In this episode, we talk with Dixon Jones, CEO of inLinks and a leading member of the internet marketing community, and discuss all things web marketing and link intelligence as well as murder mystery games.

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inLinks Website

Episode Transcript

Matthew Todd
Hi. My name is Matthew Todd, and welcome to Inside the ScaleUp. This is the podcast for founders, executives in tech, looking to make an impact and learn from their peers within the tech business, we lift the lid on tech businesses, interview leaders and following their journey from startup to scale up and beyond covering everything from developing product market fit, funding and fundraising models to value proposition structure and growth marketing. We learn from their journey so that you can understand how they really work, the failures, the success the lessons along the way, so that you can take their learnings and apply them within your own startup or scale up and join the ever growing list of high growth UK SaaS businesses.

Hi, and welcome back to the podcast. Pleased to say I’m here today with Dixon Jones from inLinks. It’s, really good to have you here.

Dixon Jones
Thanks very much for inviting me, Matthew.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, and I’m looking forward to our conversation, I think it’s going to be a really interesting and useful one. But as we like to start off with every guest we’d like them to introduce themselves tell us a little about themselves and their business what it is exactly that they’re their product or services.

Dixon Jones
Sure. My name is Dixon Jones. Currently, I’m the CEO of a company called inLinks.net, which is a semantic, SEO, SaaS, I guess. And but most people know me through history, because I used to be the marketing director of majestic.com, which in the SEO industry, a lot of people know, in SaaS industries, they probably wouldn’t. And then before that, I ran an agency and, you know, way back to my first ventures of SEO was, you know, writing and running murder mystery evenings and, and putting them up in PDF files in 1998, or something like that. So been around quite a long time.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, you’ve seen a lot of changes on the the internet world, the search folders, everything else.

Dixon Jones
Yeah. And it’s been, it’s been, for me, a really interesting journey. I’ve thoroughly enjoyed my life in the internet. I’m quite glad to be getting towards the end of it now. Because, you know, it’s, it’s, it doesn’t doesn’t stop changing, does it? It’s a no. Whereas I’m getting too old to change again.

No, it is it is ever evolving, ever changing. But I think there, you know, those are still kind of core set of principles that definitely, definitely still hold true. Yeah, I think, Well, I think the general concept of marketing holds really, really true. I think, you know, at a very, very top level now, what’s different for us as business owners is that we have the ability to create a story and narrative amongst our audiences that previously only you know, governments and you know, a multinationals could do so, you know, almost the whole of your, your business now is about making sure that people believe in your messaging and believe in your, your mantra, believe in your, your reason for being and I don’t think that was an easy thing to do.

When you’re, you know, when you’re a tire company, you know, that was just fixing people that goes, drive past then your reason for being was that your tire company is now right where they are. Whereas now, you know, people have been running around and delivering tires and putting him on your car wherever you are, you know, so that could be a lot more competition, but you know, the reason for doing it becomes different. Yeah, absolutely. So um, yeah, but let’s get to take a little step back before we get into the details of you know, majestic chanin links you mentioned the, the murder mysteries, putting PDFs up online, we’d love to hear a little bit more about that and how that led you in so I left I left university after in Thatcher’s Britain, you know, the minus strikes were doing their thing or just finished, they’re doing their thing.

The country was in recession, I think nominal amount, they just, you know, just crashed the the pound in the European Exchange Rate Mechanism. And, and so, you know, getting a job was difficult as and so, but I never really wanted to get a job, I always wanted to set up a business. So I was president Students Union for a year because that was a good way to get a job and a good way to learn a lot about business in a year, it was surprising because I had about 100 people that you are ultimately responsible for. So going straight from a student to effectively managing 100 people and the politics of it, which was not insignificant in the university was a really good grounding for business. And but I couldn’t, I didn’t really have any funds to set up a business so So I set up a murder mystery company and a few years later, when the internet came along. I knew that I needed to get into this thing called the internet and I was a little bit scared about whether somebody was going to steal my business. I didn’t understand how a business could be in the ether.

So instead of going for a no whoever the big guys were at the time, GoDaddy or whatever for hosting, I went with a hosting company that I could see the building, I could see the data center. So I was between my, between my office in Mill Hill and my flat and hangar Lane was this data company, oh, this data center. So I went there, which was, you know, brilliant because it was wasn’t the cheapest, but it was the only one I you know, it had a log and analysis program that was built into the system, which then ran the log files every Thursday and gave you a nice report to say that all of your all of your visitors were coming from Ohio, or you know, not from anywhere where I can get my actors.

So that really drove the rest of my life because I then started writing murder mysteries, in you know, putting them in files that I could get loud people to download, I then sold off the actor side of the business and kept on to the, to the sort of download this PDF file, will they’ll sell you the password, I saw the password 1000s of times same password, if that wasn’t clever. And, and that went on for I went on for another 15 years with that business going on site. So it really took me through the first.com boom and bust. And and I learned a lot how to do doing that. And then went on to set up an agency and then ultimately then move on to being Marketing Director of majestic and build that and then, you know, inLinks now with a couple of couple of false starts along the way, I think. Yeah. Okay. And, you know, back then on the internet, or how did you you get found? How did you get traffic?

Well, this is this is the thing is because the that log file analysis was showing me what search engines were sending me traffic, and they were one visitor or two visitors and Alta Vista was, you know, the big one in town sending me to, and so then I, you know, I thought well, okay, because it’s showing me this referrer who’s sending the traffic, I can, I can then go back and have a look. And what I would have did was, you know, I think Yahoo had sent me a visitor. And I went back and had looked at Yahoo and typed in murder mystery games into Yahoo. And above the results might wasn’t in the results. But above the results was this big banner ad for Nike or Adidas, I don’t remember which.

And I thought, that’s a real disconnect in my brain, you know, why on earth is Nike or Adidas paying for an advert? When surely that’s a mathematical algorithm that puts you know, and the user is going to be looking at those results, surely, it’s better to invest your time and energy into into understanding that algorithm than it is to, to pay lots of money as it was then for a banner ad on a completely unrelated term. So that’s when I kind of triggered the idea of SEO in my mind, it was already a thing in the United States by then. But it wasn’t that developed. I mean, 1998 Nine wasn’t, wasn’t that developed. And, and so I kind of used the US forums, gym tools was up those gym tools was a tool that was out there and gym world. And then later WebmasterWorld I never used the other UK one, which is create a site which I and John’s was in, but basically, I’m still technically a moderator on Webmaster world to this day, you know, that’s been that’s been my real learning, you know, base for you know, getting to grips with all this stuff.

