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My guest for Episode #310 of the My Favorite Mistake podcast is Andrew Laws, Founder of the SEO agency Yeseo IO and host of The Business Amplifier Podcast. Andrew has been working in digital marketing for over 25 years and has seen just about every shift in the SEO landscape. But one of the biggest lessons of his career came not from Google’s algorithm, but from a catastrophic business event involving hackers, a two-year police investigation, and a decision that changed everything.
Andrew shares the harrowing story of building a successful web hosting company—only to have it destroyed by cybercriminals just as he was preparing to sell it. The hackers didn’t just crash servers—they triggered legal threats, emotional exhaustion, and a complete shutdown of Andrew’s businesses at the time. But through that painful chapter, Andrew found clarity. He realized he had been doing too much alone and needed to build smarter, more resilient systems—and a team he could trust.
In our conversation, Andrew talks candidly about burnout, delegation, and how the right mistake can become a turning point. He also shares practical insights into what SEO really is (and isn’t) in 2025, why many people misunderstand Google’s algorithms, and why “doing good stuff” consistently still beats gimmicks and shortcuts. Whether you're a business owner, marketer, or just someone who's ever felt overwhelmed, Andrew’s story offers a timely reminder: the hardest setbacks can lead to the most meaningful resets.
Questions and Topics:
- What’s your favorite mistake?
- How did the hackers get in, and what did the police uncover?
- Why did you shut down not just the hosting business but also your SEO company?
- Did the hackers have a clear motive—was it ransom, malice, or something else?
- What lessons did you learn about web hosting and digital security?
- How did that experience affect your approach to business and leadership?
- What did you do differently when launching Yeseo?
- How do you now decide what to delegate versus do yourself?
- What tools or systems help you delegate effectively?
- How did you get into SEO in the first place?
- What's the biggest mistake companies make when it comes to SEO?
- How has SEO evolved, especially with the rise of AI?
- Does Google penalize AI-generated content, or is quality still the priority?
- Why does “snake oil” SEO still persist?
- Tell us about your podcast, The Business Amplifier. Who is it for?
- Who do you think is the greatest band of all time—and why?
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- Video version of the episode
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- Quotes
- Full transcript
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Actionable Takeaways from the Episode
Utilize and Adapt to Technology Wisely
Andrew advocates for the responsible use of AI-generated content, ensuring it’s useful to the audience rather than just filling space on a website. He stresses the importance of human oversight in verifying the relevancy and quality of AI content, demonstrating that while technology can aid in production, human judgment still plays a critical role. This insight suggests that businesses should integrate AI carefully, using it as a tool to enhance, not replace, authentic human creativity and insight.
Refine Your Business Strategy and Operations
Andrew Laws realized the importance of delegating tasks and optimizing operations. He learned that trying to do everything oneself could be detrimental. Implementing a system where tasks are delegated to capable team members could prevent burnout and lead to more efficient business operations. For instance, Andrew mentioned hiring a proofreader who could perform tasks more efficiently than he could himself, freeing up his time for other priorities.
Stay Authentic with SEO Practices
The episode highlights the significance of focusing on valuable and authentic content rather than relying on “black hat” SEO tricks. Laws emphasizes that genuine SEO efforts, like answering the real questions potential customers have, align with Google's aim of filtering out non-quality content. Andrew shares that focusing on real, helpful content resonating with the audience ultimately leads to better search engine performance.
Automated Transcript (May Contain Mistakes)
Mark Graban:
Hi. Welcome to My Favorite Mistake. I'm your host, Mark Graban. Our guest today is Andrew Laws. He founded an SEO agency called Yeseo IO. He's been, as he calls it, battling SEO for over 25 years.
So I think we're going to be able to talk about that later in the episode. Andrew is the host of a podcast. It's called The Business Amplifier Podcast. And he says when he's not in the office helping clients grow, he can be found in the studio or on stage making very loud noises. So, Andrew, welcome to the podcast. How are you?
Andrew Laws:
I'm okay, Mark. Thank you for welcoming me on. It's a nice little—oddly nice little—thing, hearing somebody else talk about you while you're here. I quite like that. I'm not sure what that says about me.
Mark Graban:
It's human nature, I think. We like to hear our own name, and we like to hear, I think, about ourselves. I've got to ask a question before we jump into anything involving mistakes. What do you mean by “very loud noises”?
