Hey everyone! Welcome to our monthly AMA, this time with Benji Hyam and Devesh Khanal from Grow & Convert, a content-focused SEO & PPC agency. We're excited to have them here today to share their expertise and insights.
Today's discussion will cover several key areas including:
- How to identify high-converting keywords
- Their process for hiring great freelance writers
- How they produce content for clients in all different industries
- Growing an agency
- AI and the future of content
Feel free to ask them anything about these topics or other areas of content marketing and agency growth. Let's dive in!
Where are the greatest opportunities for synergy between SEO and PPC? Our org's head of growth oversees adwords, and I oversee organic search, and we know there should be a regular exchange of insights but we're not sure what info would be most helpful for one another.
Benji: Testing keywords on paid and seeing which ones convert, then going after those same keywords organically.
I guess the big question is are you making big changes to your approach because of AI? Is Answer-optimized, AI optimized something we should all be thinking about a lot more?
Devesh: AI is making an impact in two areas of the content process:
- Content production
- Search results
Regarding search, there are two main themes:
- How Google's AI answers affect traffic from ranking on Google
- How non-Google AI tools might take "search" traffic away from Google
We're researching whether:
- Google ranking correlates with ChatGPT ranking for similar queries
- Our clients appear in AI search results through bottom-of-funnel articles
- Factors like backlinks and domain authority affect AI tool recommendations
Our previous study indicated ChatGPT tends to recommend tools featured in Google's first-page results.
What are some of the big trends in SEO that you think brands need to keep in mind for creating content in the future?
Benji:
- Brand mentions are becoming more important than just links, especially for AI search queries
- Unique content is increasingly important with AI-generated content becoming common
- Human writing will command a premium
- AI will assist writers rather than replace them
- Focus on Google optimization since it still drives the majority of business
I'd love to hear about your recruitment/onboarding process for new freelancers. Do you give them a writing test? How else do you evaluate them?
Benji:
- Initial application reviewing background and samples
- Paid writing test ($200 for writing the intro and first paragraph)
- Feedback and revision if needed
- First full article assignment
- Testing across multiple accounts
- Full onboarding after consistent good feedback
A detailed explanation of our process is available in this video.
When you're working with a new customer, what's your method for uncovering high-intent/hidden-gem/lower-volume topics and keywords that don't show up in the keyword tools?
Benji: We do a kickoff session at the beginning of every engagement where we interview sales, product, and marketing. We ask a ton of open-ended questions about who the customers are and why they buy and that helps us understand the buyer and identify topics. Then we find keywords that map to those topics.
How do you manage capacity planning for your agency? (ie: knowing how many clients you can handle, how long everything takes, etc)
Devesh: Each content strategist handles 2-4 accounts and either writes content themselves or works with 1-2 writers. When at capacity, Benji and I step in as interim strategists while training promising writers to become strategists.
Any advice on how to best track progress over time of how, where and when your brand is showing up in AI/ generative search?
Benji: If I'm honest, we don't have a process around this yet other than searching in the tools ourselves and/or looking in Google analytics and seeing when a post has a referral from an AI search engine.
How do you handle situations when it's not clear whether the SERPs want to prioritize a product landing page vs. a blog vs. a listicle vs. something else for a particular keyword? Do you just cover all your bases and make them all or is there a smarter way to think about it?
Devesh: We don't see that very often tbh. I'd be curious for you to post an example query and I can answer this more specifically.
We default to blog posts because they:
- Are easiest to produce
- Offer more content flexibility
- Outrank tons of competing URLs that are not-blog posts
- Convert as well as or better than landing pages very often
What were some of the biggest mistakes you made when trying to scale your agency? And what would you do differently if you had to start over from scratch?
Devesh:
- Delegating operations too early without established processes
- Not doing things that don't scale first
- Being too slow to delegate specific roles
- Trying to delegate to generalists instead of specialists
Maybe an impossible question, but how do you balance: (1) being an agency that needs to be super scalable, have good margins, and deliver results to every client, with (2) knowing there's no one-size-fits-all content strategy anymore, and there's a need to be somewhat experimental
Benji: We chose to do a productized service because we felt like we had a process that can generate results across multiple different clients and businesses. Making a productized service helps with more predictable hiring and what's needed on every account. If you have too loose of an offering, it gets really hard to staff for it. All expenses are rolled up to every client. So for example, there's a cost for writing, strategy, etc for every client. So that allows us to control costs and margins.
What does your team's tech stack look like? What are your preferred search tools?
Benji & Devesh:
- Trello for client work
- Data Studio for reporting
- GA4, HubSpot, and WhatConverts for tracking
- Ahrefs for SEO research
- Clearscope for on-page optimization
What are the top few valuable adjacent skills to writing that you recommend writers develop in the context of AI nipping at our heals moving forward -- or at least constraining the opportunity space? (Not including, "learn how to work with AI")
Devesh: Focus on becoming a complete marketer:
- Content strategy
- Keyword selection
- Analytics and conversion tracking
- Content promotion and link building
On the "growing an agency" front, what did you find to be the most effective business development process during your early stages of growth?
Devesh: We grew through disruptive content marketing with articles like:
Our origin stories are collected in the Beginnings of Grow & Convert section of our site.
Any SME interview tips to get the good stuff out of them?
Devesh: What I find works well is to try to outline your piece before you interview them. We used to have team members just sort of get on cold to an interview and be like "so tell me about x" and they didn't go as well. But if they try to outline the piece first, then they force themselves to think through what they want to write and what the piece likely needs so then they have really specific questions and much more background.
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That just about does it on time here for the AMA. Benji and Devesh, thanks SO MUCH for your openness and detailed answers, and thanks to everyone for the great questions - this was awesome!
It's going to take hours to dig through all these responses in detail. For those who want to learn more from these folks, you can:
Thanks again to everyone who participated!
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