Yeah, nothing is interesting. But yeah, back then was banner ads, they, they were not targeted, they were not intent based. So therefore, SEO and content had to you know, were the only option. Right and then Then along came a thing called Go to.com, which was later changed to overdraw. And, and there was a the other the other problem in the UK. Go to.com was then pay per click basically on search results. So they were ranking just just on how much you had to pay. And then that of jovoto then just sort of blended those results into into the top of search engines.

But for a time they’re free serve, which was you know, Dixons, Currys, PC worlds. So you know, ISP, they kind of did this ISP thing. And they used free serve, just put all of their results go to in all of their results. And if anybody was prepared to pay, then they would get there first. So that was very easy way to optimize that kind of lead on to Google saying, Oh, this is a way we can make our money. And they kind of got on to AdWords, which was a sort of a more sophisticated version of that idea. But ultimately, I think they got their idea from from overture, really, as to how they were going to monetize Google, because they hadn’t they hadn’t monetized it at all at the time. They weren’t even a big player.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I remember back then that yeah, you’re right. There were a lot of ISPs and they were all trying to kind of get a little bit in, you know, in front of that data and experience but obviously that yeah, ultimately didn’t work so.

Dixon Jones
No, it’s funny that you know, the AOL ‘s and the and the Yahoo’s and the you know, the those those front things just gave away to the search engines and ultimately just Google swallowed it all up, didn’t it?

Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I think I still know a see a few plumbers vans driving around with AOL email address, but I think that’s about it.

Dixon Jones
That’s right. Yeah. But I guess anyway, I was turned into Time Warner has turned into a, you know, probably a sort of a Netflix clone or something. I don’t know how all the businesses merged up, but they’ve turned into a media company, not A, not an ISP. Really? Yeah, no, absolutely. So um, yeah, from that you mentioned, there was a kind of a brief agency thing. And then, you know, majestic wasn’t, wasn’t brief. It wasn’t a brief.

It was it was, well it was good 10 years, everything seemed to take 10 years in my life. So 1999 to 2009. And I was predominantly running an agency called Receptional still goes to this day, I don’t have any say in it. Now, I’m not a shareholder. But nice to see this started winning the winning awards, and they seem to be growing. So they’re obviously doing a better job at running an agency than I did. I got it up to around about 20 people before, before I realized that, you know, running a people led business was a really hard thing for me. And at that time, around about 2008, I got the opportunity to sort of do a sideways move to a to join up with Majestic.

So the the main two guys that were setting up Majestic, there was only two of them at the time. And me and I’ve sort of became the marketing director there, what we actually did was started out as, as they were a customer of Receptional, and we were, you know, they didn’t have any any cash, per se. So we kind of worked on a basis of, well, we’ll work on a, we’ll work on a basis of shares and turnover and be a marketing partner and stuff. And it was a big risk for the agency. But I thoroughly believed in the idea, you know, when I saw that, you know, inLinks, sort of the majestic had come up with a product that was seeing backlinks, I kind of assumed that they were doing what everyone else was doing at the time, which was a tool called Yahoo Site Explorer, which a friend of mine set up at Yahoo.

And he set it up just to frustrate Google really likely to frustrate Google, which is kind of show them the backlinks because that was such a big part of Google’s algorithm. And so everybody was using some some form of Yahoo Site Explorer. And then this tool came along and reception I kind of started by, you know, trying it and I literally, I put in 10 pounds, and bought 10 pounds worth of backlink data, tried it, it didn’t work. And you know, being an angry, tired, very stressed at that time kind of boss, I kind of I, you know, whacked out this is going to complaint support email, and I got back from Alex, the only person in that organization at the time, sorry, fix the bug, try it again. And he has 20 quids worth of credits. And then I realized that he actually crawled the internet to get this data because of course, the back backlink data, it’s very easy to read a webpage and see the links out. But the only way to find the links the links in is you’ve got to crawl the whole web. Otherwise you don’t know where those links are. So to achieve that was an incredible feat.

So we ended up I sort of dragged him out by the stage I was talking quite a bit. So I tricked him into a search engine strategies conference in Angel in London, and in the space of 15 minutes, I introduced him to you know, a whole bunch of people that he would, you know, he thought were way out of his ability to meet and greet. Yeah. You know, so Danny Sullivan, who’s now Google, Matt Cutts was there, Brett Tabke, who, who runs WebmasterWorld and a bunch of other people as well. And he runs PubCon now, and you know, and so by the end of the conversations, it’s kind of like, I decided that this was good. I really wanted to this this technology.

And then over the next few years like that, we would kind of worked me out of the risk of receptionists business, because I wasn’t really helping with with with that others may wish they were better managers and helped to build up majestic. And that went on for around 10 years where I was involved in that before leaving a few years ago. And then I took some time off and then started again within links. So yeah, so it was in Majestic was a wild ride when we when we grew up that grew very, very quickly. It was an incredibly unique technology at the time.

It’s still unique him in many ways, and we won all sorts of awards got so got to go to Buckingham Palace couple of times. So it’s really awesome piece of awesome piece of kit definitely propelled my career if they.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, and you know, for those that don’t know much about Majestic I haven’t used it you know how to how did that work? And how did that kind of change over your your time there?

Dixon Jones
Yeah it was. So the the move from Receptional to Majestic was kind of interesting because initially we taken on Majestic as a client on the on the on the nevernever. But on the you know, on a, you know, on if we do well as a market and marketing Majestic, then we will do very well, you know, much better than we would have done if we taken their money straight out of the box. And, but ultimately, that became very apparent that, you know, we were now that it was going to go quite big. And the deal that we made, we would have done very well out of but I think I would haveit would have been unfair, I didn’t build that technology I hadn’t, you know, I wasn’t the brains of the outfit. Yeah, so we, so we found a way to deal with that. But also, also, we found a way for me to leave reception entirely, you know, so and, and become a full-time marketing director, and, and shareholder in majestic and keep it clean, you know, at some point, you know, a marketing, a marketing agency that’s got a control over your of your business is probably a little bit too much of a pain point for a SaaS, or any other business really, but I think that’s that’s at least a Majestic, you know, they wanted to control as much of its destiny as possible.

And so we were slightly different. But on the marketing side, you know, we never wanted to scrape Google search results, for example, because we knew that we couldn’t then offer that with a promise to our to our customer base, because if Google stopped us from searching the results, or decided that anybody scraping those results was stealing their IP or you know, or something like that, then it’s not a sustainable business model, if you’re not getting the data in a in a genuine way. So so there was a lot of things like that. And one of the one of the possibly one of the reasons why majestic is just a search, a backlink technology tool are primarily a backlink technology tool, and focusing just on that stuff is because the more the broader you go with a SaaS, the, the more there is to go wrong. And the more you start to have to rely on other technologies other people and, and that, in the end will mean that you have to you have to spend your time integrating and possibly, you know, Legacy fixing, it’s not that you don’t have legacy issues on any technology or thing, but the decision at Majestic was to go narrow and and deep.