Andrew Laws:
Very loud noises? Well, I play bass guitar, and I also play guitar—there's one just behind me. But I also make electronic music now. Guitars, I can kind of play. Electronic music—I’ve never really figured out how you're supposed to do it, but the equipment is very, very loud. You don’t have to work hard to be loud with synthesizers and drum machines and things. You just have to press a button and stand back and look confused—or just nod knowingly, just to hide the fact you don't know what's actually going on.
Mark Graban:
So you've been doing that as a hobby or—at any point—professionally? I know you've recorded some albums.
Andrew Laws:
Yeah, I've always been in the studio recording albums. I've made some money—certainly not enough to live on. I think I missed that curve. If I had been much better than I am… If I had had some talent… The secret to being in a band is always be the least talented person in the band. And I figured that out too late. My bandmates now are amazing, but if I hadn't met them 30 years ago, I might have actually made a career out of music.
Mark Graban:
Well, that sounds like the general business advice of surround yourself with people who are smarter than you or better than you at their jobs, huh?
Andrew Laws:
I find that very easy.
Mark Graban:
All right. So, Andrew, let's jump into the main question we usually start with… What's your favorite mistake?
Andrew Laws:
My favorite mistake is starting a web hosting company that I was about to sell but was destroyed by hackers and involved the Metropolitan Police — the London police people.
Mark Graban:
So — well, gosh — tell us more of the details of the… you know, so how did hackers get in? Or is that what the police were having to investigate? Or yeah, tell us more of what that meant to you in the business.
Andrew Laws:
I'll give you a very brief version of the story because it will count towards why I think this is my favorite mistake. So, as you know, I'm a musician and I started a company making buttons for bands and sold loads of them — absolutely loads of them. So I then thought — this is all whilst running an SEO agency — I thought, “Do you know what? A lot of these bands don't have anywhere to keep their websites.” So I started a web hosting company and it did really well.
I had 80 or 90 bands using my service. And then one day the server was playing up and I shut it down. You're not supposed to shut down web servers. And I got an email and it came through. It’s from somebody called Colonel Root and he'd sent an email from a major bank because it had the major bank's domain name.
And it said, “Haha, got you. What did you think you were doing, trying to kick me out of your server? Just to let you know I'm watching you.” I'm paraphrasing — “Just to let you know I'm watching you. And when you get the server running again, I'm going to destroy it again.”
And I was thinking — well — yikes, indeed, I was thinking. Then I had people threatening to sue me. It was not fun. Not a fun time at all.
And I was having a conversation with an associate, a developer guy, and he said, “Do you know, I know the person who does consultancy on computer security for the UK government. Do you want him to have a look at your… the remains of your web server?” I thought, well, why not?
He had a look and he said, “I think we've got quite a lot of evidence here.” So he said to me, “Do you mind if I contact the Metropolitan Police?” We have a weird thing with the police in this country — the London police had just started a department to look after the entire country because we're a very, very small country.
And the Metropolitan Police contacted me by just turning up on my doorstep — even though they're like from 100 miles away. They said, “Yeah, we want to pursue this.” And there was a two-year investigation. Loads of really interesting things happened. And then there was a court case.
Andrew Laws:
And in the court case, two people were convicted. One of the people who was convicted was somebody who was training to be a lawyer, but he also happened to run a website that trained criminals how to commit fraud — yeah — and how to hack. So the police were very excited. He didn't go to prison. He got what we call a suspended sentence. I don't know what it’d be in the States, but you get — I think…
Mark Graban:
We use that same phrase.
Andrew Laws:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So you have been convicted, but you're not going to go to prison unless you get caught for something else, I guess. And so I shut down not only that company but the SEO company I had at the time as well.
Mark Graban:
What was — did you ever figure out or did the police figure out or did these criminals admit their motivation? Like, they didn’t come after you — like nowadays you hear a lot about ransom attacks where people want bitcoin to turn things back on. Was it just digital vandalism? Was it just for thrills?
Andrew Laws:
We'll never know for sure. I never met the hackers. I never met them in person. The police wanted to keep me away from them — which sounds bad. No, they just didn’t want any interaction.
