Twitter, never been on the internet, but run an agency for some reason, who are you Andy? What do you do?
Andy Chadwick:
So CEO of Keyword Insights, I have been in SEO or digital marketing for 10 years. I went from agency side to freelancer. I then went from freelancer to running a very boutique agency with my business partner, Saganthan, and then to be able to scale, we started developing our own And then we started leasing those tools to other agencies, I guess.
Chris Simmance:
We’re good?
Andy Chadwick:
And then we realized, oh, actually, why not just make these tools into something proper? And so
Chris Simmance:
then.
Andy Chadwick:
we started developing the tools to be public facing, starting with, I say, starting with keyword insights. We actually do have four or five tools. Uh, we planned on releasing one a year. Uh, and then we didn’t realize just how much effort a SaaS business like it’s, it’s unrelenting. So. We’ve only released keyword insights, but it’s growing really nicely, lots of new features. We do have three or four more hidden away, but yeah, we started growing our software. And so now I guess we’re a SaaS company to help with digital marketing.
Chris Simmance:
I remember Saganthan coming to me on Twitter and I can’t remember when it was, but you were in like beta mode for keyword insights and I had a play for like a week or something. And this was a good few years ago. And I remember thinking this is bloody good. And that was just when it did everything in the background was about CSV. Before it even did pivot tables and things like that. I used it a couple of months ago for the OMG Center and I’m like… mind-blowingly good. It really does make it. It makes a huge change to the way that you look at keyword research and stuff, from my perspective at the very least. I’m sure for agencies it’s a huge time saver, right?
Andy Chadwick:
Yeah, I mean, and that was, yeah, that was the goal. And we’re trying to get out of this idea that it’s just a clustering platform now. It’s gonna be like a full content marketing suite. And we’ve been trying to release version three for the last two months, but version three is coming this month, I’ve been told, but I was told that for the last two months. And
Chris Simmance:
Hahaha
Andy Chadwick:
then you’ll see more than just clustering. I mean, it does have a bit more than clustering now, but it’s gonna be really, really good week. we hope.
Chris Simmance:
Are you suggesting that development has been delayed by developers? Because that is a news flash right there.
Andy Chadwick:
I do know I partly I think I only have myself to blame. I kept pushing them for a day and they said, we don’t know. I kept pushing them. I need a day. I need a day. I don’t know. I don’t know. And then they gave me a day and I just think they pulled it out of their, you know, so maybe I blame myself for that one. But yeah.
Chris Simmance:
Fair enough. So from an agency’s perspective, what, if I’m, if I’m looking at my tool stack and I’m thinking, you know, what the heck can keyword insights do that something else doesn’t do, or what can it do better than the other things? What, what would you, what would you say that like it, it beats or does better than, or is better for?
Andy Chadwick:
So it’s a good question. So the clustering part, which is what we’re known for, is always better and more, I say better. It’s different tools for different situations. But it was our mainstay. And so if you want keyword clustering, it does have more flexibility, let’s say, than other tools. For example, SEMrush has just brought out their clustering. And… we thought we’d lose a lot of people to that, but we haven’t. And the reason being, SEMrush only allows you to do 2000 keywords at a time and only 10 of those projects a month. So we allow you to do two and a half to 3 million keywords. So we basically are limited. So for our certainly more enterprise clients, the clustering makes sense. SEMrush only clusters if they’ve got two URLs in common with another keyword, which I think is too loose to really, it’s not enough to say, yeah, these two keywords should be captured on the same page. We actually give you the full flexibility. We let you choose from two all the way up to 10 based on what your niche is. Because if you’re a smaller niche, you probably wanna rein that in a bit. If you’re a bigger niche, you wanna maybe make bigger clusters. So there’s more flexibility there. It’s quicker, so that’s a big thing. We scale up with however many keywords you’ve dumped in it. And then that’s just the clustering part. And then we can compare ourselves with loads of other clustering tools. And it’s all very much the same sort of comparisons. Normally, we’re quicker, we allow you to do more and we give you more flexibility in the settings.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
So they’re normally the three arguments out for the clustering. The other part of it is, is we link a load of things together, I think in a really nice workflow.