I think, you know, within links, we don’t do backlink data, we do internal linking and we do other other stuff. Come on to it. But But I think we have gone a little bit broader. I’ve kind of learned now where where I can trust things and where I can’t and and I’ve also realized that, you know, you have to be collaborative in SaaS businesses. But you’ve got to get that balance right. So that you you’re not risking everything on the turnover. Turnover friendly code.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s a good point. I see a lot of SaaS companies as they get to start up and move to kind of more of a scale-up kind of phase. Not really nail, their audience and value proposition. So do you tend to go a bit too broad and don’t really go deep enough on serving one customer? They have too many kind of blurred segments? I would say.

Dixon Jones
Yeah. And at inLinks we’ve made that error twice already. And we’ve only been out for two to two to three years. So we built this this technology which had been getting in the pipeline for eight or nine years. My business partner and endlinks is a guy in France he actually contacted me through our website or on my website turned into a you know, I’m a business consultant I can help your business kind of you know, approach because I was in this hiatus after, you know, getting having a break off to majestic and something happened really and I thought I know every day I know everybody in the world, that probably would like your technology. And we worked together to bring something to market.

But I think that we along the way, we built this, this, this natural language processing algorithm, stroke Knowledge Graph mechanism. But we found that it did have other uses. So we’ve done two other things, we’ve gone into business with a a group of another group of people, and has got a company called Zen intelligence or quarter share in a company called Zen intelligence, where we analyze the data on medical websites, pharmaceutical websites, and look out for non compliance issues. So where they’re kind of, you know, talking about competitive products, or whether talking about superlatives that, that the UK doesn’t allow people to talk about in the pharmacy industry and that kind of thing.

So that’s sort of out there, and it’s doing its thing. But of course, it’s not core to our audience, you know, our audience. As we describe them a describe as inan obsessive tribe of SEOs is kind of our audience. And then we did it again, we got another method, another use of the technology called gov tracker, which is gov tracker without an e.org. And what that does is we we can understand entities in very short amounts of text with our natural language processing algorithm. So we talked to Twitter, and Twitter gave us their their API, specifically for the use of a nonprofit use of looking at politicians. Currently, in France, we have the UK and now we have Ukraine as well.

And so it looks at those the tweets and extracts the underlying concept. So you can sit there and go and have a look at, you know, the French elections, and we could have a look at the French elections and see what the French politicians are talking about. And so you can take your your idea and stuff, kind of interesting way of looking at Twitter. And then when, when the Ukrainian when the Russian Ukrainian war broke out, we came out with we did a version for Ukraine. So you could literally go in and see people that were, you know, tweeting around Mary Apolo, or whatever it may be. So you could go and see what’s happening. If you’re Ukrainian in the ground, and you’re, you’re part of the world or, you know, find out if certain things were going on.

So it was cool, but neither of those have had any, you know, financial gain, there’s a lot of effort going into them. And then yeah, we’ve we’ve we’ve made the, the fundamental mistake of if you want to grow your business, you know, there’s a there’s a methodology, called the ANSOFF matrix, NBA is 2.22, a two by two matrices. If you want to grow your business from where you are, now, you can either sell more stuff to the same customers. So if you’re a supermarket, you can have more more products, but you’re gonna have the same people buying them. Or you can, you can change your product. Or you can sell the same product to new customers. So you could set up new shops in new places around the world. As soon as you start trying to set up a new version, a new technology, that’s going to be a new product, you’re starting again, and and you cannot divert your attention in two different directions.

So it will fail it regardless of how good it is, you know, if you’re a small business, you can only grow it on one of those directions at a time. You can’t take a new product, say, Well, we’re going to feed a slightly variate version, this product to a completely new industry. That’s not gonna work. Yeah, and I think that’s certainly true from a marketing perspective, you know, trying to attract those customers, right, it’s hard to attract two completely different segments to you know, at the same time, yeah, yeah. And I think is, as a boss of that you can’t wake up and do two things very easily anyway, I suppose the way you’re supposed to do it, is then set up a completely separate business unit with a separate head of business or whatever, that’s, you know, that that’s fine. But the passion for for me, is in SEO.

You know, I can’t, I can’t run a pharmaceutical compliance company. And it turns out, I can’t run a political monitoring company, these things, and if I was to do those, I can’t then run an SEO, SaaS business at the same time. You got to wake up and decide what you’re going to do.

And, and after 23 years in the internet, business, and internet and SEO, I’ll stick with this, you know? Yeah, I’ll say.

So, I mean, we could we could, we could change our business model. And so right, people just buy the API, and then they build their own business models around that.

But that’s a hard sell. Because at the moment, there’s millions and millions of people that want to do SEO. And there’s probably a million people that want to play with API’s. But there’s only, you know, another million people that want to set up their own businesses. But those million people that want to play with API’s, and one of those million people want to set up their own businesses, you know, it’s a very small overlap. So all of a sudden, you’re, you’re carving out, you know, a hope you just got to give the API out there and hope that somebody’s gonna take it at some point when they realize the value, with our SEO product.

Matthew Todd
Yes, it’s a big risk. Absolutely. So in terms of the product now, then who, you know, who is that audience for that product? And what is the opposition to them?

Dixon Jones
So obsessive, you know, a tribe of obsessive SEOs is, is a pretty good way of describing our audience, because it’s an SEO technology. But there are some really good SEO technologies out there now, you know, SEMrush, and Ahrefs. And, you know, for that matter, majestic, you know, there’s other ones that are well developed. And in the full service space, you know, I guess SEMrush Ahrefs are in the lead has authority tests and other ones around there, that are also, you know, our there’s bright agent and conductor at an enterprise level. So there’s quite a lot of technologies out there that people can can choose. So we, we focused very much on this idea of entity, SEOs.

So all of those technologies pre 2014/15, before Google bought meta web, which was not a big Knowledge Graph, were based around keywords, you know, the, in the mentality of doing SEO, it’s, you know, well, how many people search for the phrase, you know, restaurants near me, or pizza restaurants or, or houses for sale, or something of that. So everything was based around those, those words, and the search engines were really based around extracting those words. But when the Knowledge Graph became a thing, when Google bought meta web, what they actually bought was a new way to organize the world’s information. So instead of organizing the world’s information by here’s all the web pages on the Internet, what do each of these web pages say? They organize the world’s information by saying, Here are all the things that happen in the world, or the topics or the entities.

