Karl Hudson: 0:00

I think we're closer to 100,000 links now. Yeah, we've built a hell of a lot more than that.

Sarah: 0:07

What's your approach to building links to e commerce sites? What's your process for figuring out the mix of links like digital PR versus guest posts, versus niche edits versus tier two links? Would you start an agency all over again?

Karl Hudson: 0:18

I'd probably become a builder. Yeah, I think, I think I just changed career. Put down the laptop and get me hands, the two soft, the two soft,

Sarah: 0:28

the hands.

Karl Hudson: 0:32

I've got calluses on my fingertips. We use our links to rank our own assets. So as I mentioned at the start, it's one of my biggest pet peeves is someone just entering link building and saying, Well, I can sell you a link, but if you don't understand the fundamentals of the link and what they're actually doing, and you haven't ranked a website before, you shouldn't be selling the link. Hey

Sarah: 0:54

everyone, thanks so much for joining us again today. I am

Karl Hudson: 0:55

Thank you, Sarah for having us. That was some so excited to have today's guest on with us. We've got Karl intro, by the way. So let's hop back and live off to the Hudson joining the show. He's a master in SEO and link building, and he's the founder of Searcheroo. Karl is a standard you've just set. That was quite a high standard. trailblazer in digital marketing, getting his start at

Sarah: 1:09

I think you deserve it. You know, from just reading just 14, he's grown countless businesses since we're diving deep into the world of link building, learning from one of the industry's most seasoned veterans. Get ready for an insightful session filled with actionable advice and just an idea on what's really working in today's changing SEO industry. So Thanks Karl for joining me today. about what you've done, I mean, getting your start at 14, that's no small feat. Like you've obviously seen a lot of changes, and so I'm super pumped to talk to you about everything changing today, because, as we know, everything is just rapid fire before we start getting into all the nitty gritty of what's going on with link building. I want to get into your past story. So can you start me off? Tell me about the journey that led you to fall in love with SEO and link building.

Karl Hudson: 2:14

Yeah. So actually, it was quite a interesting so I come from a quite a entrepreneurial background from my parents, but we had a quite rough upbringing, until they managed to generate some successful businesses, and then we kind of moved out of the poorer areas. So it was actually the background to get into SEO was from my father, so he was like a life coach, or is a life coach, sorry, NLP practitioner and things like this, does hypnotherapy and stuff. And he started wanting to train people on how to do it. And he didn't know how to build a website. And things he knew because I, I used to, I used to game from a very young age. Um, we used to place cap strike 1.6 source, Call of Duty, all of those sort of really fun games, World of Warcraft. So he knew I was into computers, but didn't realize that computers wasn't just a general thing. Just because I'm into playing games doesn't mean I can make a website, right? It's not typical. Build me a website, son, okay, didn't I think it was dream weaver at the time or something. I had no idea what I was doing, but basically, kind of started doing that, did a little bit of at school. I was actually originally going to go into the Marines, went for the medical but failed because I didn't realize I was color blind. And so they only allow you to go into, like, certain area of the Marines if you're color blind, and depending how blind you are, sort of affects where you can go. So kind of, yeah, got into SEO from that, basically, my dad chucked me in the deep end. Said, here's some money make this website work that you've built that was very poor quality, I might add, at that time. Obviously, it was kind of when WordPress was just getting out there and things and, yeah, kind of roll forward, started utilizing many of the tools at the time. So I think was things like sruma, you had various different link building tools. I think six submitter came out around that time, and you started using these sort of automated link building tools, very, very golden era, because you were able to rank very, very quickly. You were kind of just spamming in that I used to have, like a computer set up in the back of the house, which was like the backlink and computer so no one goes in there. You just leave that alone. I'd go and occasionally and just feed in lists to it, and it would just be spamming the internet and getting loads of, obviously, links. This was before GSA and all of that. So yeah, it was very, very spammy until I've. Penguin came out, and then it all changed. The whole landscape changed. Kind of built my own agency back then, at very young age, it didn't the problem was I was very much with the gaming background. I wasn't very I was always seen as, like the shy kid at school. Kind of came out my shell a little bit since school, but I was always seen as the shy kid, so I was very much, you know, 16 to sort of 19 year old, just sat behind the computer screen. Didn't like really see many clients. So that agency only ever grew to, I think, five or six clients of sort of people who my father knew, and then I ended up doing their SEO type for them. And then, yeah, after that launched, I got into my own affiliate marketing side, quite heavy into like dating and pick up artistry, if you must know, like that was the specific area of dating that we went into, quite successful in that. And then, yeah, ever since then, ended up getting involved in gambling. That was a really interesting situation where I sat down basically with these guys, and they ran a gambling company, and it was failing. It was, I think, quite a bit in the negative each month, and they couldn't rank. So I stepped in, got the bank enough in six months. It was kind of a niche that I had not been in, like at all, very tough UK gambling niche, and that business is now growing exponentially. I've now since left that business. I've exited that this year, but it was, yeah, about six years in that business, growing it from pretty much me, the two other investors in a content guy, to, I think now 15 team members, which is pretty cool. And then off the back of that, during that period, Searcheroo was also launched, which obviously is my own agency, link building, agency and content, it was kind of built with the intention of utilizing the staff for my own projects. That was kind of the intention, because obviously I've got quite a few projects on the go myself. I rank in multiple niches. So it was kind of utilized the same guys, but actually they might have some time available to build some links for someone else, so why not get that someone else to pay for their salary and leverage that? And then it just kind of blew up from there. Yeah, that's the, sorry, that's the very short background. Well, I