Chris Simmance:
Mm.
Andy Chadwick:
There’s certain tools out there that just add more and more tools onto their suite just to, because they see another tool doing well and they just stick it on, they bolt it onto whatever they do. and it’s
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
not really thinking about the actual workflow. So keyword insights will never bring, we’ve talked about it, but we’re pretty sure we’ll never bring link data in, like our own link scoring metrics, you know, like backlink, because it doesn’t really fit our workflow. Our workflow is this, we help you find a load of keywords, we’ll help you group them together to find the right pages, then we’re gonna help you write great content, and then we’re gonna help you track that content and monitor it and improve it. There’s no need for the link stuff to be in there, where some tools just start bolting on, you know, there may be a link index and they add on clustering, but it doesn’t really fit, it doesn’t, why? Just because clustering does well for that tool. So
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
we’ve really thought about the workflow very carefully and we wanna make sure that workflow is followed. Actually, to be honest, that’s what V3 is about. Hopefully, as you said, this comes out in a few weeks or months, whatever you said. At the
Chris Simmance:
We
Andy Chadwick:
moment,
Chris Simmance:
can move
Andy Chadwick:
the
Chris Simmance:
it.
Andy Chadwick:
keyword, that
Chris Simmance:
We can be as flexible as these devs. Don’t you worry.
Andy Chadwick:
Okay, so
Chris Simmance:
Ha
Andy Chadwick:
a good
Chris Simmance:
ha!
Andy Chadwick:
example is we’ve got the keyword discovery part at the moment. So at the moment, our tool does keyword discovery, so keyword research, clustering, and then a content brief, which the clustering bait is great. The clustering bit is fantastic. The keyword discovery bit is, is not good at the moment. You would still normally need to do your keyword research in another tool like SEMRest or Ahrefs. The keyword discovery part is a big thing we’ve worked on for this V3 thing. We. want to be a suitable alternative to do your keyword research. So if you don’t need all the link stuff and all the other 500 different features SEMrush has, which you probably only use 2% of them, you can now use keyword insights for your keyword research. So that’s a big thing we’ve worked on because we know how much that was lacking. So that’s a big part. And then the content brief part, it was good for content briefs, but we found more and more people actually just didn’t want a brief. They, they really, especially with ChatGPT. They really want an editor that they can write the whole article with, not just the headings and stuff. So we’ve done a lot of work on making a very good alternative to Jasper and
Chris Simmance:
Oh yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
tools like that. So we’re working very hard on that thing. And then
Chris Simmance:
I mean,
Andy Chadwick:
we’ve got the…
Chris Simmance:
that’s a heck of a lot of good reasons for an agency to have a go, right?
Andy Chadwick:
Yeah, we brought our own spin to it. We’re still very confident you shouldn’t rely on just churning out AI data. So we’ve got a few hidden features in there that make it so that I won’t wait for the release, but that isn’t like Jasper that is bringing a new angle to it. So we’ve worked very hard on that. And then we’ve got true to our namesake, we’ve got some very, we’ve got secret features that I can’t… I know this isn’t coming out to them. We’ve got some really super secret features that no other tool has at all. We wanna be true to the word keyword insights. So we wanna start giving you more information. This is a sneak preview, but more information on what the keywords across different platforms. So not just Google, but TikTok and Pinterest.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
We wanna give you more insights into those platforms and how they’re doing. That gives away a nice insight into where we’re going, but doesn’t tell you enough. I mean, I know imagination is probably running wild or you think you know what we’re doing, but you won’t. It’s quite cool. But we’re going down that avenue as well. So yeah,
Chris Simmance:
soon.