And now, which which pages were these pages that we’re looking at, which of these topics are they talking about? So it turns out that, you know, there’s trillions and trillions and trillions of web pages, and they’re going up by hundreds of billions every single day. But the number of ideas in the world is in the hundreds of billions, and is only going up, you know, a small, small amount, of course, things happen, you know, you know, but, you know, they don’t happen all the time, they don’t happen at the same rate, what will happen when they do do occur is that they become a fad on a lot of people will then start talking about this new concept or this new idea. And it can get very easily incorporated into their knowledge graph. But if they if they see the world’s information by ideas, and then they just say which of these ideas are on this page, you’ve got a fingerprint of the of the page of what it’s about.

So we created this knowledge graph and this methodology of reading content and saying, Well, this is about this Wikipedia page, or this idea and this idea and breaking down every single sentence into all its underlying topics. And then that whole methodology then meant that we could do some different things that other tools didn’t do. So we didn’t try and do all of the things that the other tools did. The first thing that we tried to do was write some interesting schema, some content schema, so we can just read a page and say, Hey, this page is about these things. Here’s the main things, let’s put that into some schema. And we’re still got a free tool that you don’t even need to log into on index dot nets homepage, where you can just put in any web page, and it’ll tell you the underlying entities and writes some schema for you.

And so that was great. But then we also realized, well, you know, we’ve got this for all the other pages as well. So if we bring in all of the pages, and you say that this is the page about, houses, then every time you mentioned other houses, we can tell you that there should be a link in there. And then we’d kind of away actually just one line of JavaScript, we could put the link in for people so they don’t have to put them in themselves. So now we’re building and hence the word inLinks. Really, so So we’re automating internal links around your website around concepts and entities so that a human in the loop says this, this is my landing page. This is my core page for this concept. Then all the other variations of that concept around the website can then link through to that page. So users and search engines alike can see where the authority for that idea is within your website. So now we’ve got schema being injected, we’ve got internal links being injected. And then we thought, You know what, you can then read the competitors content as well. So we can sit there and say, right, I want to rank for an SEO speaker is want to play with a lot. So if you see SEO speak on Google, hopefully, you’ll see me in there.

And so I can then go and have a look at all the other web pages that are talking about SEO schema, do the do the this this fingerprinting of those ideas on those pages, and then look at my content to show a gap analysis. And then we can sort of show this way of improving it to say, right, you know, what, if you want to talk about an SEO speaker, the biggest the biggest conference in Europe is Brian SEO, and you haven’t mentioned Brian SEO, so you better better mention that concept. Yeah, or whatever it may be. So then that became a an editing tool that looked a bit like other editing, SEO editing tools that are out there. There’s some good ones is surfer SEO and phrase.io. I think SEMrush have one built into their system. And I imagined the others do, too.

But there were they were working around words, you know. So what would happen is that, you know, maybe a tower and a bridge would be seen as different concepts. They weren’t seen as Tower Bridge, when you put them together, and we see you see these, you know, and that’s a very different thing. Tower Bridge is very different to any old tower in any old bridge.

So understanding these concepts then allowed us to, to better direct users in a way that the users when we explain it to them could understand they understood that we were trying to push you in a way that was going to make you a better expert on the on the subject matter you’re writing about. And then more recently, that’s that’s led to a new way of doing keyword research as well. So those are we building out this this functionality, but we’re not doing the biggest thing that SEO has ever wanted, which was rank checking. And they want to know where you rank for your keywords. That’s a tough, tough ask that’s been well and truly done by the other, you know, by the other technologies.

So yeah, I think there’ll be a long time before we try and build that kind of functionality. So that’s where we end up with the obsessives. That’s why the tribal assessors are there. Because until they understand the idea of entity SEO, they don’t really understand why we’ve have a USP.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, so you’re kind of trying to move people away from that kind of almost done keywords to actually think about the concepts, the relationship between those on your website and how your contents, you know, positions, you or your product, or whatever it may be, you know, as the expert on those and, you know, closes some of the gaps that competitors don’t have.

Dixon Jones
Yeah, and I think we aren’t, we understand that, you know, that’s the way that Google was going. And Google, it gives them a lot of freedom if they ever, when they when they achieve that because it means that SEO search, from Google’s perspective, of course, Google’s perspective is a whole different look on on SEO to the customer, the website owners perspective, the website says, I think I’m the best website for blue spaghetti, and I definitely deserve to be there, you know, I’m gonna make blue spaghetti if everyone ever a customer asked for something that’s not that’s not the same as, as Google going around and seeing every every business every webpage on the internet and deciding what blue sketti it’s all about. And, and then answering the user query when the user query says, you know, give me some blue spaghetti recipes. You know, Google wants to do so much more than just give a list of 1010 blue links. And now it does, of course, it will show you pictures of blue spaghetti, it’ll give you recipes on the page, it’ll, of course, give you some answers. If there’s a Wikipedia page has been this panel on the right-hand side that kind of highlights different things about Blue spaghetti. So there’s going to be a whole different approach.

And also it becomes language or non gnostic, if if Google has decided that there is a thing called Blue spaghetti, then all of the all the words that we say, and all of the different languages are just, I just labels for the same thing, you know, the same thing that the thing ultimately in their database is a number. So so it gives them some freedom to to some bits and pieces. So if you’re on your, again, move over to Apple, Siri, if you’re on your phone, you know, and it can understand those those words in your language, then then it can start, you know, finding out answers to those things in sort of machine language format, and just converted back at the other end. So, yeah, so it is a different kind of methodology. And we’ve got to get SEOs to realize that that’s the sort of those are the sorts of things that Google is thinking about because they have to deal with scale at such an incredible level. And we as as website owners get bogged down, in, you know, why are we getting picked upon

Because, because because our website isn’t where it’s supposed to be. And you know, that’s not fair. It’s not Google at all. Google is sitting there saying, frankly, there are. There are only so many ways to tie a bow tie. I don’t need 2 million web pages saying that I just need to show the customer, my user, Google’s user, how to tie a bow tie.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. Unless you’re coming up with something different than, you know, chances are someone’s already said it.

Dixon Jones
That’s absolutely right. That’s actually right. Yeah, I think that’s another reason why we kind of turned the tried to turn the phrase entity SEO. So I think there’s other you know, other people may have called it semantic SEO.

But we turn turn that, that phrase, or I like to think or turn that phrase, because you have to very succinctly explain a different, you know, why it’s different. And if you’re the first one with that phrase, it becomes much easier to associate your brand with it.

