Affiliate Sites, Agency & Australia's Biggest SEO - James Norquay Interview

[00:01] companies are just lazy like they don't want to invest in training most clients that we work with are in like Asia Pacific so like 80% of our clients are in Australia I mean most of the work we do is English-speaking markets so we

[00:14] don't really do foreign markets I seen a lot of like agencies trying to recruit people to come from UK to Australia cuz I think there's favorable Visa Australia's biggest SEO conference Sydney SEO in March we have like 30 test

[00:29] webs sites and some of these test websites have um grown into be like mini Brands kind of blown up cuz they're in different verticals it's generating hundreds of thousands of clicks so how do you see Google sge affecting

[00:44] know there's rumors that it's not coming out it out it [Music]

[01:01] and welcome back to another interview in today's episode I've got James Norway one of the ogs of the SEO industry for sure I've known James for pretty much definitely one of the first people that I ran into he now runs Australia's

[01:18] biggest SEO conference one of the biggest digital marketing agencies in Australia as well and he was famous for diversifying his portfolio away from just client work into a at space so we'll get into all of that throughout

[01:32] channel James nor ladies and gentlemen thanks for having me Charles um yeah I think I've known you for many years probably like over 12 years or something like that um since when you first kind of got into SEO so yeah I

[01:46] remember chatting back to you and Matthew Barbie on Skype like long time ago so yeah definitely uh kept in touch over the years yeah I I remember the Skype groups inbound. org as well was the on back in the day with the the the

[02:02] original kind of Reddit up votes for for the SEO Community I remember reading Viper chill's posts and stuff and always talking about it with you as well those gigantic kind of long editorials were were awesome those days were really the

[02:14] kind of the OG days as well like it was it was definitely um it's also amazing from from those days because a lot of people kind of had jobs or had you know people like yourself kind of running one of the the biggest digital Market ages

[02:29] people running some of the biggest dig Market agencies in the UK Canada right you know talking mult multi10 million a year agencies and stuff it's really it's really quite amazing um so kind of talking about your agency how did you

[02:43] get started with prosperity media um so yeah basically I um used to run like a big Myspace layout site that hit over 20 million unique visitors so that's kind of how I got into SEO um and then I had like entertainment sites so

[02:59] we had um sites ranking in the US market in different like entertainment niches basically like music and things like that and then um yeah I was doing really well from that like making a couple hundred dollars a day on Google um

[03:13] Google AdSense back in the day and just different like Revenue sources and um my parents were like go and get a real job so I was like living at home at the time with my parents just staying up to like 3:00 4:00 a.m. working or doing SEO like

[03:29] then I was just doing all sorts of random stuff just testing stuff and then yeah I went and got a job at an agency um back in like 2008 um so at the time I

[03:41] didn't like I just applied for a few jobs and then people were like you know too much like you're a risk blah blah blah but then I I went for a job somewhere and the guy was like oh like I need someone to like lead a team and

[03:54] start an SEO offering um so yeah basically I was kind of went from running my own sites to kind of starting an SEO offering for at the time it was Australia's largest Media company so they were like a media buyer and they

[04:09] were doing like hundreds of millions of dollars in media buying and those people were spending millions and millions a month on like Google ads but they had no SEO offering so they were Outsourcing all that back in 2008 and I kind of came

[04:22] in and had to build an offering and then I was there for like 4 years and build up that and they hired a whole bunch of people and then in 2012 pretty much went

[04:34] and started Prosperity media um so yeah we're probably the largest SEO we're probably the largest SEO specialist agency in Sydney um so yeah we're Specialists for SEO digital PR and content and we do a bit of analytics and

[04:49] stuff but we don't do paid media so yeah we've uh grown the team from just me to we've uh grown the team from just me to we've got over 28 people now so yeah damn that's a that's a massive team size especially considering you're just

[05:02] specializing in SEO and I think that that uh a lot of agencies do kind of go too broad with their offerings right and they don't kind of have that special they don't actually have even the expertise to be offering kind of those

[05:15] additional Services half the time right um so I think it's it's kind of within your nature to just 100% go down that path so because you're an Australian agency and you do have international clients um how have you found compete

[05:29] internationally as an Australian agency considering you are in kind of the the other end of the world for most clients in you know the UK or the US and stuff right yeah so I think most of the time most clients that we work with are in