Sarah: 7:36

mean, I think in my mind, I'm still fixated on the visual of the backlinking computer that no one was, wow, okay, what's going on there? But no, you just mentioned, you know, quite a few different businesses and ventures. And it sounded like a, I don't know if I'm getting this correctly, a little bit of like a transition between, you know, having your own businesses and launching Searcharoo. I mean, I don't know if you could walk me through, you know, when you wanted to start your own agency, like, what were you dreaming of achieving, and what were you trying to set out to do when you're starting your own venture in that sense.

Karl Hudson: 8:15

So that original started with a very good friend of mine, Tom Phillips, started Searcheroo back in 2018 and basically we launched it off the fact that he had so many of his own projects going on, and I think he had his own Pitchbox account and various different outreach and team members. I had my own Pitchbox account various different outreach and team members, and it was kind of like, why don't we just merge it all and see what happens? Type thing, and that's kind of how Searcheroo came about. Was, again, very much focused on building links for our own projects. Because the one thing that I personally hate in SEO is you have, there's a lot of Link builders, right? But nine times out of 10 these link builders, I would say, 80% of the time. Let's do the Pareto Principle. 80% of the time the link builders have never actually ranked a website. They just sell you a link. So this was kind of surgery. Was built because we were ranking our ranking websites, and then it's like, well, we utilize these links to rank websites, why don't we then sell these links to other people so they can rank websites? That's kind of the the mindset we adopted with it, and that's, yeah, that's kind of how Searcheroo came about. And it's infancy. I think it was, don't, don't quote me on this. I think it was 2022, when Tom left, and then Dooley, my new business partner, acquired his shares. And then it's kind of been grown exponentially since, you know, I do a lot of podcasts now with. Uli is quite well known, and the industry's been the bit about a wild card. So, yeah,

Sarah: 10:06

okay, amazing. I mean, I did want to talk to you a bit more on the Searcheroo, Searcheroo front, because taking this from your site and doing a little bit of research on you guys, you guys have built over 10,000 links for your clients. I'm curious what is the secret sauce behind that success?

Karl Hudson: 10:26

I think I would say that's probably, I know you've just read that off the website. It's probably a very outdated metric. Now, I think we're closer to 100,000 links now, yeah, we've built a hell of a lot more than that crazy the secret sauce would be patience, inconsistency. That's the only thing I can say to people. There's a lot of back and forth to and fro with webmasters. There's a lot of changing hands of websites. You know, people acquire websites all the time. There's a lot of filtering out, like we have a database management team where basically they're just in charge of because obviously we do make contact with, don't quote me on this. I think we send about 20,000 emails a month. Wow. And give or take on an outreach point of view. And again, it's that constant cycling of we need to keep the database nice and clean. We need to make sure metrics are updated. We need to if a site's becoming toxic, like we have our own in house toxicity tool. So if a site starts becoming toxic, it'll get dropped from our list, but obviously that list, it goes into, like an archive list, and that list can still be brought back forward, or the website can be brought back into the live list if it starts to show signs of non toxicity again. So there's, like, quite a few things going on. So we kind of have, like, a database management team who are in charge of that side. You're very much talking, I think me and Sarah were chatting on this earlier, or you're very much talking to the top level guy who set this up? So there might be broad spectrum, but if someone wants to ask a specific question later on, on comments and things, I can get specific answers to them. If you know is a helping hand. Yeah, so that's kind of the way we set it up. We've got outreachers, we've got customer service managers, and then we've got the database management team, okay,

Sarah: 12:24

all right. I mean, because I did want to talk to you a little bit about like, that team element. I mean, you have to have the right team in place, assistance in place, that can achieve that milestone, you know, say, 100,000 plus links, give or take. You know, what's your formula for securing links on high DR sites, for example?