And I think part of the building of a business now is understanding how your business, which which business, which topics in the world, your business has to be associated with, to, to make sure that everything you write about, you know, focuses on something that a user, a type of user is interested in. And for us, it’s entities and search.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, and I think that’s really interesting, both from obviously, the SEO perspective, and how people can use that. But then in terms of building in links, as a business from, you know, a marketers perspective, then, you know, you kind of mentioned, it’s important to kind of label and claim that entity almost as being associated with with the brand, you know, what other things would you recommend for people to kind of differentiate themselves and it’s been done throughout history, you know, Hoover’s were a brand and then Dyson’s became a brand.

Dixon Jones
And you know, and I think, I think throughout history, one of the achievements for any marketing company is when you’re when your company name turns up in an encyclopedia. And that’s the same now on Wikipedia, if your brand is good enough to have his own Wikipedia page, you’ve achieved something very significant because Google dot, you know, Wikipedia doesn’t allow it very often. And, and as soon as it has allowed it, you know, we know that Google understands Wikipedia very, very well and trust Wikipedia. So it’s not the only thing they trust. I think they also trust IMDb, they trust, lots of other data sources.

But the interesting thing about Wikipedia is it’s very, very broad. It’s very multilingual. It’s just an insight, it’s an encyclopedia. But it’s an encyclopedia is incredibly well structured. And so Google can very easily tie that back to an entity and its own knowledge graph. So it’s no knowledge graph is really another representation of wiki data, with but different and its own and augmented and added to and lots of other, you know, relationships between entities are added. But, but if you can, if you can tell Google that you are this entity in Wikipedia, you’ve got a huge advantage in, in search.

So I think it’s a marketer’s dream, even though they don’t know it’s a dream, you know, you want to become a not as a not a verb, a verb. Yeah. You want to you want to be able to Google something, you know, we google something, we don’t search for something. Now we Google something, you know, yeah, we Facebook, something, you know, and when we start doing those kinds of things, you know, then then then a brand has landed I think.

Matthew Todd
So for inLinks then. Was it, is it a lot of promoting of entity SEO than as an trying to educate an audience or?

Dixon Jones

Using education as a way into your product, for me, has always been a very powerful methodology.

Dixon Jones
It was, I think, I think using education as a way into your product, for me has always been a very powerful methodology. It’s possibly slower than, you know, going out there and using PPC, where you get a deeper customer base that can also be your, your mouthpiece or online as well. So I’m a really big believer in in freemium models.

So what we did was we firstly I had to get my head around using entities and instead of keywords in SEO myself, I’d already been an SEO for, you know, 1819 years. To be honest with you, the last last eight of those I hadn’t done much SEO because I was basically a link building, you know, technology. Representative, I suppose. So I had to get my head back around that and think about it. So I started writing. And I started writing, how I saw this approach of using entities instead of keywords to do to do search. So that formed initially, a huge amount of content for the for the blog that I could then let’s go out in bits and start to start to get a new name for myself as a, as a sort of semantic based commentator, stroke, knowledge leader. And there were only really a few people talking about the late great Bill Slawski is a good friend of mine. We talked about it a lot for over many years.

And there’s also a company in Italy called Wordlifter where Andrea he’s really pushing this idea as well. But there’s not what they want a huge number of people. And even when there were huge, some people, we were thinking about things differently. So I wrote this all down, that gave me really a valuable amount of content that I could send out. And when it was interesting, it was picked up by other people, other other SEOs that knew me, and lucky enough to have a reasonably good Twitter following. I mean, I ain’t no, I ain’t no Donald Trump, but you know, thank God. But, you know, got a few people on there. But then I also wrote did a free course on Udemy. And I’d done this with majestic as well. But I did a course which is entirely free.

And it was how to write content with an entity based approach. And, and the whole course is about trying to optimize a page for entity SEO course, which hopefully, we rank for two as well. Yeah, it was videos, and of course, and then we bring in the technology, so you can see the technology in the in the training, doesn’t have to use the technology, you know, a lot of it can be done slower, admittedly, with with Excel and, and just and sort of looking at all your competitors and writing down the topics that they’re all talking about. And there’s other ways of doing what we’re doing.

But, but of course, the technology makes it very quick, and also very consistent as well. humans tend to make, you know, dramatic risk. But you know, when they read a piece of content, they don’t read the underlying topics, they just pick out three topics and say it’s about that.

So, so doing that course. And making it free, meant that a lot of people were taking the course, that was helping them understand. And they were there was aligning my product with the very thing that I was trying to do. So free training has been very, very important for me. And the only the only regret for that is that if I have a free course on Udemy, it doesn’t show up so well in the US. So I get a lot more people from from other parts of the world.

So the US I turned a lot, a lot of that content to a book called Entity SEO. That was also to help me get an entity for myself as well, because one of my biggest frustration was was I was not ranking for Dixon Jones. Okay, so those that have been a problem for me since 1999. I mean, it’d been a nightmare. Because I own dicksonjones.com. And there’s this, there was this group of architects called Dixon Jones, who designed the Royal Opera House in the UK. And they were they were not an insignificant organization. But he had a bit for many years.

Back in the early 2000s, they had a flash base website, and they were still ranking above me for the phrase shows, which is, which is how I learned about links, really, you know, because their links were coming from the Royal Opera House and mine were coming from, I don’t know from Joanne directory or something like that.

Matthew Todd
I’ve just done a Google search for Dixon Jones and you’ll be pleased to hear you’re number one and their number two.

Dixon Jones
Yeah, well, well, what’s interesting is that they’ve gone bankcrupt so they don’t exist anymore. And they’re still number two. So but I think I have just about got there now. But you know, obviously their their influence in the market is waning, given that they don’t exist.

But I’m sure if you type type in you know, Henry the Fifth, he’ll still you will still get this not Not, not Henry the Fifth that we’ve got in our village who was a fifth child in a in a family. So So you know, you don’t have to be alive to rank. But there were anyway, so got the book and that that helped me to get out to the to the US audience a bit more as well. Yes, but everything I’ve been doing is trying to help educate the community, my community, my tribe into the concept of entities and then aligning the technology to the to the

Due to the learning, so.

So the only way that people, if people are understanding their technology, then they are understanding the concepts, then they then are highly likely to know my my brand. If they if they’re not interested in that then not like to move my brand at all, because I haven’t told a single person, or don’t try and tell anybody outside that brand. And I appreciate it a huge amount of your audience won’t know what the heck inLinks is, or majestic for that matter, because that’s not their their bag. But whatever your bag is, I think you’ve got to just align, align align with your audience. So make sure that everything you say publicly, helps that audience feel more confident in the in the thing that you’re you’re representing.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, and I agree, and I think there’s a couple of mistakes people make, you know, when they’re trying to attract an audience, you know, aside from not knowing who the audience is, but we’ll kind of set that aside. For now, I think one is they tend to be too transactional, and they just try and take them straight to product or straight to, you know, some crappy landing page and effectively by an email address that they could have got for free elsewhere anyway.