[05:43] like Asia Pacific so like 80% of our clients are in Australia like 10% in New Zealand um and we've got a few in like Singapore we used to have a lot more clients in the US primarily like around like the like LA California like Seattle

[06:02] like we've worked across that time zone cuz that that time zone is pretty good for Australia like usually the morning in Australia is the afternoon and night for them so you can work with clients in that time zone but yeah UK time zone is

[06:15] a little bit trickier but we have done jobs in the UK before like I think like if for like Global Brands and if you're doing a good job they they'll just let you work across multiple markets if you're getting results you know I don't

[06:30] think people care too much where you are but yeah it is it is hard for Europe and the UK for like connecting calls and things like that sometimes you got to stay back late and but we've definitely like we've done jobs everywhere you know

[06:43] like we've done jobs in the UK Australia Singapore um all over the US so like working primarily anywhere is not really an issue have you found dealing with

[06:55] clients from different demographics kind of different um I mean most of the work we do is english- speaking markets so we don't really do foreign markets that's definitely something that like it's it

[07:08] gets too complex like we have people that say can you do our Italian SEO speakers in our office like we don't have a Italian link builders that know how to get it links and things like that like I mean people just use vendors or

[07:21] whatever to get links but um yeah I think um I mean in terms of how people are different in different markets like in a Australia clients um can maybe be a

[07:33] in a Australia clients um can maybe be a bit more chill I think in the US and UK people are a bit more like want stuff quickly in Singapore people want stuff quickly too like it's funny like a couple of um weeks ago when it was like

[07:46] Christmas shutdown like in Australia like there's like Christmas shutdown right like everyone goes on holidays for like two or three weeks like no one replies to anything and then someone hit us up from Singapore for like a lead and

[07:59] they sent a lead and it was like over the two weeks that our office was shut and um they sent a lead on like Friday and then they sent another lead on Saturday and I was just like whoa like chill out like we'll reply like cuz like

[08:12] even if our office is shut down like I still reply to stuff like myself you know like just reply on the phone like let's lock in a call whatever but it's just like different markets I think like they expect maybe things quicker like

[08:25] very quick you know quick quick quick like want it now whereas Australia is a a little bit more like relaxed Vibes New Zealand's similar too like pretty Kickback but people still want results you know like people if they're spending

[08:37] good money they're going to they're going to want results but um I think there's definitely a lot more like work life balance in Australia like people want to work from like 9 till 5: and then it shuts off but in America like

[08:50] and in the UK maybe you working longer hours too yeah we don't know what work life balance is in a lot a lot of UK SEO people are actually moving to Australia like it's

[09:04] been I've seen a lot cuz Australian SEO salaries like would play pay seos pretty well here and yeah I think I'd probably say higher than UK so um yeah I've seen a lot of like agencies trying to recruit people to come from UK to Australia cuz

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[10:44] campaign I think it's multiple things right like the UK is seeing a kind of downward spiraling downward economy and the weather's trash the people are negative know there's crime like going through the roof and stuff right so

[10:58] there's this kind of whole thing where it's just if if you can move down under where you've got sunshine happiness and better pay then you've got kind of everything you've ever asked for right um oh 100% yeah I I also do think that

[11:11] um oh 100% yeah I I also do think that with um a lot of the agency hires there seems to be a lack of solid people at the moment like there just seems to be and I don't know whether it's because

[11:23] people are scared at the moment to change jobs because of like Ai and move even change positions and things because they don't know if they're risking their career path to do so um or it's just because people are kind of

[11:37] kind of stuck I don't know we we've we've been uh trying to take in as many recruiting business that we're starting soon and it's genuinely been quite difficult to get certain types of people like there's there seems to be kind of a

[11:52] with development experience or development backgrounds and things like that um so if you if you're out there and you you know feel undervalued you probably are so I would try and look for

[12:05] like said there's an abundance of jobs and seems like there is a there seems to be a lack of quality people to fulfill them at the moment I think the biggest problem there is like people don't want to train people up you know like I think

[12:19] um like we've trained a lot of SEO people up over the years and there's a couple of other agencies that do it but people just like companies are just lazy training cuz to train someone up you got to invest like two or 3 years of your