From what we can gather, they were using my server as a part of a relay. So setting up — you call it the Dark Web now — so setting up a chat system. And if you set up a chat system on the Dark Web, you don't just go to GoDaddy and get a server. You hack it and use other people's servers. And he thought I’d spotted this and he thought — this is all guesswork but fairly well-informed — we think he thought I had spotted him.
So out of malice decided to destroy the whole server. And it came out in court that him — there was one main guy — him and his friend had been… they'd started a campaign of harassment. They were harassing me. So they were ringing me up and leaving empty phone calls — you know, back from landlines, you used to pick it up and you go “hello?” — yeah, yeah, that happened all the time because the phone system where I live was terrible anyway.
But it turned out in court they were doing all these things to wind me up and harass me and I was completely oblivious to all of them. Because each time they ended — they found chat logs between these two guys talking about and planning and actually executing all these things to try and make my life miserable.
And I was completely oblivious. You know, these chat logs: “LOL, just sent a few more heavy breathing phone calls to Andrew.” I didn’t know.
Andrew Laws:
Yeah, so I think they put in a lot of work actually that didn’t pay off for them — because I was completely oblivious to it.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So, I mean, back to the beginning of the story — was the server just overloaded because of the stuff they were doing? Was that the symptom that you saw that led you to shut down the server?
Andrew Laws:
No. We did a security audit. I mean, this isn’t a web server that — my background originally is in building servers. So it wasn’t a server that was run like a Chernobyl or something. It was well looked after. And I think they spotted me doing a security audit and started messing with stuff.
And I fixed the computer, but when I brought it back up, they set every single file on the server to read-only — which effectively not only kills the server but makes it impossible to recover. Again, it’s dead. It’s just gone. There’s nothing you can do — well, certainly wasn’t back then. So they were very thorough.
Yeah, so malice, I guess, and frustration and annoyance. I guess that’s why they did it.
Mark Graban:
So I could understand how that destroyed the hosting business. You mentioned you also shut down an SEO company you had at the time. What was the connection there?
Andrew Laws:
I was just — I was broken by it, essentially. I'd worked — I’d built the business for ten years and poured myself into it at the same time as doing lots of other things. I was younger than I am now, and I just realized the fragility of it.
And at the same time I found out I was going to become a parent for the first time. And I just thought, “I'm done. I'm finished.” That’s it. If it can be taken away so easily… and it was such a dark, upsetting, miserable time to go through.
Close friends who were hosting with me were threatening me — legal action.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Andrew Laws:
And the police were good, but being involved in a two-year police investigation — it’s not a lot of fun.
Mark Graban:
Right.
Andrew Laws:
So that was it. I was just — no, I’ve had enough. And that’s why it’s my favorite mistake. Because what I did — with a very brief pause, one of my clients gave me a job, very kindly — with a very brief pause, I realized that it was possibly one of the best things that had happened to me.
Because I started in business in my early 20s — 22, I think. I had no guidance, just going hell for leather at it. Just running at all problems face first, working I don’t know how many hours every week, always exhausted, never having enough time for my girlfriend — who's now my wife — just to give you a hint at a happy ending.
Andrew Laws:
And I realized that if I hadn’t had the brakes slammed on in such a total way, I think I probably would have ended up as a very unhappy, very unwell, possibly dead person — because I would have worked myself into the ground. But having that pause, having that imposed upon me, gave me the opportunity to step back and look at my life and go, “Do you know what? I do want to run a business, but I now know with total clarity the things I’m not going to do and the mistakes I’m not going to repeat.” And to this day, I haven’t.
But yeah — honestly, if those two guys — they were 18 years old — if they hadn’t have done that, then I wouldn’t be where I am. And the police were really confused at the end of it.
They wanted me to give a statement, you know, saying how pleased I was. And I didn’t. I gave a statement saying two young men have a chance to look at their direction and decide if they want to make some changes. And the police were quite frustrated by that, but I still believe it to this day. I wouldn’t say I’m grateful to them, but I’m certainly glad it happened.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. The police wanted you to sound more thankful to them than you were empathetic toward the hackers.
Andrew Laws:
Yeah, yeah. They were lovely. I’ve got nothing bad to say about them at all. But yeah, they wanted me to — actually, they wanted me to start going to conferences — to cybersecurity conferences — to give talks about how great the police were because they were new.