And the other one is they’re not, they don’t have a different message or something to educate around, or they’re too scared to, to do that without, you know, kind of ramming the product down down people’s throats. I think a lot of people are missing, try and miss that stuff out. And I don’t think it works.

Dixon Jones
Yeah. And the jumping up and just talking about the product to the conference doesn’t doesn’t help either. So you’ve got to you’ve got to have something else to talk about. And then the the product then becomes a natural extension of that conversation. Yeah, absolutely. Right. If you if you’re, if you’ve got the latest greatest new CRM system, you don’t say buy my CRM system, it’s, it’s, it’s the best thing since sliced bread, you talk about relationships first and and genuinely start to develop those relationships. Hopefully using your own your own CRM, or whatever technology, it may be that you’ve got, I think you have to try and be a thought leader. If you’re scared to get up in public and talk about what you’ve got, then you have a challenge, it means that you’re either not confident in yourself or you’re not confident in your product. If you’re confident in your product, but not yourself, that’s an easy fix, because you get somebody else to do that.

So I am the mouthpiece of inLinks, I was the mouthpiece of majestic, I happen to be the CEO of a lynx. But, but ultimately, you know, my part of my job is to keep all of that stuff off of the main shareholders desk. So Fred owns more shares in inLinks than I do and one of my mantras in life is make sure your developer owns more shares new because actually, the hardest thing in a in a in a SaaS is to keep that momentum in the product, the product development going and, and if you lose your head developer, elite developer, you’re pretty screwed, I think. And if you’ve outsourced your build, that’s also a very dangerous place to be because, you know, you may get a quote for the original build, but then you’ve got all this code that you can’t manage change, you know, and then, you know,

Microsoft comes out and says, right, we’re going to remove this type of browser or something like that, or this kind of support or whatever. And all of a sudden, big chunks of your your system probably only need a little bit of a change. But you know, you don’t you don’t know that you don’t know whether it’s big, whether it’s little, and more importantly, the developers that developed your product have moved on. So it’s a now the new person that’s got a little change has to spend, you know, a huge amount of time and ultimately your money, getting up to speed. So never lose your developer. That’s the game and try and keep all of the all of the crap off of the development teams desk, if you can.It’s kind of kind of a good mantra to have, I think, in a sense.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, yeah, no, absolutely. And I think a lot of it stems from, you know, having confidence in the product, but also, you know, believing in that there is a genuine differentiation there. If not, you are just a kind of me to product. And I think that flows into development, knowing you know, what you’re building and who you’re building that for. Yeah, and getting that message through. It is more about getting it through to your own people. As much as getting it through to your customer base. I think I think your own people need to have faith and believe in your story.

Dixon Jones
Otherwise, you’re just spinning, spinning a yarn. Yeah. And it’s got to be deeper than spinning a yarn.

I’m rereading Sapiens right now and so As one keep on thinking about stories, which is a fantastic book, incredible way to look around life in our but ultimately your you know, whatever your brand says it’s a story. And the only reason people buy from you is because they believe your story.

And even if you don’t know that you’re setting up a story you are, you know, if you’re just a cafe on the street, what you say when you when when the customer comes in, affects, you know, that story?

Yeah, no, absolutely. It does. And I think, you know, spending the right time working on that and sticking to it and not getting dragged off in in 10 different directions, as he kind of alluded to before is all part of that story actually, resonating and being believable.

Yeah, yeah. And that means, of course, that you’ve got to be able to work with those customers as they come in. So you need to have a methodology, if you’re going to be running a SaaS, I got I got this from Intercom actually, obviously, a fantastic SaaS model very well.

And they wrote a book, which was a freebie book, which I can’t find any more, I’m really annoyed that I can’t find it. If anybody knows anyone on Intercom. And so we’re sitting around this, this book of you know how we made intercom, I’d love to get it again. But one of the things they said was that everybody’s gonna have churn, you’re going to get people in who were not the right fit for your business, or ultimately, or the budget was a right or they got squeezed out by different ideas in their organization, or whatever it may be. So you’re going to have to have churn.

So that means that there will always be however much energy you put into a marketing pitch, or a marketing effort, there will be a ceiling point at which your your monthly recurring revenue, which is should be every guiding star metric for every SaaS that I know of anyway, will flatten out, you know, if you’re, if you’re getting people at, you know, 10 customers a day, and you’re losing, you know, one customer a day, as you get more and more people that one customer will turn into two customers a day to three, and at some point, it will flatten out at 10 customers a day.

So actually, you know, a year in advance, you can probably guess, if you carry on putting this much energy in to marketing where your MRR is going to flatten out. And the only way that you can stop that is either put more money in, and I’m I’m not a big fan of going out and getting VC money and stuff. So I try not to do that. But that would work. As long as you know that you’ve got the product, right. And that’s the big trick, you know, be start, start putting money out before you know got the product, right, you’re going to die.

But the other way of doing it is making sure that you can upsell to your existing customers so so I think if you haven’t built that into your SaaS, and this is what I learned from intercom, if you haven’t built that into your SaaS, you’ve got no way of recovering from the churn or making up the the churn money. And so there will always be this flattening out. But if you have got a methodology for making sure that your best customers start start using more of you, then you can offset that churn. So it means that your lifetime value doesn’t stop going up, you can carry on putting that energy into recruiting the customer in the first place. And yes, you’ll get some that don’t last the course. But for everyone that doesn’t lost the course you’ll get another one that upgrades and takes over that that hole. So so the MRR doesn’t have to stop? No, absolutely. I think that’s a really good point. You know, a lot of people, especially early on will focus on getting those customers in the door and you know, probably have a guess at some pricing plans. But I think you need ones that align where you end up with a win win situation.

So if your customers do better, then, you know, to a point you should also, you know do better whether that’s different tears or usage based or whatever that may be, but there should be upgrades. Yes, yeah. And and I think a lot of tools don’t do that. And that’s definitely something that I couldn’t do in my previous stuff. So when we started selling PDF files right at the Mac with murder mystery games in the first dock domain first.com I was selling these PDF files for 30 pounds now that I was selling a one off sale to a one off customer they downloaded this PDF file. They ran their murder mystery. Chances are they weren’t going to run another murder mystery.

