Our Story (Why SEO is a lot like Golf)

What’s Our Story?

Everyone likes a good story, so let me begin at the beginning, because it’s a very good place to start ;-)

I’m Laurence, the CEO. It’s quite a self-important title and we’re not that into job titles at Analytics SEO, but it’s short and people seem to like to understand who they’re dealing with, so I’m sticking with it for now.

In 2006, after nearly 10 years running Thomson Directories’ digital businesses, I decided it was time to move on. I’d always wanted to run my own business and for as long as I can remember I’ve kept a folder of ‘great’ business ideas. I agreed to work my year’s notice - surely that would be enough time to evaluate and cultivate these ideas and come up with a cunning plan for a business.

As it happens, when you actually come to start your own business for the first time, you quickly realise that some of these ideas aren’t so ‘great’ after all! I ended up working 7 months of my notice (never again…my advice to anyone in a similar situation is not to do this…it is extremely difficult to give a job you love 100% when you have one eye on the door and future opportunities) and by the time I left in 2006 I still had no firm plan of what I was going to do.

I’d always been reasonably good at most sports, but rubbish at golf and so I decided that starting a business would be a great time to improve my golf. So how about combining the two and starting a golf business? What a brilliant idea!

As it turned out it got us to where we are today, but with several pivots along the way.

I decided to start my golf business (and golf improvement plan) by seeking the very best advice I could find. So I approached a number of top European Tour coaches and before long I was having lessons and getting free advice from some brilliant and inspirational coaches who coached the elite golfers you see on TV every week. We even published some pocket golf lessons, some golf tip videos for iPhones and some golf instruction DVDs from Europe’s No1 coach Pete Cowen. We even sold a fair few!

This was great fun, and soon I had cut my golf handicap in half ;-)

Yes, I did cut my golf handicap from 24 to 12 in less than a year; and this did pleasantly surprise a lot of long-suffering friends who have spent the last few years searching bushes, lakes and bunkers for my golf balls. But I didn’t make any money.

So we pivoted having learnt lots of lessons, in particular a few very good ones that I could apply to the world of SEO (more on this later).

Pivot 1 – From Golf Instruction/Promotional Business to Website Development business (2006 – 2008)

A lot of people we met in golf knew my background, so we ended up building their websites for them. This then expanded and we soon ended up building websites for more and more clients outside of golf too. From jewellery sites, to motorbike parts, fitness sites, hotels and resorts, poker sites, local company websites and more. A complete mixed bag, but they all had one thing in common. A desire to market their websites effectively and cost efficiently online. So we started to help them with a range of online marketing advice and services, and we focused on SEO.

Of course the difficulty with SEO is the more successful you become the harder it is to replicate that success at scale. You need systems, processes and procedures to organise, manage and report on the whole SEO process. So we looked for a software solution to help us manage this process well. We searched globally and found lots of good tools but none that were great. And certainly no process driven, workflow driven SEO campaign or project management software platform. So we decided to build our own.

Pivot 2 – Website Development and SEO Services business to SaaS SEO Business (2008 – present)

At Thomson Directories, we had built some award-winning CD-ROM based marketing products in the Business Information business, and had also built a PPC bid-management platform (and a successful revenue stream from selling PPC to local businesses), so we knew a thing or two about developing internet products.

So we set out to build a cloud-based SEO platform that would have inherent advantages over the downloadable desktop SEO products out there. It had to be process driven and integrate with Google Analytics so we could measure real success metrics like visitors and conversions. 

We soon realised this would be a better business for us to be in long-term. We stopped looking for new SEO and website development customers (we don’t want to compete with our customers) and we’ve been building it out ever since. It’s been hard but ultimately very rewarding.

So how can this peripatetic history possibly prepare us for the rigours of the SEO world? Well we’ve built plenty of websites and have made our fair share of mistakes and seen our fair share of issues. We’ve also got between us extensive online marketing experience, product development experience and a track record of building successful businesses. But perhaps more importantly than all of this, is the experience of working with some of the world’s top golf coaches. This has given me some valuable insights into what it takes to go from good to great.

From Good to Great

Just as there are many good SEO tools globally, there are many good golfers. There are however not that many great SEO tools and not that many great golfers. So the question is, “What does it take to go from good to great?”

Jim Collins, a respected business guru not golf coach, in his excellent book “Good to Great”, examined hundreds of top US companies to find answers and he asks the question, “Can a good company become a great company? And if so how?”

Pete Cowen, PGA Master Professional (see profile), is Europe’s most successful golf coach as measured by player victories (or as our US based friends would say, he’s the most winningest golf coach on the European tour). He has worked with some of the very best players in the world including with Lee Westwood for over 15 years until he reached the dizzy heights of World No.1. He’s currently working with World No.1 Luke Donald and about a dozen great golfers. He’s also worked with other really good players and elite amateurs that haven’t made the grade.

If you ask him, he can tell you that when a new player asks him to coach them (there’s a queue for his services) he can tell whether they’ve got what it takes to compete at the highest level just by looking at them and conversing with them before they’ve even hit a ball!

You see great golf is about more than hitting a golf ball well. Just like SEO, many people know the theory and can execute it well, but only a few become great. And it takes a range of skills, talent, experience, hard work and a whole team to become truly great at both golf and SEO (not necessarily at the same time). Most importantly you have to have the attitude, the burning desire, the balls….let’s call it all the ethos to put it all together and to shoot for world-class. This is what we are aiming for. And when you analyse what it takes to be a great golfer and a great SEO, there’s a lot of similarities!