Can you believe this was 2010 this happened? Or 2009? It doesn’t matter — it was a while ago. But there was no significant funding for cybersecurity at a police level in the country at the time.
They were brand new. There were like five people looking after the country. So I sympathized with them because having a business owner go to conferences and say, “These guys fixed something” would have been really useful.
In the end, I went to a recording studio and recorded a statement. Just said, “Look, this — you can have this copyright free, do what you want with it.”
But all the newspapers — all the newspapers, the tabloids in the UK — the story they were running with was basically, “Little urchins destroy hardworking man’s business.” Which, yeah, they did destroy the hosting business. I don’t hold them directly accountable for me shutting down the other one. I was just… I was just done, you know.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So, I mean, were there other lessons or things that would be part of what you learned — about, let’s say, how the hackers were able to get in? I mean, were there things that you learned to do differently when it came to web hosting? Or are things just different in 2025, where we've got cloud platforms and hosting that we don't have to do ourselves, that hopefully has better security, more redundancy, better backups?
Andrew Laws:
Yeah, all of that.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Andrew Laws:
This was still an age when WordPress hadn’t really become as popular as it is now. Or not just WordPress — any of the cloud systems like Squarespace and whatever.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Andrew Laws:
But when I have this conversation with people, I think the one thing I want people to take away is that you need to use the maximum of any security you've got. Because I get contacted still a lot when somebody — you know, a friend of the family or someone I know’s grandma or somebody — says, “Oh, my Facebook page has been hacked.” No, it's like it hasn't been hacked. You’ve just got a terrible password. Because that’s the truth.
You know, our server was incredibly tight. In fact, the guy — my upstream guy, the guy I rented the server off — he ended up doing security consultation for the National Computer Crime Squad. So we were good. We were hot. We were really good.
Mark Graban:
Sure.
Andrew Laws:
It’s just that websites were terrible.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, yeah, yeah. So our guest again, Andrew Laws, you know — thank you for sharing that story. It sounds like it was a really hard time to go through, and I’d like to hear your telling of, you know, when and how you felt ready to go again. Tell us the story of starting Yeseo — in terms of new approaches or things that you were doing differently.
Andrew Laws:
Sure thing. So with a pause — going to go and work for this company, who are still clients of mine — and spending time with a managing director who was very experienced and very wise, I learned a great deal from him.
I realized the biggest mistake in the entirety of the previous 10 years of running this company is that I was doing everything myself. And as a business owner, I was busy. But it’s very, very hard to delegate work out to other people. If I had known to delegate, none of that would have happened because the security would have been right.
Get the company making enough money to pay someone to look after the security. Get this part of the company profitable enough that somebody else can come in and do that. And you run a business — the worst threat to that business is you. And it’s you trying to do absolutely everything you can in the business.
Mark Graban:
Yeah.
Andrew Laws:
We joked earlier about kind of always being the worst person in the band. Oh — and actually you then said it's the same with business: always be the least talented person. If you think you're always going to be the best and you can't trust other people, at some point you're going to come unstuck.
And I'm sorry to anyone listening to this who needs to hear that. If that’s resonating with you — go with your heart. You've got it in you. Just find the right people.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that's a story or a theme we’ve heard from many guests on the podcast. Out of roughly 300 episodes — maybe a dozen, this is off the top of my head — maybe a dozen guests have had some sort of variation of the “I didn’t delegate, I was trying to do it all myself.” And that either leads to, like you said, not having the best capabilities or, you know, someone else might bring expertise in a space — or people getting burned out just from the effort that it takes to do it all yourself.
Andrew Laws:
And I'm reminded all the time. One of my team — I'm the only full-time person, the rest of my team are part-time. That’s something else I didn’t understand: you can just… you can find people who don't want to be full-time, and that means you can generally be closer to affording them.
I hired someone who — she's a qualified proofreader. And I can proof — I’ve written books, I know how to write, I know how to edit other people's work. And I realized very quickly she could do what would take me two or three hours — she can do it in about 15 minutes. Yeah. Just that time alone, it's like, “Why was I doing that?” She’s so much better and so much faster.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, there's the efficiency, the effectiveness and, yeah, just, you know, the opportunity cost of your time. Which I imagine… So, tell us: in your role as the founder, how do you allocate your time or decide what's the best use of your time as opposed to what you would delegate or contract out?