Karl Hudson: 12:49

Yeah. So the hardest, I would say, the phobia is very much the same as it's kind of just getting to the right person at the right time. The hardest part is you don't want to fall into the box that everyone else has fell into, where they just say, you know, how much is a guest post on your website type thing. You kind of try and add value to the site. So I do try to encourage the team, you know, we're refresh templates all the time, but the the templates are very much molded on the various different niches and sites anyway. So you know, data will be dropped in, like there might be a new post the person's made. You'll actually add references to this post within the outreach. You might even if it's a niche that we're familiar with that might contribute to that post, just within the the get go and initial conversation to spark a little interaction. And again, DR is what we sell. I would very much from my own link building background, DR is just made up metric, right? So we sell DR because that's what everyone wants to buy. But we don't typically find it any harder to get a higher DR or a lower DR site. It's more just the expectation from the customer that we struggle with, because everyone has their own so we make like a customer profile, right? Because everyone has their own expectation in this niche. And I'm sure as you're interviewing more and more SEOs, everyone has their own opinions on what is good SEO, what is bad SEO, etc. So this is kind of where the idea of a customer profile came about. Was we offer pre approval, so anyone who buys a link from us will hopefully out the box, hit it on the head with what you perceive as good value, and we try and ask questions to tell us what you perceive as a good link, because obviously that will help us find relative links in the database or reach out to relative sites that you think are good, but we don't always get it right first time. So what we then do is work with you and work out from your side what you believe is. Link so we can then fulfill your expectations, as opposed to, like, a blanket approach. And that's, I think, what kind of sets apart is we, you know, we don't get it right first time, and we don't judge people for, you know, decline with you can decline the links and we'll find new ones, but we often then say, why have you declined them? Give us some idea, so we can create the customer profile around you. So then the next time we find links, say, you place another order. The next time we find the links, we know that you need to have a traffic ratio of x. You need to have a certain amount of outbound links per post, the amount of internal expert post, all of these different metrics come into play, which would tick a box for you, and that's kind of the approach we've adopted. It's not the best money making approach. I'll admit, like there's a lot of admin time involved. I would love to just scrap the auto approval, sorry, approval status and just handout links. It's definitely a lot easier. However, it's just, you know, we don't get a lot of people re asking for refunds. We, I think, to date, so since 2018 we've had two clawback requests. Okay, and that's it. So that's quite a low amount, two clawback requests, and one of them was a actual client who just didn't recognize our company name on the bill, so he apologized and resent the payment. And so that was really good. So really it's only one, but I have to say two, because that is actually the number. It's still very honest. It's

Sarah: 16:41

like, it's too you get a plus for honesty there. And I'm sure the clients, like, he knows. They know exactly who they are and

Karl Hudson: 16:52

like exactly so usually what happens is, let's say a client comes on board, and let's say he's inside birthday card niche, right? So he only sells birthday cards. What we would usually do from the get go is we say, right? Let's have a look at competitors. What are the main competitors to this site? We then, straight away, download all of their links, and we start an outreach campaign to try and match links that their competitors have that they don't have. And then also do a cross section of the links that they might want in the future from other sites, right? So we kind of, from the get go, they are getting a unique campaign. The problem with that, or the problem rise of that, is it can take us, you know, a couple of months to see the the flourishing of these links. So it might like month one might be the kind of just getting links that we've maybe, you know, we might have another three clients in the birthday card niche, so we might already have decent websites in that niche. So they're getting them sort of links, but then by Month three, they're probably starting to get more unique links to their whole persona and what they offer. We've seen good success. Like, we've got many clients who are seeing pretty good which is the nicest part. The whole thing is seeing the client success stories, I know, like, there's been a few reasons I've had about four or five different clients actually offer shares in their business for us to get involved and kind of become their main supplier of SEO and guide them on an SEO path. Because obviously the hard part of us is it's like from a link building agent. The idea of Searcheroo was only ever to be a link building agency, maybe a bit of content on the side, but it's to deliver the service that SEOs need. That was the idea. So the SEOs are still top level, where then feed and into SEOs who then deliver to the clients. So it's quite difficult for us when people approach us and go, can you just become our SEOs? It's like, well, we've got a lot of other ideas going on and a lot of other websites and projects, so it's not always feasible that, but we do. We do try and do some things with customers, but often we try to keep it at a stage of, you know, you've got an SEO there, we'll work with SEO to help him deliver the success that's

Sarah: 19:15

really cool. So I know I've heard, you know, you talk about niche edits a lot. You know, there's a strong presence of that on Searcheroo site. I've seen you do other podcasts and talking about that, and so I did want to get into that a little bit. I'm wondering what you think about niche edits as just an overall strategy, and could you explain why and what makes them so effective? I