[12:32] companies just don't want to do that you know like um I yeah I I think um the other thing that we've seen not recently is like hiring for different types of

[12:44] roles like hiring like say like a data Specialist or like a junior data person sometimes that can be a good fit to get like a technical SEO person cuz like a lot of people that are in the data World they don't know about SEO

[12:59] coding they want a freaking chance at a job like there's like tens of thousands of people in that industry where there can be a bit of crossover so sometimes just mixing up job ads and testing different stuff has worked as well to

[13:13] get different people that may not even know SEO exists but they've spent five years doing data and they're they know coding and they love the internet so yeah yeah and even to your point as well I think a lot of people um kind of a lot

[13:30] of agencies especially just don't have up-to-date training don't have proper Sops don't have anything really so e even not not even to do with like onboarding people even their current staff aren't kind of up to scratch and

[13:43] because they just don't have that base level things and I do understand that you know as a CEO and as a CEO and stuff the last thing you want to be really to sign up for an account and do something right but if you don't have

[13:57] that initial layer of training as you grow as a company you do just deteriorate in terms of quality because you do because as you hire onboard new people or as people grow into new positions They Don't Really level up and

[14:09] level of quality as the person that was doing it before them as that person levels up because the training and stuff isn't there right so I definitely agree with that entire premise um 100% yeah know we've invested big in like on

[14:21] boarding and Sops and for like the last 10 years we've been investing in that you know and like you you have to because if you don't like that's people to do things and you have to constantly be updating Sops too because things

[14:36] change you know like every every freaking month in SEO something changes so you got to continuously update stuff because it becomes out of date very very quickly okay so let's let's move away from all that kind of stuff and move

[14:50] over to your conference now so you're running Australia's biggest SEO conference it's Sydney SEO in March I think um yeah yeah how have you developed this over the last few years because I I've run events and I know how

[15:03] much of a pain in the ass it really is trying to organize these things yeah lot of people just don't do it because it's just the cost like running anything in Australia is costly like I think people don't realize how much costs

[15:17] as well like putting like a a one- day event on you might have to spend $80,000 to just for all the different random stuff you know so um and then you got to sell tickets and you got to pay for Avatar in and you got to make it

[15:30] affordable too so we only charge like $349 for our tickets and that's pretty damn affordable considering you're getting like food we get bartab you get getting like food we get bartab you get really good SEO speakers so like it's

[15:43] invest in that you see people that are like oh I'm not going to pay $349 like you're going to your team when they come down are going to learn a lot you're going to be networking it's going to be next level so yeah I think um um people

[15:59] like yourself Matt Diggity like they we've invested a lot into running these events and giving back to the industry because yeah if someone has to do it at other companies that were trying to do events in Australia but they just charg

[16:13] too much you know they charge like 2,000 3,000 a ticket not that many talks like um I think uh that's pretty much what I started doing it just to give back to the community um bring really good people down to Australia like we've had

[16:29] like Kyle Ruth come down we've had Matt Diggity we've had um Bernard from Clear scope um Alita Solace so we've bring some big names down and like we usually they come down and and do like a half day session with our team you know many

[16:43] we've done masterminds here so it's a lot of fun you know yeah and like I said I I think the connection to networking is a massive part of it it's it was the uh the masterminds and things for me was what really leveled up I think my

[16:58] kind of the SEO side of things right because I i' I've I've been able to rank for the last 20 years last 15 years whatever that's fine right it's the actual monetizing part of it that I kind of struggled with especially when you're

[17:12] you know when I was like 14 15 just not understanding how to properly um value maximize things and just not even understanding the worth of things definitely helped me develop going forward what what I want to talk about

[17:26] is you diversifying your agency away from just clients into your own sites and into your own affiliate sites and these site spaces how are you getting on Endeavor yeah I mean like we've been doing sites forever because like that's

[17:43] Myspace layout site I had some other websites so at the moment um the way that we kind of have really grown that up as an agency is um we have like 30 up as an agency is um we have like 30 test websites so um just testing

[17:57] different things you know and some of these test websites have um grown into be like mini Brands um like where they've kind of blown up because they're in different verticals and um yeah like some of them have done really well you

[18:10] know and like I've bought websites too um I don't know if you saw my talk at changai I did a workshop talked about some sites that we' bought um like bought sites that were ranking in the UK and then flipped it to Australian Market