Andrew Laws:
It’s a never-ending challenge to try and do that. I've started working with a digital delivery consultant — a guy called John Munson — and it’s his job to go into companies and help people with that.
What I tend to do is be very aware that if I spot a job and think, “Ah, that’ll just take me 30 seconds, I’ll just get it done” — they’re the ones that you should probably delegate. So it’s the ones I think are going to be very easy. Because the big tasks — you know, like I’ve got a developer on my team, and if some programming needs to be done, I’m not even going to attempt that. I'm just going to say — his name’s Matt — say, “Matt, can you take this on? Let me know how long you think it's going to take you.”
Those jobs aren’t the threat. The threat is the “Hmm, I could just do that” or “I could just email that client” or “I could just…” — they’re the dangerous words. “I could just…”
Mark Graban:
Yeah, that sounds like an interesting lesson to learn because — I mean — it sounds counterintuitive. Part of me thinks if you say, “Well, that would only take 30 seconds,” that’s, you know… and maybe that turns out to be an accurate assessment. Sometimes maybe that’s the trap.
But the time of doing it versus the time of explaining to someone else what needs to be done — that’s part of the trade-off, right?
Andrew Laws:
Oh, it absolutely is. But the big change in my business for that is I started writing — when I decided to start getting team members rather than just working with freelancers — I started writing a massive operations manual. And I realized I was spending so much time writing “Step one, step two…”
So I did some work with an efficiency consultant — whose name I've forgotten, alarmingly — and she just said, “What are you doing? Use Loom.”
So Loom, for anyone who doesn’t know, is a system where you press a button and Loom starts recording your screen. It puts your face in the bottom corner and it records everything you do. So we do everything with Loom now and we store it in our Notion, which we use like a wiki.
So if there's a task to do — if no one else in the business can do it — it’s quite easy for me to go, “Well, I am going to do this, but I’m going to record it so I can put it somewhere central. And if somebody else needs to do it, I can say, ‘Go watch me do it.’” So I'm not even writing instructions for things.
So yeah, that’s the danger.
The thing I like most at the moment about saving time makes me feel like I’ve come full circle and I’m back to being a 1950s-style boss — because I started dictating my emails to my assistant. Just fire up WhatsApp, press record and go: “Email from this person, just reply saying this…” And I can clear my inbox in two or three minutes.
Mark Graban:
Interesting. Which is — unlike the 1950s — this assistant isn’t using one of those old-timey… what was that machine?
Andrew Laws:
Typewriter?
Mark Graban:
Well, not even — there’s the typewriter. I guess something like a courtroom…
Andrew Laws:
Oh — stenographer.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, stenography was the word I was trying to think of. But it’s funny — you talk about going back in time to the 1950s. As a quick aside, do you remember the movie RoboCop?
Andrew Laws:
Oh yes, I’m the 80s. Yeah, I’m a kid of the 80s, so I remember RoboCop.
Mark Graban:
Same here. I think there was a remake and I refuse to admit that that exists. But the original film that was made in the 80s — I think it was set in roughly the year 2035. And the things that they got so wrong about the future…
There’s a corporate boardroom scene. And for one, there’s a woman taking notes using one of those stenograph things. And then the other thing that cracks me up is that I think every single person in the room is smoking a cigarette.
Andrew Laws:
Oh God. You know, I was watching something the other day and just thought, “Just how many people smoked?” Yeah, just how…
Smoking has been illegal in the UK, I think, nearly as long as it’s been illegal in America. And I did some work in another country, and I was — I took the elevator and somebody got in and lit a cigarette and I was so flabbergasted. I was so confounded. I didn’t say anything. I probably — poor person probably just saw me staring at him going like, “What?”
Mark Graban:
Yeah, you don't even know what to say. Yeah, it’s a mistake to light up the cigarette. Or if, you know — gosh — if somebody were to try doing that on an airplane anymore, that would be…
Andrew Laws:
Smoking on planes! I smoked on planes. I used to smoke. And that seems wild. That seems absolutely wild.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, it sure does. So, Andrew, how did you get into doing SEO — search engine optimization — work? I mean, what pulled you into that or what appealed to you?