Karl Hudson: 19:39

personally prefer guest posts because you can go with quite generic sites and tailor the guest post to your niche to whatever you want, right? You can make it relevant or whatever, whereas a niche edit, you're kind of reliant on that pre existing post already being relevant to your site and then getting a link in. Inserted, or, you know, a paragraph inserted, and contributing to that that post to make it a little bit better. And obviously, within that contribution, you've also inserted your anger text. And I think both of them are still very, very good strategies. Me and Tom used to always argue about this all the time. It's quite it takes us back to be fair, because he used to. He loves niche edits. He plows niche edits till the cows come up. I'm more of a guest post, a ghost post guy. So it's like, maybe business partner duly, were just chatting on this earlier. A lot of people are talking about ghost posting and guest posting. And the difference, what's actually quite interesting, is we typically do ghost posting and not guest posting, but we just call it guest posting because that's what everyone searches for. But actually it's always ghost posting because you're writing and then giving that content to the author of that website, and then they're publishing it as if it's their content. So you're always a ghost poster, you're never a guest poster. So it's, yeah, that's quite interesting. But in terms of niche edits or guest posts or ghost posts, I personally think all of the strategies are effective. The key is, again, just consistency over time, the amount of times we've seen customers who might only come in to Searcheroo and they might be on a link pack one, but they stay on link pack one for six months. And over the six months, you just see the RDS slowly going up, keywords slowly going up, and traffic slowly going up. And again, it's just that consistency over time. You they just keep on listening to the advice that we train over customer service guys to kind of be pretty much SEOs. Some of them are SEOs in their own right. They have their own sites, but we make sure that it's kind of SOP to death that you know, if a client comes to you and is asking for anchor text advice, you know, we have certain thresholds that we suggest to them, and we train our staff to ensure that we always tread on the side of caution. It's always damn keyword rich architects that seem to trigger penalties. It just always is people going too aggressive about anchor texts, and all of a sudden they get hit. So, yeah, it's kind of like we adopt an approach of being safe and cautious. Is the key and consistent?

Sarah: 22:34

Okay? No, I appreciate you mentioning that, because that that was one of my questions. I wanted to talk to you about, like, your approach to figuring out anchor text ratios.

Karl Hudson: 22:43

We can't force if they say, this is the anchor we want. It's the anchor with teamwork with but we always say to them, like, like, if, if, for instance, they've been too aggressive, and the team member thinks you've been a little bit aggressive, yeah, the will pop that message in to say, you know, I would probably suggest use a different anchor for this because you pass five times you've linked to this page, you've you've used these money anchors, and it's starting to look like a bit of a pattern. And now sometimes SEOs don't think about that, or they just overlook it. So we're very much like pattern mitigation, ideally, is the key. It's, you know, make it look natural. And there's many websites that are rank and which are huge websites out then the key, I think, to a really successful website is you open up their anchor text profile in almost the first page of anchors is usually their brand or branded products or branded names. You can almost instantly tell when an SEO has been working on a website, because usually it's keyword with chunk, as in the brands, one of the smaller ones further down, because they don't believe in brands. But then them same websites will get slapped in a year's time. They might hack a bit of time, and they might rank quite quickly. I seen it in the gambling niche. We had a competitor come in, he completely copied our strategy, except he went hyper aggressive on anchors. So he came in, and he pretty much knocked us out the SERP. We dropped the page two, and obviously at that time it was very frustrating. Same platform pretty much ripped all of our content off, but then gave him three months of his continued strategy, and he never ranked again, and just burnt all of his sights. And we were back up onto the page, page one. So it was like, it's kind of like one of them strategies where it's like, slow and steady wins the race. You can't always be on page one all of the time, especially in bigger niches where, you know, like gambling and things you know, it's a multi million pound keywords you've got there. You can't always be on page one, especially when you're competing with the likes of businesses that might have 10 million pound to check the link building strategy and you're working with, let's say 10 grand

Sarah: 24:59

on that note, is. You, you're discussing kind of slow and steady wins a race and what's working, I guess I want to take a step back and look a little bit more high level. Can you walk me through how you build out a holistic link building strategy? What's your process for figuring out the mix of links like digital PR versus guest posts, versus niche edits versus tier two links, maybe that a client site might need in order to outrank its competitors.