Andy Chadwick:
that’s how we think we can help agencies. We know that there’s lacking parts of the tool at the moment, especially at the keyword discovery stage and the briefing one, we’re fixing them and bringing more. But the clustering is always why you would come to us at the moment. because like I
Chris Simmance:
That’s
Andy Chadwick:
said, there’s
Chris Simmance:
awesome.
Andy Chadwick:
more flexibility, speeder, more keywords.
Chris Simmance:
Jesus, bit rude. Right.
Andy Chadwick:
I’m
Chris Simmance:
I was about
Andy Chadwick:
gonna go.
Chris Simmance:
to ask you a really, really important question. Um, what is the, what is the thing that you love most about working with agencies versus any other user of, of keyword insights?
Andy Chadwick:
So agencies bring… So we always offer like help to use keyword insights. So it’s like, because Sagantha and I are so wedded to it, we really want people to get the most out of it. And to be honest, this is another problem with keyword insights. It’s not enough case studies or I did, I went into a massive global agency the other day to showcase V3, what was coming up. And I showed them at the end of it, I just showed them some case studies of how we use keyword insights. And even doing that blew their mind about different ways. It’s not just clustering, it’s why we’ve used the clustering, because there’s a lot more creative ways you can use it than you just think. Anyway, coming back to your question there, working with agencies gives us, we always say, reach out to us if you want some help in understanding it, or if you want some ways to use it. And some of the agency’s problems are so much more, well, they have to be more creative and more varied than, because we… Our tools are also used by lots of in-house teams. And in-house teams don’t seem to need that same creativity or diversity in what they’re trying to achieve with it. So working with agencies really keeps us on our toes in terms of developing either new features or working out how we could use the tool in different ways. Because they come to us and, hey, we’ve got this problem, can this be solved? using keyword insights, we’re using the clustering or using this and we go, oh, yeah, actually, if you thought about using it this way, we’ll make a little tweak to the report, but then that will give you that information. And so that’s, that’s why we love working with agencies. They keep the tool fresh, if that makes
Chris Simmance:
Yeah,
Andy Chadwick:
sense.
Chris Simmance:
that’s, I mean, and there’s so much change happening in agencies all the time. Uh, and agencies essentially, um, in-house is just as hard from an SEO point of view, usually, but in agencies, you could be out on your ear in five minutes with the client. So you’ve got to keep fresh, keep things moving, keep proving the value. And that usually means that, like you say, that creativity stuff happens a lot more frequently, um, I just, I don’t know about you, but When I was running the agency, I was coming up with a new idea every week about something or other. And quite a lot of that is now thankfully, because technology exists a lot more easily to build things. Not saying keyword insights at all was easy to build, I’m sure. But it’s a heck of a lot easier to build keyword insights now than it was probably five to eight years ago, because of just development. structure and the available information. And quite a lot of these ideas now mean that, you know, someone on Twitter is probably going to say, Hey, has anyone done an X? And you’re going to go, new feature. That sounds great.
Andy Chadwick:
Yep.
Chris Simmance:
So what in your experience do you find like, you know, you’ve run an agency, you work with a lot of agencies, you see a lot on Twitter and LinkedIn and so on. And what do you think kind of sets the best out from the rest?
Andy Chadwick:
It’s gonna be a cheap answer, because he’s just following on from my last one, I guess, but creativity is a big one. It’s sort of even looking at our own agency, we had clients come to us, and we’re a very small agency, you know, five, six person team. We had agencies come to us because they, not agencies, sorry, in-house teams, who already had all the agencies set up,
Chris Simmance:
Thank
Andy Chadwick:
they came
Chris Simmance:
you.
Andy Chadwick:
to us when they wanted a different, like angle of something, like a different way of doing it, a new idea. And so I know there’s a market in just, you know, being more creative than others. And it is such a, I guess it’s quite a broad word, but we’ve worked with agencies, like I said, come back to the keyword insights. We’ve worked with agencies who’ve gone, oh, this is how we’ve used keyword, they came up with case studies for us. This is how we’ve used keyword insights to achieve this. And they think, oh, actually, that’s really bloody clever. Yeah, so creativity, it’s a bit of a cheap one, but.
