Episode Transcript
Adam O'Leary (00:01.134)
If you're a business owner struggling to get more organic traffic to your website without spending a fortune on paid ads, then our guest, Harry Sanders is about to give you a simple win you can implement today. Harry Sanders is the founder of Studio Hawk, one of the largest global SEO agencies with a team of 120 specialists across Australia, the UK and the US. He also co-founded Cadi Luggage,
a fast growing travel brand that recently became Meyers most successful luggage launch. Harry, so excited to have you there. This is going to be a great episode.
Harry Sanders (00:36.767)
Thanks Adam, stoked to be on here.
Adam O'Leary (00:39.062)
Absolutely. So I've heard you discuss how digital PR can dramatically boost SEO authority. Why is focusing on data driven stories more effective than technical SEO tweaks for new brands?
Harry Sanders (00:44.619)
Mmm.
Harry Sanders (00:52.649)
Yeah, so I think a lot of people get very confused with SEO because unfortunately, as we always joke, like the most common two words we say in SEO is it depends. Now, if you're a small brand, know, technical SEO is not gonna get you that far. And that might be a controversial thing to say. You wanna get the foundational stuff right by all means. Like you wanna make sure that the website's laid out properly, you've got a good internal links and Google can obviously understand your website.
But if you start going deep into optimizing your heading tags and image alt tags and all these things, you've gone too deep in the source. Let me back you up and let's talk about digital PR. So digital PR, as you kind of said, Adam, is acquiring links in bigger publications, know, Forbes or niche relevant publications, talking about or referencing your brand. Talking about is probably the wrong word. So why this has blown up is because of AI and LLMs.
They're really looking for these big credible sources, linking ideally, but mentioning your brand. And data-led stories are the best way to get in there.
Adam O'Leary (02:00.0)
That's fascinating. And when it comes to AI, I know this is on everybody's mind right now. Why are you saying that going out and getting this sort of backlinks sort of press digital PR is more important when it comes to AI? If you can just kind of dig into that just a little bit more, just go the audience can really understand.
Harry Sanders (02:17.675)
Hmm.
Yeah, so AI is all about contextual information and serving relevant contextual information. Just like search engines, they're not very different, right? In fact, LLMs, AI mode, Gemini, Perplexity all use Google or a variant of their search to come up with their answers when you do a live query. Now, whenever something says searching for, that's effectively doing what we call fan out queries, which is 10, 12 different searches to compile that information and serve it to a user.
So why is digital PR important? Well, links have always been important since the inception of Google, right? You you'll famously remember PageRank was Google's kind of proprietary algorithm for ranking websites based on niche relevant links. Digital PR is just an extension of that because previously Google really only cared about links. Now you're seeing in AI engines that mentions are becoming powerful as well. And they want to see brands that are authoritative sources. So if you're able to produce data that positions you as an authoritative
source, like an example would be for for caddy luggage, we had a, you know, we were trying to get publications in the travel niche. Now, if you just reach out and say, we've got some fantastic suitcases, we'll send you some, you want to cover us? That's been done a million times. Journals are kind of sick of that. And there's also a quarter of many journalists as they were pre COVID. So if you reach out and say, hey, Adam, my favorite journalist buddy, I've got an article for you about the worst times to fly. And you're like, that's a cool article. And it's got data.
And all it says is new data from Caddy luggage. It doesn't talk about Caddy luggage, but these AI search engines or AI engines will pick that up and go, wow, these Caddy guys must be pretty authoritative to be getting these big publications like Escape or Travel Destinations, all these big travel companies talking about them.
Adam O'Leary (04:09.047)
That's fantastic. Okay, so I'm starting to get the hang of it now. I'm starting to see where you're going with this. So how are we going to go ahead and you're talking about this? I guess you would refer to it as almost like data stories, right? You're, creating these stories that have data's in it, but how, if I'm just a business owner and I'm not necessarily, I've never done this before. I'm not thinking about it. What are some ways that they can start identifying different sort of
Harry Sanders (04:12.373)
Mmm.
Harry Sanders (04:20.117)
Mm-mm.
Harry Sanders (04:31.445)
Mmm.
Adam O'Leary (04:35.521)
data stories that they could be able to present to these media outlets.