Karl Hudson: 25:25

So if it's a local website, that's a great question, by the way. It's a hard question to answer because it will change site and niche dependent. But let's just see if it's a local website, almost instantly out the box, we would never, usually advise, unless they're already quite a big national chain. Let's say it's a brand new website. It would be probably citations. It would probably be a press release announcing launch of the new brand. It might be some social signals to also, you know, warrant that press release in the kind of build a bit of authenticity around it, as if it's becoming viral, and then it might be one or two branded guest posts. I usually with new sites, obviously advocate for guest posts, but usually go for a guest post approach, because it doesn't make sense to have a niche edit, let's say, for instance, you've just done a press release in the news, and you've said the website's launched and it's 2024 if you then had a niche edit that says these guys are air conditioning experts and they're the best in the world, but actually that posts from 2019 it kind of doesn't make sense, right? It doesn't take two and two to go over there. Why are these now the best on this 2019 post, when they've only just launched, according to this digital press release, in 2024 so that's kind of the the adoption I would take. Is go for more guest posts, get some nice fresh content out there piggyback off the digital PR. So you could even leverage, you know, building up the authorship around the site. So leverage connecting the name of the company owner, the various different entities that might be set up around there. So, for instance, in the UK, you have, like, a company's house page, things like this, different entities, I don't know, in the US, you probably have something similar, some type of corporation entity that you can publish and prove that you are the owner of this corporation type thing. I think you might have that, like LLC record or something. So again, just adding all of those into like authenticity factors when you're making these guest posts can really help contribute to that initial branding around that new website. So that's kind of the strategy would take, probably, for the first three months. So very branded, very It might even be team members names on anchor texts and things like this, very much connecting the brand and the authors together, and then in time, you probably end up launching service pages. If you were in a local society, you'd put your SEO would probably launch keyword specific local pages for whatever you know, AC, repair, HVAC, installation, whatever it might be, um specific to towns and cities. From that point again, I would still do branded most of my most of the teams tactics over at surgery would be, if it's a new page and you're building new links to it for the first time, make sure your internal links are keyword rich and optimized, but focus primarily on branded anchor text and more URL branded, topical level anchors, as opposed to going heavy on keyword rich anchors out the box, that would kind of be our strategy, reference tier two links. Now, the reason why I like guest posts so much is because, off the back of the guest posts, which are already all tailored exactly how you want it, you've might have optimized the post to try and rank for various keywords, which we often advise so like, you know, using a tool like surfer, making sure it has the right entities, and then trying to focus on low hanging fruit keywords that that guest post could rank for, then building tier twos through to that guest post all of a sudden makes it a niche edit, right? So you're kind of transforming that guest post into a niche edit that you've cultivated and grown, and you've got at least a year, sometimes longer where that webmaster will won't sell a niche edit onto that post, because a lot of them have, like, a year coverage on the post, so they'll not edit the post for a year. So what that then also, because this is what a lot of people don't talk about with niche edits, is niche edits are fantastic, but. What happens when this webmaster is sort the same page 10 times to 10 different people in the next month, and you've just bought the link, that link is going to lose, just even based off the old school page rank algorithm, is going to lose a huge amount of power in time. And this is where, like Link decay and link rock come in quite heavily with niche edits. You can mitigate this so you can build tier two links to niche edits, but obviously you still have the fact that those niche edits are probably going to be so and so and so in Seoul, so you can only build so many tier twos to the point where it's like, well, what's the point of me building more and more tier twos to all of these competitors who also have this link on the same page? Right? Whereas, if you've built a guest post or a ghost post, depending on how you want to call it in and you know, it's perfectly optimized, it's potentially ranking for some seed keywords or low hanging fruit keywords. It's promoting your business, and then you're boosting it up with tier two links. It's like the win all round, right? The webmaster wins because he's got a post that now gains traffic. You win because it's a post that gains traffic and has power from the the tier two niche edits. It has a relative link to your site, and it's probably ranking for a, you know, a low hanging fruit keyword, which could pass custom your way. So it's like, everyone's kind of winning, and Google's happy because it's fulfilling user intent. So it's like, wins all around. And that's kind of the approach I like to adopt with guest posts, and that's why

Sarah: 31:40

I do have kind of a specific question for you. I want to talk about target pages. For example, what's your approach to building links to e commerce sites? Do you try to build links to product pages, or do you build links to other content and use internal links on the target site to flow the link juice to the product pages?