Andrew Laws:
It was quite a practical thing that did it. So early days of the internet — which here in the UK I’d say was probably a couple of years after the States, so about 1998 — when it was starting to just become, “Okay, this is a thing, this is a normal thing.” Big hosting companies didn’t really exist in the same way. So I was doing network support. I was the only employee for this American guy.
And we thought, “You know what, we ought to build some web servers just to see what it’s about — to see how to do it.” So I built a couple of servers and I drove them off somewhere and locked them in a cupboard, which is what the internet seemed to be like at the time. And then we started building websites. We just — with FrontPage or Notepad or something — started putting together very rudimentary websites for people.
And I can remember thinking, “Who’s going to see these websites?” The thinking at the time was everyone would put their web address on their business card and they’d meet people in person — like, “Hey, nice to meet you, go and have a look at my website.” Which I just thought, that seems insane. That’s bonkers. Because how many cards are you going to hand out, or how many times is your truck with your web address on it going to have to drive past somewhere before anyone looks at your website?
And that’s when I discovered things like AltaVista and HotBot and DMOZ and all the search engines — and this new one that people seemed quite excited about called Google. I thought, “That’s never going to catch on with a silly name like that.” So I started to learn it. Started to do it. And it was very easy back then, if I’m honest.
And then — I mentioned earlier that I started a button-making company for bands — and I realized that I only had enough money to buy the machine — you know, like the big clamp?
But if I could make sure that my badge company was found ahead of everyone else when someone typed “badge,” then I’d have a going concern. So I did the SEO, and within about three months the demand was so high I sold 80% of the company to a friend and just stepped back from the manufacturing.
And I thought, “This is like a David and Goliath story.” This is — and I still love this about SEO — if you’ve got the intelligence and if you really care and you really want to do well and you ignore the silly SEO tricks that people do, then any size company can beat a multinational in some way — or can take ground from them at least. And that’s still what excites me.
Most of the companies I work with aren’t huge companies. They’re small mom-and-pop operations. But we can use intelligence to get them ahead of people with much, much larger budgets. And 27 years later, I’m still doing the same thing now.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, yeah. But that challenge, I imagine, is ever-evolving. It’s said that — let’s say — the Google algorithms are always changing. And boy, I get pitched all the time as a small business — people who claim to understand the algorithms, which I’m a bit skeptical about — but they’ll say, “Look, the rules are changing. The game has changed. What worked in the past doesn’t work anymore.”
I mean, what’s your reaction to any of that?
Andrew Laws:
If you treat SEO as a game and as something where you're trying to fool Google — yeah, the same things that worked before don’t work now. If you treat SEO as a natural amplification of all the good things in your business, you can ignore algorithm changes. All Google are doing with their constant algorithm changes is getting better at sniffing out the junk.
Yeah, SEO can amplify brilliant companies. It can’t conjure nonsense about rubbish companies. So yeah, it is changing, but not in a way that anyone who does it right really cares about.
We — I started a networking group called the SEO Collective networking group — and nobody in that group cares about algorithm updates. We might be interested for, like, academic reasons: “Oh, that’s very interesting.”
Mark Graban:
But you said about people claiming to understand the algorithm — something I don’t think enough people realize is that Google doesn’t understand the algorithm.
Andrew Laws:
Yes! That’s it. That is so big and so sprawling. They’re quite open about it. There’s a guy called John Mueller who works for Google and he’s constantly answering questions on LinkedIn, all over the place. And people say, “Now this specific thing happened, what in the algorithm did that?”
And not just him — other people at Google go, “We don’t know. It’s possibly because of this.”
So if Google don’t know, then somebody called Outreach contacting you saying, “Hey, I know the algorithm” — no you don’t.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So I was going to ask you, Andrew, the biggest mistake that people or companies make trying to improve their search engine result presence — is the biggest mistake the silly tricks? Or are there other mistakes that are pretty common?
Andrew Laws:
There are two ways I can answer this. There's the traditional way, which is saying, “Yeah, by doing black hat SEO, by doing the silly tricks, by buying links” — that's the biggest mistake.
The reality is that's not in the wheelhouse for most business owners. Most business owners — the biggest mistake they make is treating their website as a “fit and forget” thing. You know, like you might print a paper brochure and go, “Well, I've got 5,000 copies of this brochure — now I’m not going to change anything in that.”
If you treat your website the same way, it’s probably the biggest mistake you can make — because the needs of your customers change. And your website should just be a reflection of the questions that your best salespeople get asked.