[18:24] and then flipped it to Australian Market um yeah some have done really well um stuff you know I just put up something on LinkedIn today about uh one uh traffic uh test that we did on one site and basically we're looking at pay wall

[18:39] sites looking at sites that have um low competition uh like behind paywall low competition keywords and we're building out like Pages based on that at scale and um it's generating hundreds of thousands of clicks just through low

[18:54] competition pay wall sites with like no pay wall and titles and things like that it's just testing random stuff just like it's fun you know like if there's some new type of wacky schema that comes out we'll test it on one of our own sites

[19:06] before we roll it out onto a client because yeah it doesn't matter if you stuff something up on one of the test sites but yeah for these big brands that yeah I think having that test environment as an agency is is very

[19:20] powerful because too many agencies and especially having a testment as a team as well so that you can do Team level experimentation and things like that it really gives you an edge up and an Insight above just agencies who are only

[19:32] can mess things up and it doesn't really matter so that's kind of perfect so how do you see Google sge affecting affiliate and these sites going forward I know there's rers that it's not coming out it is like it will eventually roll

[19:48] out um and and there's kind of rumors that it's going to be watered down it's only going to be 10% of the Surs it's only going to be 80% the Surs you know from my testing it looks to be like 50 to 60% of maybe 40% in sub niches are

[20:01] showing SG um but how do you see SG affecting affiliate n site client sites going forward yeah it's definitely going to affect affiliate sites in a big way um I think like especially like info content sites um I mean there's been a

[20:16] lot of people testing different things to get like data points on the the level definitely feel like Affiliates will get hit pretty hard um I think the other thing is the way that I've always looked

[20:28] at sge and the way that we've been playing around with it is we're looking for like new opportunities how you can optimize for sge so like when you search for a keyword we want to show up in all the like like We call we tell clients

[20:42] the super snippet you know like show up and all that and then working out ways where we can pull in phone numbers to SG and all sorts of stuff so I think there's going to be new opportunities for people I think uh even if it does

[20:55] get rolled out I think a lot of clients will start to panic because they think they might think like traffic's going to get lost which it probably will but then there's going to be new opportunity for people to like selling new Services you

[21:07] know like generative AI SEO services or S rankings or whatever and like I think like there'll be new Consulting opportunities and um yeah but Affiliates will get hit hard you know like and info content sites like display ad sites um

[21:24] content sites like display ad sites um zero click searches is going to rise um definitely 100% yeah it's I think it's uh going to affect basically every vertical and every nobody's going to be safe

[21:37] unfortunately everyone's going to see some uh loss or some think effect or in the SE that it's right it's it's kind of um just in an inevitability in my opinion it's so getting away from SG but still staying within the AI realm how

[21:53] are you using AI if you are using it at all for your clients and your own site portfolio yeah for our own sites like we've been testing AI for years you know we've been testing AI for years you know like um even like before chat GPT like

[22:06] we were using like Jasper just testing it out um even on some of our own sites recently we've done some tests where we tested like AI content versus human ridden content versus human plus AI so we're doing a lot of tests like that um

[22:21] I definitely feel like for a lot of the kind of niches that we're in we still need human writers but definitely like AI content is definitely taking off and especially for the affiliate sites we are using it um I think you got to have

[22:34] good prompts you got to you really have to be editing it a bit as well I think um too many people are just jumping into chat GPT and say write an article about best things to do in Sydney and then like 50 other people are doing the same

[22:48] thing you know that's when you you it's not going to work but definitely we we still have our some in-house content writers and um yeah I think it's got to be a mix of both yeah for sure well I appreciate you

[23:02] coming on and is there anywhere on anyone online can find you um yeah I mean um just like on LinkedIn James Norway just follow me or add me to LinkedIn um just don't spam me with random backlink offers on LinkedIn

[23:17] because I already get enough of that um if you're in Sydney um come come to uh Sydney SEO conference on the first first of March um at Sydney um use the code

[23:30] LinkedIn I think that'll give you $50 off um but yeah it's going to be a great event um yeah but Twitter LinkedIn um follow me on there or just check out Prosperity media.com um happy to chat perfect thank

[23:46] you for coming on and I'll see you guys in the next one peace