Karl Hudson: 31:59

Yeah. So with E commerce, it's kind of a completely different strategy. So E commerce we only for, we would always recommend category pages. Few reasons for this is, with you being an E commerce brand, you might not always have that product in stock. And so if you're leveraging your success of the success of one URL, which is usually a very specific URL of the product, and then you run out of stock of that product, you very quickly, user metrics are going to start falling very quickly on that page, regardless of its ranking position. But the problem you've got when the user metrics start failing on the page is that will have a negative, net negative knock on effect to the potential ranking of that page. So in time, what you might find is that the page starts to lose its rank, and because you're not fulfilling the user intent that user might have clicked on to buy your product, and you haven't got the product in stock, so then they've backed the SERP. So usually go back to that SERP that tells Google that you're not fulfilling the intent for that query. So what we would typically do is we would take the category that that product belongs to and try and rank the category page, but then ensure that we've got very strong internal links to the products. So that way, if you in time, let's say, three months down the line, you ran out of stock of the product, you could very quickly just three or one redirect that you haven't got much link juice there anywhere. It won't matter. You could just delete the product. It won't matter again. Obviously four or four would occur. So I would recommend, obviously, set up a relative direct redirect or canonical link on that. But again, it's just that strategy of mitigating the potential loss of money if you were to leverage your business on one product page, it's very much one. Another petty of mine is you've seen a lot more authority sites ranking. And the primary reason for this is because of the power of their home page. Right? Their home pages are so powerful. And then what people start to do, surprise. Surprise is they build out a, you know, very well optimized in a page. They start building links to this very well optimized in a page. And guess what? It ranks. And this is the whole concept of parasite, Parasite SEO, right? It's links come through to this authority site. Well, because it's an already authority site in Google, it very quickly ranks, and in time, it kind of starts to rank and make money for that that user. It's kind of that same analogy is, if you focus on building with E commerce, your homepage and your category pages, your product pages should rank naturally higher anyway, and in time you code it, if it's a sustained product where you know you are the publisher of it, you've made the product, you know it's going to be in stock forever. Yeah, then that strategy might change where, yeah, I would probably say, Okay, let's build a few links. I would almost do if it was in percentages, I would probably say 60% to the homepage, 20% to a category page, 10% to blog pages, and maybe 10% to product pages. That might vary, again, very much might vary, depend on the nation, whatever. But that's kind of how I would do it from an E commerce point of view. Another point that we also do on E commerce, which it really frustrates us when I say this, is people do not leverage from category pages internal links to that, like internal category pages. So they just leverage the the fact that it's in a nav bar or a nebula, and then or and then, that's it. That's that's all their leverage. And they don't put any content in there and internally link within the body of content, what what products are on? What pages? Um, it's definitely overlooked in the E commerce space, and it's usually where you see a lot of success stories, and a lot of the time it's actually just fixing the basic stuff, like going through do a technical Site Audit, make sure it speeds fast, fixing any internal link issues, re optimizing internal links, adding more content to the site and then coming up with a content strategy, and all of a sudden, they haven't even touched link building yet. All of a sudden, they're seeing huge gains just from doing the basics. But I say the basics because from an SEO point, it's the basics, but I know from a business owner, it's very much. They don't know what the basics are. They know to run their company and their product, but they might not necessarily know the basics of SEO, which, why would? It's not their bag, right? Yeah, I hope that's answered the question

Sarah: 36:53

you did, and I really appreciate your take on that. I want to ask, you know, link building in general, like it often garners mixed opinions, and I'm curious where you stand. Do you find link building to be, like, overrated, underrated, or generally, fairly rated?

Karl Hudson: 37:10

So I would say I've always been an advocate for link building, okay, but nowadays, because of the age of AI. Now, if you just put yourself into just layman, layman's terms, you know, company owner, let's say, and you've built something that was forever leveraging content backlinks. And now the problem you've got is people can access content at an exponential rate. The hard part of this is listening to someone who's potentially listening to this podcast. They're going to say the link building agency guy is going to say, Link building is important,

Unknown: 37:50

right? That's fair enough. This

Karl Hudson: 37:53

is where I'm trying to point out that, you know, if you're able to get content for pennies on the dollar, then what is the differentiating factor? Then it's either going to come down to truck to traffic and social media, like elements going on, or it's going to come down to link building, and that's it. That's the only two elements that can come down to your traffic, to the website, or your link building, maybe a little bit paid ads. But I don't shove that into the traffic element. So it's, you know, you have to pick one of them. And the easiest route to market personally, if you don't have the skills to do it, is going to be buy some links from an agency and leverage their skills. Or, you know, set up a paid ads campaign and watch as you rank and start to increase it, and it's kind of, that's one of them,

Sarah: 38:43

in light of everything that you just talked about and all these changes. You know, I don't even know if this is possible, but I'll ask anyway, could you give me your opinion if you find how AI is changing the game? Do you think that's making things kind of better or worse in the world of link building and SEO, I