It’s a very broad way — sorry, a very brutal way — of looking at it. If you want to know what to put on your website, speak to your own sales guys. Or if you're a one-man band, think, “What are the questions people ask me?” Because they're the same questions that people type into Google. Put the question and the answer on your website.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, the biggest mistake is just to “fit and forget.” Don’t do it.
So there’s a software company, Kinexus, that I've worked with over the last 12–13 years, and Kinexus — it's been a very sustained effort. There was some coaching from a marketing advisor and we have a great marketing team. I think one thing we've learned at Kinexus — and we do very well in the search engine result placement — is that it came from, in our experience, when there's no overnight success.
It’s many years, and it's a function of a lot of really good, authentic, human-written content. I think a lot of it — to your point — is: what are the questions people are asking? What are the things they're talking about? Not even just directly related to “I want to buy software,” but just answers to questions that our customers have in their domain and in their industry. And I think that’s served Kinexus very well.
I would describe that as a content-driven strategy as opposed to any sort of tricks or manipulation.
Andrew Laws:
It's going to continue to serve them. In fact, in the age of AI, it’s going to become more important.
One of the topics that’s really hot in our world at the moment — which I think is damaging the sales across the board in SEO — is people thinking, “Oh, we don’t need SEO now that we’ve got AI.”
There’s some research that shows that AI LLMs — you know, the learning parts of it — they rely more on your website to find out information about your topics and your company than Google does. And increasingly, even ChatGPT does it. The chat AIs are being forced to give sources — to prove the sources.
So yeah, putting good content on your website matters now more than ever. And amplifying your excellence by doing that matters now more than ever. AI is not going to kill SEO. We’ll just stop calling it SEO. We can finally call it — I hate the phrase SEO — it should just be called “Do good stuff.”
Mark Graban:
“Do good stuff.” Do good stuff that gets rewarded. Yeah, yeah.
Andrew Laws:
It’s not easy, but it’s good.
Mark Graban:
Yeah. So what are people looking at in terms of AI? I mean, are you talking about AI-generated content on their website? Is that being rewarded, or is Google sniffing that out? Does that even matter — if it's written by a human or ChatGPT, etc.?
Andrew Laws:
It’s something that amuses quite a lot of us in the world of SEO, because a couple of years ago people went, “Wow, we’ll just use AI to create tons of content,” and they slathered it all over their websites. And then their websites started tanking.
And the reaction a lot of people had to that was going, “Ah, Google must hate AI content.” The truth of the matter — or my opinion on the matter — it’s not guesswork, it’s experience… I sound big-headed, but my assessment, and in the conversations I have with my peers, is that putting AI content on your website doesn’t really matter. What matters is how useful that content is.
And Google has said the same thing. Google has an AI content-generating tool called Bard. So they're not just going to say no — they’d be shooting themselves in the foot. But it’s the same as anything else you do with your online presence: if you make enough of an effort, you’ll get a good enough output.
So you mentioned my company name — it’s Yeseo.io. I chose “IO” because in tech language it means input/output. Good — put good stuff in, get good stuff out.
If you go to ChatGPT and just type the prompt “Write me an article about apple sellers in New York,” it’s going to go and give you an article. If you write a really long prompt explaining who the target audience is, what it is you want to get across, what you want the tone of the article to be — and even better, if you've trained a custom GPT, one of the ones that you can train — and you've put books into it, because you can ask GPT to read books on subjects, and you’ve gone and got the latest research and then you say to ChatGPT, “Write me an article on this,” then that article is probably going to be pretty good.
I said about algorithm updates, how we don’t really care — but there is one that’s worth paying attention to. Google made a lot of noise about it 12–14 months ago, about an update they call the “Helpful Content Update,” and it’s all about this. They are looking at a page and asking: is this helpful to the person looking for information on this topic?
And that’s all it’s ever, ever been. But now they’re just making it really clear. And it wasn’t called the “Helpful Content but Don’t Use AI” update.
Mark Graban:
Yeah, but I’m sure some people are misinterpreting that or jumping to a conclusion — making a mistake.
Andrew Laws:
There’s always somebody who will try and make a few quid out of confusion. I think it’s probably one of the biggest issues in SEO — is that there’s a lot of snake oil.