Harry Sanders (04:40.543)
Yeah, so we have a protocol, we call it the Raids Protocol, which is super nerdy, because I play too many video games, I play too much World of Warcraft, and so we came up with Raids. And it's about coming up with ideation and all these things that you need to do. But the good news is, you can do this stuff theoretically for free, right? It just requires a bit of creative thinking. So when you're thinking ideas, you've gotta remember what you want people to talk about. I would love people to talk about, you know,
Studio, I'd love to talk about it's the best SEO company. Journals don't want to write about that, right? But what they do want to write about is stuff that people are looking for. So journals are interested in writing content around AI search. So we reach out to a lot of journals with data that we compile and provide to them. Now that data might sound sophisticated, but like in the case of Caddy, right? I like to use real examples. We did a airlines with the most hidden fees. got, you know, a hundred pieces of coverage, which is just immense and incredible SEO value. And
To get that data, you know what we did Adam? We just went to a bunch of airline websites, had like a standard like thing that we checked, we'd say we needed 10 kilos of baggage, we needed, know, are we paying extra in flight for meal service? What are the add-ons and the costs, you know, to come up with what airlines had the most hidden fees? And we just shared that process with the journalists, because how you collect that data is very important. And it took off, it really resonated. So it doesn't have to be insane.
It can just be simple ideas like that.
Adam O'Leary (06:11.213)
I'm not even joking. Okay, now that you just said that, that popped up on my Google News. That exact story.
Harry Sanders (06:16.619)
Well there you go man, there you go, that's digital PR, it's working.
Adam O'Leary (06:21.665)
That's amazing. Yeah, because I've traveled to over a hundred countries now. So I mean, they must know that I love travel and that is hysterical that you just said that because I literally saw that article.
Harry Sanders (06:32.575)
Yeah, and another great example, if you're like, know, this is big in the UK, I think it made its way to the US. We were doing some work with the brand and they, do you remember that Banksy piece? I think it was a few years ago now, they got shredded when it sold. Do you remember that? Did you ever see those articles that said it doubled in value after it got shredded? Did you see those? That was all digital PR. So what a company did is they went out and it was actually someone we work with and they would go out and
Adam O'Leary (06:47.339)
Yep. Yes.
Adam O'Leary (06:53.004)
Yeah.
Mm.
Harry Sanders (07:02.549)
go to publishers and say, they got a value on, they went out to a value where that was in one of their clients and they said, hey, would you say that this had doubled in value? And they're like, I don't know, maybe. And they're like, let's just say it had because we can get a ton of press off this. And that's what it was. And you can see this stuff in everyday life.
Adam O'Leary (07:20.373)
That's fantastic. Okay. Super, super cool. And so let's kind of break this down step by step. So from idea to the actual, like the actual gathering of the data to there, what is like the step by step process that somebody would realistically follow here?
Harry Sanders (07:38.197)
So like, I mean, we could do a whole thing on this. Like, so you wanna start with like the ideation process. Basically you wanna start then getting data to prove that process. So you go, okay, what data could I, I've got some great ideas. What data could I get to support those ideas, which we kind of discussed. Then you wanna start coming up with a media list and going through who would
who's covered this previously so that they would potentially cover it again and you can use like Hunter or hunter.io which is like a tool to fetch journalists details or if you're more commercial you can use a tool like Muckrack which we would use which is at a bigger scale and then you can start messaging these people and following up. I mean that's what it is in a simple process. And then just keep in touch, have good journal relations. We recently...
did a YouTube video kind of explaining this whole thing because there's no real secrets here, Adam. It's like, you know, it's just sharing this information. But that's all it really is in breaking down.
Adam O'Leary (08:48.528)
So if I go out and do this, okay, and I start going to get all this digital PR, let's say if I have a hundred people go publish my story, how do you measure the impact of this digital PR efforts?
Harry Sanders (08:54.891)
Mmm.
Harry Sanders (09:02.527)
Yeah, so this is where it gets fun and tricky, right? So the hard part about this whole thing is tracking nowadays with AI is very, very hard, right? And I actually think it's only going to get harder because what's gonna happen is, look, I find myself guilty of it already. When I'm searching for something, I'll pull up AI mode because it's just convenient, like it's just in Google.
and it'll come up with a series of brands and I'll just copy those brands and go to their website, right? And that'll come through as direct traffic, not organic. And that means it's really hard to see where these sources are coming from. Also, it means that for a lot of informational content, you're not gonna get traffic anymore. Google's basically saying, we're gonna take all that traffic, we're gonna leave it on the Google ecosystem, we're still gonna give you the transactional keywords, which is ultimately what it is.
what people should care about, but we are gonna be taking that educational content, which is a big change.
Adam O'Leary (10:07.638)
That's crazy. I guess, so how can a business owner really look at that and say, you know what, this is actually a good idea to try versus, you know what, this sounds too difficult. It's, it's, it's, and Google's taking all the traffic anyways. Like what is that separation there?