Karl Hudson: 39:04

would definitely say it's making it easier for us, because, you know, we can create content cheaper, we can often, we can summarize. So I actually quite like to summarize posts. And you know, you can tweak it into a pitch to someone. So you can sort of say, you know, I've seen this post on here. This is what I took from it, and all it is is a chat GPT summary of what they see it on the post. And would it be possible that it can contribute to your next post? All of a sudden, they're like, well, that he's here. He's clearly read this article. Took us three seconds to paste it in and then feed it back. But the user doesn't know that, and it looks very unique to the user, right? So, yeah, I think it's definitely made things AI's made things a lot easier. Again, the only hard part with it is you just have to be wary on facts. There's just, and this is. Is what a recent chat I did with Charles Flo we were on about SG and how that could potentially impact your money or your life niches, or, you know, the gambling niche. And I personally don't see it happening, primarily because, if you've been in that industry, and you know, I imagine there's probably some guys who or girls listening to the podcast, who might be in that industry, they know there's heavy legislation and there's heavy fines dished out if things are said on your website that can be protruded as child friendly or protruded as encouraging someone to gamble, or suggesting that someone can win a gambling there's heavy fines handed out for that sort of stuff. Now you imagine, if you've, I imagine Sarah, you've probably had a play around with chat GPT. You there's very, I would say, 40% of the time, it will randomly come out with something that you don't know where it came from, but it's kind of produced some type of garbage that was not related to what you've asked Now imagine if that was done in gambling, and It's coming from Google. I can very quickly imagine the UK GC might be fine finding, let's say, a little white label casino, you know, 100 grand, if it's Google, on the other hand, suggesting certain things, I imagine the fines would be considerably more. Um, so I just, I don't see it kind of coming into play talking

Sarah: 41:43

about links. You've just given some fantastic perspective on what that looks like and how that's working for you. But of course, Pitchbox, being, you know, one of the main tools you're using, I want to ask about how that fits in. So like, take a step back. At what point did you start using Pitchbox. You know, what sort of situation were you in at the time where you're like, we need a we need a link building solution here. Yeah, so

Karl Hudson: 42:11

Pitchbox and I go way back, um, pre the gambling company. So you talked over seven or eight, yeah. Okay, it is pretty much our only tool. We use outreach originally, when we first started with the gambling, the main reason why we got involved with Pitchbox Was it was one of the only tools that would integrate with the likes of Ahrefs, Majestic, Moz, SEMrush, and it pretty much integrates with all of the main tools in LRT is it would allow us to very quickly gain all the elements use it, utilizing the API keys of what we thought was a good or powerful website, and utilizing criteria, we can very quickly build a campaign and insert our metrics, and it would only Pull back the sites that hit our metrics. And that was kind of straight away winner, um, what I also liked was the fact that I could track team time. So we were all on team management. We could track milestones, and, you know, we could often, like wind team members up by sort of saying, like, why is your success rate only down at, you know, 10% Why is it not as 25% like this person's own? So you could very quickly get a bit granular of the data. And rolling forwards nowadays, the team did come back to me, and they said that they're actually really enjoying the latest update, which was utilizing the new assistant, AI assistant, and customizing templates with the integration the CRM tool and also the email tracking the you also said, Put the start doing language translations, which is quite cool, because We do a lot of link building and other GEOS, but our main language is English, so it is a little bit of a struggle, but now it translates on the fly, which is pretty cool as well. So it's actually enabled us to expand, I believe we built up. Sorry, found 1000 contacts last month in France for bloggers, and a lot of that would have been done via the translator side. So that's also working really good as well. Okay, so obviously, we use a lot of spreadsheets and like Google Sheets and things to track, um, opportunities and things like that. And what I like is that in Pitchbox, you can pretty much just grab the URL for that opportunity, and anyone can click into it and continue the conversation. Obviously, anyone from your team, not just anyone in the general public, but it's it makes it really good for if you're wanting to get an order, from our perspective, get link order completed quickly, and you know you might have a staff member who's on holiday that week, and. You know, it allows that other staff member just to step in and just quickly fix up opportunities and get those wins and but in terms of, like scaling, it's been, I would almost say it's been a crucial step, if I'm being honest with our businesses, that multiple businesses across the board, obviously, I think, personally, anyone who's wanting to set up a link building agency, or even just run a link building campaign themselves, why wouldn't you leverage a business that's been in it for years? Pitchbox has one of the biggest databases for contacts. So like, you know, you might find a website, you think, Oh, that's fantastic, but you can't find their email address. Shove it into Pitchbox. There's a chance it's got the email address already.

Sarah: 45:43

I this is a little bit related to what you're saying. It's a personal question. I wanted to ask this because you're just talking about this perspective as an agency owner, all these things that you're trying to think of in 20 different directions to predict how things are going to go, etc. I'm just wondering if you were to reflect on your journey all those things that you've had to consider over the years. Would you start an agency all over again?