Chris Simmance:
I get it. And I, I used to do this with, with the agency all the time and it was coming up with new ways to use tools that had different reasons than, um, than their original purpose. So, um, like for example, if I was running an agency right now, keyword insights is not just from a clustering and a hub and the spoke and all of the bits around that it’s a really good way of explaining to a client why the content strategy is what is. So they don’t go, yeah, but we’d rather write it in this order or rather not have that content. You can show them visually, this cluster of keywords is really, really high volume, really, really say easy in, you know, not really easy, but easy comparatively. And there’s a massive gap here. And you’ve got these other content which can point across to it. This is where we start and you can show them that. And, you know, if they understand a table then it’s not that complicated to get the point across. That’s very different to using it for research and using it for insights. That’s literally using the insights to provide information to a client. And like I would, that’s what I would be doing with it. And as a separate
Andy Chadwick:
E.
Chris Simmance:
use case, should we say.
Andy Chadwick:
Yeah, there’s like, so we give you the intent of a keyword, right? Because we, how we do it is we scrape Google for that keywords you put into it. And we look at, we use our own algorithm. We work out the intent of that keyword. So you upload a thousand keywords and we’ll give you the intent for informational, transactional. Uh, we had a client, we had a client use us and go, is there any way? I don’t want to upload keywords. I want to upload the URLs and get the intent for that.
Chris Simmance:
Mmm.
Andy Chadwick:
So, you know, you can
Chris Simmance:
Oh,
Andy Chadwick:
append.
Chris Simmance:
that’s nice.
Andy Chadwick:
a URL with site, so
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
site colon URL. We just uploaded the 1,000 of them with all the different URLs, and we scraped them and told them the intent of each one. Things like that and using it slightly differently.
Chris Simmance:
Yes, clever. I like that.
Andy Chadwick:
Use it for keyword cannibalization study. We cut a website from 50 million URLs to 15 million URLs using the clustering feature to group similar pages. There’s loads of these creative ways
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
you can… you can use it and working with agencies that are very creative. So I guess if I needed to hone that in to not be so broad, it’s agencies that don’t just template everything.
Chris Simmance:
Yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
We’ve seen pitches before, and I’ve come from an agency side and I’ve seen this pitches before that are always, yeah, we will tech audit, content audit, link building, and it’s just so structured. And then I’ve seen other, which are a lot more creative and a lot more zoned into whatever that client needed. And those were the ones that particularly stood out for me.
Chris Simmance:
And then conversely then to the templating and the creativity aspect, like something I’ve had to say a few times with the agencies that the OMG Center works with, it’s, you know, we’ve always done it this way, isn’t the right answer, especially in this industry. And I always used to, if I was at an agency that had a whiteboard, draw a tombstone on the whiteboard and just write here lies agency name. whatever the start date to that year and just write in underneath it. We’ve always done it this way and then leave it there. And every single time someone, um, someone says, yeah, but we’ve always done it this way point at that. And there’s an agency which sent me is like three or four days ago, sent me a WhatsApp that says it’s been two years and it’s still on the whiteboard. We won’t remove it because anytime anyone says it, we point at that. And we remind them that it’s good idea to be creative and innovate. And it was, it was a C
Andy Chadwick:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
change for them. C change for them. But it was, um, Uh, the, the best agencies have to look differently at the same thing over and over again. You might not change everything. You might not change a little bit, but sometimes you’ve got to look at it and go, is there a different angle to this? Um, Andy, so let’s say your new, uh, your V3 is out. Yeah. Your CTO is sitting there twiddling his thumbs and he gets a bit bored and he decides to develop a magic wand and it, the magic wand actually gets built relatively quickly as well, just in time for you to use it on this podcast, actually. And what one thing would you use that magic wand for to change in all agencies at the same time?
Andy Chadwick:
I think it would, going on again about this theme of creativity, if I follow the theme,
Chris Simmance:
Follow the thread.