Harry Sanders (10:25.237)
Well, I think it's the harsh reality and to be controversial is if you're not doing this, you'll get beaten by people that are. It's like saying I'm running an e-commerce shop and I'm not gonna do meta ads because they're expensive. Like, cool, you can do that. That's an approach you can take. You're not gonna scale as fast as brands that are doing that. And if you're one of those brands and nothing against you, but you're like, well, meta ads are working for me. I don't know why I would waste time doing stuff like this. Well, your meta ads are gonna get more and more expensive. There's gonna be more and more competitors with.
better and better margins, this is your moat. You can own this journey, right? Just like you own your website. You can help optimize the journey that people might go through to get to your website. Because even if your meta ads are working great now, I would say in a year's time, people are gonna be more more discerning and we can already see it in user behavior. They're looking to conversational agents like ChatDBT, Google AI,
AI mode to get more information around businesses. Are these legit? What are the big drawbacks? All this kind of stuff that previously people weren't looking at so much, they were just clicking to buy on Meta. But if you're not optimizing this whole journey, you're going to lose out to people that are.
Adam O'Leary (11:39.115)
And you're forgetting about the most important thing about Facebook ads is that I was spending $150,000 a month on Facebook ads. And one day they just stopped. just, they just blocked the account. And then I had to spend a month to get the account reactivated, which was madness.
Harry Sanders (11:57.759)
Yeah, and I wish that was a unique story. It'd be rarer to hear from someone that hasn't had that happen to them. It's remarkable.
Adam O'Leary (12:05.004)
for sure. It's insane. I mean, you're giving somebody basically a house a month and they say, no, don't want your money right now. Absolutely. No, a hundred percent. No, this is fascinating. And I guess from what you've seen, I mean, you have literally all the data of what your clients have done. What sort of results have you seen from companies who have actually focused on this, this digital PR and where can people go to learn more about you?
Harry Sanders (12:10.749)
Yeah, yeah, yeah, seriously. mean, Zuckerberg's living good.
Harry Sanders (12:22.783)
Mm.
Harry Sanders (12:34.729)
Yeah, so digital PR, I think is, you it's a pillar of SEO. You still need, like we spoke about, still having the fundamentals of technical, right? And again, like it varies depending on who you are. If you're a massive enterprise brand, you're probably better focused on like technical SEO, right? Because you probably already got a lot of digital power. That's not to say that you couldn't use more, but you know, there's certain complexities on, and if you're not posting any content, then...
Google doesn't see you as an authority even if you are having external sites and your technical is great. it's, know, when people say, do I focus on? It's like, well, it's like what chair is the most important on a three-legged chair? It's like, you kind of need to do all these things just different ways. But you know, the results that we're seeing, astronomical, like for StudioHook, for instance, we get the majority of our leads through our SEO, which makes sense. But we also on top of that are now seeing,
Our SEO is climbing, but we're also seeing one of our biggest other lead channels, which is completely new, is AI Search. People saying that they're finding us on ChatGBT. What's interesting is this is like an additional lead channel to what we're seeing through traditional search. We're seeing this across the board. It's very, I'll split it out in two parts. B2B, we're seeing a lot of this. B2B SaaS, B2B everything. There's a lot of value in...
optimizing for AI, for doing the basic SEO principles that are then optimizing you for AI. Because people are distrustful, people have been burnt a million times before of businesses similar to yours, and they go and research and they ask AI because we trust AI, I don't know why we do, but we do. And when it tells us these things, these sweet little songs in our ear, we believe them and we'll go out and engage with these companies. But in B2C, we're not seeing that happen so much right now, right?
Most of the B2C brands we're working with see, know, despite the hype, 0.5 % of their traffic is coming through AI. And what's really interesting about that is it's not increasing. In fact, it was 0.7 % earlier this year for a lot of those brands, because we work with hundreds of clients in all sorts of verticals and we we dashboard this out and look at that data and it hasn't been increasing in B2C, however, it is in B2B.
Harry Sanders (14:54.059)
The only standouts from that are high ticket items. So high ticket B2C items where people are doing more research. But it's fascinating to see the hype versus what's really happening.
Adam O'Leary (15:08.554)
That is amazing. And where can people go to learn more about you?
Harry Sanders (15:12.011)
So we've got obviously studiohawk.com, I've got my website harrysanders.com and we've got a YouTube channel which we've just kind of started and we're talking about like if you're interested in the RAIDs protocol that we talked about for digital PR, we've got content there too.
Adam O'Leary (15:26.462)
Amazing. Well, Harry, thank you. Thank you. Thank you so much for your time. This was a fantastic interview.
Harry Sanders (15:32.085)
Thanks Adam, appreciate it.
Adam O'Leary (15:33.983)
Awesome, well thank you all for listening and I will see you on the next episode of Simple Wins.