You know what some of them might run another one next year. But you know, the whole you didn’t did, didn’t you? There aren’t that many fans for murder mysteries that will buy your murder mysteries every week. And even if they were I’d have to write so many murder mysteries so I have trouble. So I was I was I was winning because I didn’t have to kiss get actors to fulfill every order. But I was only getting one off sales. When we got to Majestic I understood a SaaS model where it’s paying every month is a beautiful, beautiful model. I can see everything

Moving towards including, you know, car ownership as cars become self driving, I can imagine you just sit there waiting and just lending your car out, if you’re happy to buy one just goes out and earns money for you. And if you don’t, then you just use one that’s out there, like taxis really. And I can see that everything is moving to that model, even buying a house is by is actually buying a mortgage, you know. So everything is paid to pay month, month, month, month, month. So that’s what the SaaS model does. And so I think it’s really really,but with my second business majestic, essentially, it was a fixed fee, every month, and I didn’t really have an upsell methodology, you know, the people that were buying the retail thing, didn’t buy the, the enterprise level, kind of build it in, you know, if you’re going to buy them enterprise level thing, you would never have bought the retail system. So inLinks is, is a better model for me. Because you know, people can come in at a small price and come in for free, they can upgrade to a $39 or 30 pounds a month package. And they get something you know, which I think is really, really valuable.

But ultimately, if they want to start interlinking more than the 100 web pages on their website, then they probably need a level two so on 205 pages, or Level three is 315 pages. So as they so they as they can see the value of that internal linking and that schema and stuff. If I’ve made it if it’s valuable for 100 pages, it’ll probably be just as valuable for the other 100 pages. And then they’ve combined factor of 200 pages together, hopefully will make much more than the 30 pound extra they’ve had to pay. So there probably is a there is probably a there, I’m sure there is a point for our customers where on each website, getting more going up, my scale isn’t going to help them at all. But I can’t say what that is they’re going to have to work that out. If they’ve only got a 300 pound website, they probably shouldn’t have 1000 pounds 1000 Page package.

Yes. And also, if they’ve got a million page website, they probably don’t need a million page packet, they probably probably get Google probably understands it after 1000 pages. And frankly, you know, that’s all you need to have in the system. So we’ve got this upsell methodology, we can keep them in, we now need to get get them broader. So now I’m going a bit broader and adding this keyword research functionality. But only after I’ve got this, this core of people and I understand them as obsessive SEOs. And now I can start working on feeding them what they want that I can deliver at least. But they’re all very similar to each other. They may not know each other, but you know, they are similar to each other in the way that they look at. Look at me my product, and and the search industry is the vertical i’m in.

Matthew Todd
No, absolutely. I think that’s very much the the right approach and the right time to go abroad is when you’ve got that deep community that you understand really, really well they understand you really, really well. They’re all coming from that same perspective on you know, whatever it is that that that SaaS provides and then, you know, only then can you start to say, Well, okay, how else you’ll have segments within them, you know, how else can I serve this audience and similar ones? Yeah, absolutely. Absolutely. Yeah, one thing that we we did talk about last time as well, I think, yeah, you’re bang on with the the ability to upsell, but you know, launch strategy, as well as something that you you mentioned that we thought was probably worth touching on, or do you want to?

Dixon Jones
Yeah, I think I’m very picky about the way in which I would like to do a launch of a new feature, I think, new features in SaaS products are, are the real golden marketing opportunity. And I think they often get completely ignored. I mean, especially look at it in, you know, mobile apps and, and WordPress plugins, you know, when people completely waste the fact that they’ve just increased the functionality. They press a button and make it live and then your phone updates and all your your your plugins update, you don’t know what’s happened, you’ll go and find that stuff.

But there was a huge marketing opportunity there, of telling the world that you’ve that you’ve come out with a new new feature, you can’t imagine Sony Pictures, not you know, just just releasing a new film and not putting a whole marketing thing around it. So why do you why do you just launch new functionality in your sales without allowing the marketing team time to to put together a proper launch strategy, and it doesn’t take an awful lot of time in about a week and you can pretty much get there. So I said I was a big fan of the freemium model. The great thing about the freemium model is that those free users have opted into your email systems have believed in your product and therefore if you tell them something about what’s getting launched before you tell them that if everybody else the masses so to speak, they will be your mouthpiece and they will amplify your message.

And if they are your tribe, then they’re talking to their to their tribe, which is, you know, is going to be similar. So they’re going to have a similar tribe of people that they talk to. So they’re not talking to complete strangers, they’re talking to people that are emotionally connected. And so, so if I can, if I’m launching, if we’ve got a new bit of functionality in in a product, hopefully we can see it and test it and get screenshots for it. If you’ve got the ability to also give some people special logins, then that’s even better. So what we did with with the keyword research stuff, the which was our most recent launch, the very first thing I did was a video about the new keyword research stuff, which I did not put live, I put it into a private mode on YouTube. And you could only get there if I physically invited you by email. Yeah, I then did a long form post on LinkedIn, about why keyword research is wrong, why the methodology that SEOs have been using has been wrong.

So I wasn’t specifically talking about the product, but I was saying we’re launching a new product to to fix that. And so if anybody would, by the way, if anybody would like the video of the of the explaining, you know, showing our product, then let me know, in the in the comments. So in the comments, I got 100 150 People in the comment saying yes, interested? Yes, please, please. The ones that were first level LinkedIn, connected, fine, I could I could do their email address, I could connect them up. The ones that weren’t I, I asked to connect to them. And and, and then ask for their email address so that I could show that to them. So there was this whole FOMO thing going on, that the only people that connect to me, are people in us in the industry anyway? Well, yeah, hopefully, most of them. And so. So you know, there was this FOMO thing going on, you couldn’t see the video, so you didn’t know what’s coming out unless you asked to see it. So now I had 150 people that I’d given this email address to for the actual video.

And I knew their email addresses, and they had specifically asked on that one particular point, you know, I think I’d got permission to talk to them about that one particular point and necessarily got permission to spam them for all time. But then LinkedIn doesn’t let you do that unless you start using probably some of your customers or your audiences. But yeah, but but that meant that when we did go live, I could then write the the press release. And I also shared with just a couple of people who are industry insiders, I suppose. More details about the product. So if they started asking questions about it then went in there.

So Roger, I know him as Martini Buster, but Roger from is on Search Engine Journal, which is a specific industry thing, he really went into it started writing a whole load of stuff up. A few others wrote a whole blog posts, so I could share the blog posts, the press release announcement that we were going out with, I could also share the URL with which we were going to launch and I said, right, we’re going to launch next Friday, or whatever day it was at 7pm. Now, and if you want to say anything between now and then that’s fine, I’m gonna make this video, public or public, but not talk about it 24 hours before, so you can embed it into your, into your post, if you want to talk about it as well.