Andy Chadwick:
I think it would be to follow the thread. It would be to abandon the phrase, we’re just an extension of your team
Chris Simmance:
Oh,
Andy Chadwick:
and
Chris Simmance:
yeah,
Andy Chadwick:
come up
Chris Simmance:
get out, yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
with a more creative. In fact, I’m worried that was actually still on our old website. Let me check. But no, it’s not. We got rid of it. Yeah. To come up with a more creative. USP, well, it’s not even a USP anymore. It’s a broad, you know, sell everyone says the same thing. So come up with a different offer something more beyond being an extension, offering something more beyond being just an extension of their team. Because it’s not it’s not a USP anymore. And it’s
Chris Simmance:
830,000
Andy Chadwick:
I don’t know what that’s
Chris Simmance:
results
Andy Chadwick:
doing.
Chris Simmance:
on Google for we are an extension of your team.
Andy Chadwick:
Was it?
Chris Simmance:
Ha ha
Andy Chadwick:
Did you just
Chris Simmance:
ha.
Andy Chadwick:
do it? Genuinely, we are an extension.
Chris Simmance:
Almost all the first few of them are agencies, and then several of them are like people making jokes about it. So if you’ve got that on your website and you’re listening
Andy Chadwick:
I’ve
Chris Simmance:
to this
Andy Chadwick:
just
Chris Simmance:
right
Andy Chadwick:
done
Chris Simmance:
now,
Andy Chadwick:
it here.
Chris Simmance:
have a think about it. Because you are not an extension of someone’s team, you are a service provider, you have a good relationship with your client. Clients don’t care, because they’re not gonna nip across to your desk and ask you questions. If you’re an extension of someone’s team, why aren’t you in their meetings internally, things like that. get rid of it. Also, I did this, I hate it. But the I mean, this is the reason that the podcasts called down we have an office dog, if you have a dog in your office, lovely, great. But it isn’t a perk. And also, they
Andy Chadwick:
Hahaha,
Chris Simmance:
are not your chief biscuit
Andy Chadwick:
yeah!
Chris Simmance:
officer, or your chief morale officer. They are lovely to have in the office, you can put them on the website for obviously nice reasons. But like someone at some point came up with the chief morale officer or the chief biscuit officer, but it’s not unique.
Andy Chadwick:
Hehehehehehe
Chris Simmance:
And it’s not as creative as you might feel. Thanks so much
Andy Chadwick:
Neither’s,
Chris Simmance:
for coming on
Andy Chadwick:
neither’s
Chris Simmance:
there.
Andy Chadwick:
whopping a pool table in there.
Chris Simmance:
Oh, yeah. Yeah, yeah.
Andy Chadwick:
Like,
Chris Simmance:
Pop,
Andy Chadwick:
or a table,
Chris Simmance:
cool table,
Andy Chadwick:
football
Chris Simmance:
ping
Andy Chadwick:
table,
Chris Simmance:
pong
Andy Chadwick:
ooh.
Chris Simmance:
table, et cetera. I was in an office the other day,
Andy Chadwick:
Yeah.
Chris Simmance:
and they’ve got a really long board table. And it’s like a really nice office, like relatively cool setup and everything. They’ve got a really long board table. It’s almost like it looks like reclaimed wood. It’s very fancy and everything like that. I was like, there’s only seven of you, but you could fit like 30 around this table. I was like, why do you have this massive table? And he’s like, beer pong.
Andy Chadwick:
Yes, yep.
Chris Simmance:
So, you know, typical agency stuff, but it still looks bloody good. Andy, thanks so much for coming on the podcast. It’s been great to talk to you all about, you know, keyword insights and creativity, mate.
Andy Chadwick:
Yeah, no problem. Thanks for having me, Chris. And yeah, speak soon.
Chris Simmance:
And in our next episode, we’re going to talk to an agency advisor, coach, mentor, or partner. And so listen up and speak to you soon.