Karl Hudson: 46:07

I'd probably become a builder. Yeah, I think, I think I just changed career. Put down the laptop and get me hands. Yeah, the too soft, the too soft,

Sarah: 46:15

the hands.

Karl Hudson: 46:20

I've got calluses on my fingertips. I personally would primarily because I quite enjoy the people that I've met and helped over the years and the relationships I've built, like some of my closest friends now, actually were link building clients from, you know, way, way back when we use our links to rank our own assets so, and as I mentioned at the start, it's one of my biggest pet peeves is so one just entering link building and saying, Well, I can sell you a link, but if you don't understand the fundamentals of the link and what they're actually doing, and you haven't ranked a website before, you shouldn't be selling a link. And so I would probably, because I've done had my own websites, ranked my own websites, and got all of that sort of this, the battle scars from doing all this, and a fair few penalties from link building as well, I would say, yes, I would, if that's kind of like a roundabout

Sarah: 47:23

answer, I guess, I guess, in in light of that, you know, despite the battle scars, what keeps you going and what do you have next for yourself on the horizon that you're just really excited about, maybe for you personally, or for you in Searcheroo personally.

Karl Hudson: 47:41

I'm getting married this year, so that's quite exciting. Obviously, stag do coming up and things I'm looking forward to that. In terms of business side, we've made quite a few investments into different niches. I can't say just yet which ones, but we've made some pretty big investments, sort of, you know, six figure investments into certain websites where we're becoming, you know, quite a sizable shareholder in them, and with the idea of, you know, taking on the whole SEO of the business. And obviously, the hard part is, I see myself more as a digital markdown sort of digital landlord and digital entrepreneur now is because my background is SEO as a predominant source, but I also do have done a lot of paid ads. I've managed multi million pound accounts on paid ads. So I'm definitely do a lot more digital entrepreneurial stuff and digital marketing as a whole. So we're always looking for investment. My new business partner, Julie and I set up a business literally all around just investments. Of, you know, he often gets a lot of people want him to get involved in the business. He often comes to me and says, do we want to get involved? You know, how can we add to this business? Not just because, obviously it's all great getting involved and trying to help someone, but if we can't really add much value, we generally don't bother. You know, if that business literally just needs a few links, we'll just say, just buy some links. There's no point in losing a share of what you've built to us, when really all we're going to do is come in and build the links that you should just build, and you'll be fine. So yeah, this year's kind of focused on growing surgery, growing my own personal brand, and then just seeing where I love the journey. I love the people, like a lot of the people coming to my wedding, or friends who I've met in like, for instance, Chiang Mai 10 year ago. Yeah, maybe nine year old. I can't remember the date. I've known them for years. We get on like, house on fire. We help each other and each other's businesses and things. It's kind of the ethos that actually had a really nice message the other day. He sort of said, Look, I love the ethos. I love the fact that it's a. Um, our sort of core little group in the UK is very much of, there's no point of being the one guy in the marina who has the yacht. You'd rather be in there with your 10 best mates who've all got a yacht each. And it's all about elevating each other up and kind of, you know, helping each other get to that next stepping up to that next level and the next level. You know, the whole approach of never being the smartest guy in the room, you should really find a different room if you are the smartest guy in the room is very much what we adopt. So I usually like to be the thick guy in a room, because it just helps you step up, right? I love that. And that's kind of Yeah, another thing I've done, is called plunging this year. I've been doing that religiously since the start the year, and that is intense, especially in England in the winter. That is an outdoor plunge pool is intense.

Sarah: 50:57

Doing them one thing, yes, never do. But who knows? Maybe throw me in that direction. Well, happy being in Mexico, where it's warm in February, but you can have your eyes. I love that for you to have you on today. I truly appreciate your time answering all my questions. You killed it. You went over some really amazing things. I think it's gonna be so helpful for our audience. So I appreciate having you on if anyone wants to find you and reach out, where can they get in touch?

Karl Hudson: 51:30

Everyone asks me this LinkedIn, maybe search. Karl Hudson, I should know it off by our karlhudseo on Twitter and just Karl Hudson on Facebook, and you'll probably see us in various different SEO groups and things, and just you can connect to us via that as well. And I've also got a personal website, again, that might be a similar website to what was made way back when I was 14 year old. It's probably slightly better than men. I don't obviously spend a lot of time on it, but that's karlhudson.co.uk,

Sarah: 52:06

no, I think it's really brilliant. I mean, how many businesses you just talked about, the niches, what you've done for yourself as a link builder, your own businesses? I mean, you're keeping yourself busy and your eyes plunging at the same time, so no small feat. I think it's really impressive, and I'm excited to hear the feedback about this episode and everything that everyone learned from me today. So I appreciate your time. Thank you. Bye.