Also, so when I went live, I could then then I had a couple of good pieces out in the out in the wild of people that were reviewing the new methodology. I’d had 150 people that had looked at the video and understood what it was, but they you know, they couldn’t really share that with anybody until that point, the blog post was out. So now had the landing page URL, the functionality was live, I could then go back to those 150 people and say, Okay, this live now, here’s the URL, if you can tweet about it, that’d be great. Yeah, that’s where it all happens. It wasn’t viral. It was 150 people that have already, you know, seen it, and already been given something for a bit, you know, a secret, and they’d kept the secret for me for a week or so.

So to ask them to retreat or say something about it was not a big ask for them, you know, they would at least like the thing and they amplified that that tweet and that Facebook and that next in links, LinkedIn posts very effectively. So I think this timing is really, really important. Basically, the second that you

Go live on your blog post, all of your marketing should have been done. And then only afterwards, do you send the newsletter out to your to your mailing list of 10s of 1000s, or whatever it may be, because those people are much wider, much less likely to engage. But if they are going to engage with actual product, then they’re gonna have a look for social clues and social cues, which will now be there because genuine people have said genuine things good or bad about the product?

Matthew Todd
Yeah, I think that is an excellent strategy. And I think that’s certainly something we would recommend, you know, pulling people in to Well, as you say, before, it’s there. So it again, it ties in with what we were talking about before with kind of educating them as to what that methodology is, and getting them to kind of put their hand up and show interest and buy into that. And then taking them a little bit further on that journey, taking them a little bit further before the product is actually there. I think that’s so important to get that buy in.

Dixon Jones
I think so I think I’m going to try and take that further as well. So I am I got invited by Wise is the other day to Latvia or Lithuania? No, yeah, no, we’re Estonia, I can’t remember one of those. And to go in to go and talk with them and, and have some sort of feedback loop because we use wires quite a lot. That came completely out of the blue, it was the next week, I couldn’t do it, you know, but it did make me think that, you know, proper SaaS businesses, like the ones that are much bigger than me, are really taking the opportunity to, to get their customers to give feedback.

So what I’m going to do now is I’m going to go back to some of those, those customers and start to have, we just booked up our, our first customer Hangout, and I think we’re going to make it a regular thing, but certainly this very first one, and it’ll be me and the CTO on the call and stuff. But instead of us trying to say anything to them, it’s much more about your already a customer, you know, feed us back what you like what you don’t like, but also in the group, which will be quite selective in that it said that they were all only going to be customers that have used us in the last 30 days or whatever, that we’re going to send the message out to, you know, we want them to kind of share best practices with each other and build a community of, you know, with the idea of the obsessive tribe kind of thing. You know, if those people are then talking about each other’s their strategies, you know, they’re often in very, very different market versus vertical.

So they’re not necessarily competing with each other. You know, they’re, they’re competing with Google, I suppose, or, or complete on competing to get, you know, share of their customer, their customer, but the customer is different at the far end. So if I can get them into a group where they’re sharing best practices, they’re all sharing their pain points, and Fred and I are listening, we’re gonna get a much better affinity or product is gonna have a much better affinity with that tribe, as we move forward if we know what’s really annoying them.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, absolutely. I like that phrasing of product affinity. I think that is important. And obviously something you can’t do if you if you don’t have that drive. If you’re not, you know, serving an identifiable audience that bought into what you do.

Dixon Jones
Yeah, yeah, absolutely. I think most SaaS businesses kind of assume that, you know, you’re going to wake up one day and millions of people are going to have sign up to your product. And I don’t see it like that. I mean, in my experience, it’s one it’s one person at a time. You know, and even if you’ve got a, well, if you’ve got, let’s say, you’ve got one signup a day, well, okay, you’ve got one signup per day, that’s one a day, that’s five week, there’s five real human beings that are signing up. If you’ve got 10 a day, that’s still every hour, you could be having a look at a person that signed up, what made them tick, what, you know, what’s their profile? How did that happen?

So that whole signup process is a really good way of profiling, you know, that that product affinity and understanding, you know, what’s the similarity of these people? Are they all go to the same page on the website, the same section of the product? Are they going to different sections of the product? You know, when they’re, when they’re chatting in that box, we that the chat box on our website is fantastic for us. I mean, it’s tied totally into our CRM, totally into our newsletter, totally into our analytics, and totally into my mobile phone. So you know, anybody can chat on the website. And yes, we could do so we do could do some automated stuff with that. But ultimately, if they sit there and say, you know, I can’t do this, it could just as easily be the as the CTO or, or Nina and accounts or me or you know, all of us okay, I linked into that thing. We need that pulse.

You know, this is our, this is our sort of our flesh and blood that website and it attaches us to the website. So we get some very human responses that people don’t expect. They assume that this you know, this automated agent from India is going to come back and okay, the Indian if the Asian might be in Morocco or maybe in Egypt or maybe in in the UK, but it’s us, you know, we’re a small team. And we’re a small remote team you know, but we we live and breathe the product.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, I think that’s great advice. Keep it keep it human and build that that connection. Yeah, yeah, I think yeah, too.

Perfect, so I’m kind of aware of time you’ve been talking a little while but I think there’s a lot of really, really good points that our audience should shouldn’t be listening to and hopefully it gives them a lot to think about and try and apply and think about how well they know their tribe or even have a tribe in in many instances. So nice. It’s been really really useful conversation. I think just to round things off, you know, for anyone that’s interested in what you’re talking about, about SEO about the concept of you know, entity based SEO versus keyword as well you know, where should they go to find out more.

Dixon Jones
Probably go to Amazon and buy the book actually, there’s an E version if you’re a Kindle Unlimited then you can get it for free on Kindle Unlimited or whatever you pay for your fee. But it’s called Entity SEO moving from strings to things by Dixon Jones, that’s probably a good place to go. Or alternatively your if you’re a writer and you write a lot, if you’re a content writer, typing Entity SEO course into Google and you’ll find the Udemy course.

Matthew Todd
Perfect, I’ll make sure we share links to all of those in the in the notes of this episode as well. So no absolute pleasure talking to you today. I’m sure we could talk for hours about many more things but I think we’ll certainly leave it there for this round of the conversation at least I hope there’s a future one to come on we we find out how you know inLinks is has grown and how entity SEO has progressed since then.

Dixon Jones
Perfect. Well, thank you very much. It’s very Matthew, I do quite enjoy talking about this stuff and getting it off my chest and reminding myself what I did right and what I did wrong. Over the years.

Matthew Todd
Yeah, no, thank you again, been a pleasure talking.

Thank you for joining me on this episode of Inside the ScaleUp. Remember for the show notes and in-depth resources from today’s guests. You can find these on the website insidethescaleup.com. You can also leave feedback on today’s episode, as well as suggest guests and companies you’d like to hear from. Thank you for listening