Comparison of an Elite Golfer’s Traits vs an Elite SEO’s

Good SEO is not that hard (good golf is harder). After all, research we carried out a year ago showed that just under half of UK businesses didn’t have the basic SEO elements in place. Great golf requires commitment, dedication and the relentless pursuit of specific and measurable goals, mid course-correction, and the strength of will to recover from the odd setback along the way. Sound at all familiar? Great SEO encompasses all of this too.

Take a look at the following two well known success models from world leading practitioners in the world of golf and the world of SEO:

Pete Cowen’s Pyramid of Learning
 

Rand Fishkin’s SEOMoz Diagram

Similar philosophies? Hey, they’re both pyramids! Plus there's the fact that both suggest that success comes through adopting a methodical and systematic approach to the challenge and that the fundamentals must be sound before you try and go too far.

The SEOMoz pyramid suggests, “For optimal results start with a strong base and build your way up”. Pete Cowen describes his swing philosophy as a continuous process of improvement and refinement that starts with the technical fundamentals of balance, posture, arm hang and grip. Like building a house, you first get the foundations right and then start building on top of this solid platform with more advanced techniques.

One addition I’d humbly suggest to the SEOMoz pyramid is the attitude layer from Pete Cowen’s Pyramid of Learning. As mentioned above you’ve got to be systematic, relentless, focused and take a long-term view, roll with the ups and downs, the wins and losses, the penalties and keep a focus on your goals and keep refining your actions until you get the results your efforts deserve. Eventually (after a lot of hard work) you end up with 'Trust' - in your website or in yourself and your golf swing.

You also need a team around you.

A great golfer has a great team around them. For most golfers it might look like this (obviously some coaches cover several of these roles):

So my question is to all SEOs out there is, “Who’s on your team?”

Comparison of an Elite Golfer’s Team & an Elite SEO’s Team

You’ll notice that even golfers use analytics software! If you play golf check-out Strokeaverage.com – as an amateur it will help you systematically track every aspect of your game to help you identify the necessary changes to improve your game. Sound familiar? The purpose of our SEO software, is to systematically track all the important and relevant factors that can impact your SEO, so that you can make the necessary changes to improve your results. You’re playing a different game; but it is a game and almost as lucrative!

Great golfers use specific analytics tools like Stroke Average by building it in to their day-to-day ‘working’ lives.

Here’s an example Stroke Average report from a very well known and great golfer’s analytics. Only by measuring up against the very best and being honest about what’s poor, average, good, excellent and truly world-class can he really identify gaps that can be addressed. Don’t you think it looks a little bit like one of our lovely Analytics SEO performance benchmarking reports? By devising a system of continuous improvement and by having software to support this process, a top golfer can compete effectively at the highest level.

With SEO, you’ll notice the metrics are different, but the approach to measuring what makes a difference is the same.

Pete Cowen says, “The road to success is always under construction”. Great players no matter how great they become always want to get better. Perfection is not possible. That’s why great players like Tiger Woods and Nick Faldo achieve great things in the game and then make swing changes to try and get that little bit better than the rest. Getting to World No.1 is hard enough, staying there is even harder.

So how does this apply to our SEO Software business and to your SEO business?

If you’re a current or prospective customer or partner

Our philosophy is, “The day we think the software is finished we will be”. 

• We want everything about our business to be great; world-class.

• We will measure ourselves against the best, and strive to be that little bit better.

• We will systematically improve every aspect of what we do time and time again

• If you join us, you’ll be on our team and we’ll be on yours.

We know that you need a whole team to achieve great SEO success. We’d like to be a small but fundamental part of your team - and we’ll do our utmost to support you to achieve your goals by building software and offering services, advice and technical support to help you gain an edge over your competitors.

We’d also like you to be part of our team too. It’s a two way street and we are very open to suggestions, opinions, advice and candid feedback about any aspect of our business. We have a concept which I call, “The Customer Within”. This means when you join us, we listen, we respond, we act. We may not be able to deliver everything you need immediately (or, in a few cases, ever) but we’ll always endeavour to and will only make promises we intend to keep. We’ll share our plans with you and get your input into the development process as early as we can. If you want to get really involved we even have a customer Steering Committee that helps set our direction and priorities.

What does this mean for you, if you use our software? 

We are constantly updating the software and have a very long plan of what we can do in the future. But we are flexible to respond to market changes (algorithm updates) and customer suggestions. The software is updated every week, minor features once a week and we have designed the system so that we can make an instant change if we really need to respond quickly. We have also built it so the more sites we add to the system the better the system gets – see SEO effectiveness research. We’ve also recently completed a funding round to double the engineering team and accelerate our plans.

If you’re keen to join our team and work with us every day

What does this philosophy mean? Does it mean you have to play golf to join us?

No, but it certainly wouldn’t hurt ;-)

All it means is you have got to have a heartfelt desire to be part of a winning team (and that includes being a virtual part of our customers’ teams). Helping others, listening, analysing and optimising are key skills - you’re a problem solver and want to make a difference. When you join our team, rest assured we’ll be on yours too.

So I hope you can see - there really are loads of parallels between golf and SEO!

Right now we’re pretty good compared to most alternatives (that’s why we’re always open and honest about other products) but we’re on a journey to great! And this is a road that’s always going to be under construction!

One day, after building a successful software business, I plan to retire and join the European (or US) Senior Tour! Clearly, after one or two seasons I’d love to rank No.1 on the money list ;-)

In the meantime I can be contacted anytime by any of the usual methods (as can the whole team).