Mark Graban:
Out there — and it seems like that’s been the case for a while. I mean — why does that survive or even thrive in some cases, I wonder?
Andrew Laws:
Because it’s seen by some people as a get-rich-quick scheme. If you’re going to take on a client and charge them astronomical amounts of money — and agencies in the US charge probably five to ten times more than European agencies — hey, if I can do that and just click a button and give the client something, then I’ll get rich.
Or if I outsource absolutely everything with no control or whatever… That’s my assessment, anyway.
I mean, seniority is something that people go on about in SEO. So I’ve mentioned already — I just happened to drop in — I’ve done it for nearly 30 years. That’s not really very important. What’s important is people’s attitude to SEO.
Because if the attitude is, “I’m going to do my absolute best for that client to make sure that their website is the absolute best for their audience,” then I don’t care how long someone’s done SEO for. That’s at the heart of what will succeed.
And, well, in the industry we can spot the grifters a mile away. Yeah, they make promises. I'm going to make a video about this at some point, which will make me probably quite unpopular with a lot of people.
Mark Graban:
But what — they’re going to hack you?
Andrew Laws:
Well — don’t tempt them.
Mark Graban:
I shouldn’t say that.
Andrew Laws:
But, you know — and the same would apply to podcasting. Podcasting is not a get-rich-quick scheme for most people. It’s not a get-rich-anytime scheme. But you know, here on this podcast, I’m trying to do good work and provide helpful content.
Mark Graban:
And a lot of that comes from — it’s because of guests like you. Andrew, tell us about your podcast though — The Business Amplifier Podcast.
Andrew Laws:
The Business Amplifier Podcast is a podcast for business owners or people in marketing who feel stuck. There’s a lot of podcasts out there for people who are just starting a business, or for people who are at the absolute top of their game.
I realized there’s not many podcasts — or it’s a YouTube channel as well — there’s not many podcasts for people who have done really well but have just either sort of run out of gas or they just keep hitting against that ceiling and just not knowing how to get past that.
So The Business Amplifier Podcast is for stuck businesses — to bring in fresh thinking, introduce new ideas, and to look at some things around just general wellbeing. Because I mentioned earlier that I would have burned out if I hadn’t had that business hacked to pieces. And that’s another real positive, actually — it made me really look at how well I was looking after myself.
So that’s who The Business Amplifier Podcast is for. No jargon, no nonsense, just nice short bite-sized chunks of juicy information.
Mark Graban:
All right. Well, I hope people will check that out. And you mentioned videos, Andrew — there’s a YouTube channel I will put a link to in the show notes, but look for Yeseo, or dot Yeseo agency, on YouTube.
Final question — it’s suggested in your PodMatch profile. We’ve talked a little bit about your music already. I’m going to ask your opinion here: who is the best band of all time?
Andrew Laws:
The Replacements.
Mark Graban:
And why do you say The Replacements? That’s probably not a popular answer if we asked a thousand people that question.
Andrew Laws:
In the UK, no one knows who they are. But I’m originally from the punk scene. The Replacements — because it doesn’t matter what sort of music you like, you can find it in The Replacements.
The early stuff’s like Black Flag, or you know, like hardcore punk. The later stuff’s like Bon Jovi — I hate to say it — but like Bon Jovi. They’ve got electronic bits in there. They’ve got bits like Dylan. They’ve got folk. It’s all there. And you go through their entire back catalog of albums and you can hear them develop and learn. I think they’re a fascinating band.
Mark Graban:
American band — I just Googled. I was confusing them with another band from Ireland, maybe, with a similar name. I was just making a mistake there. What would you say is their biggest hit?
Andrew Laws:
Biggest hit is “Can’t Hardly Wait,” it’s called. And that’s one that will appeal possibly to fans of Simon & Garfunkel. You know, they’re a very, very broad band. Minneapolis, they were from.
Mark Graban:
Yes. All right, so I’m going to play out. I’m sure it’s one of these things where I hear the song and it will click. There we go — The Replacements.
But Andrew, it’s been great having you here on the podcast. Thank you for sharing your stories and your reflections. I’m sure not the thing that’s most fun to talk about, but I appreciate you and all of our guests being willing to share those stories — and especially how you bounced back.
Andrew Laws:
Mark, it’s the first time I’ve told the story — certainly outside of just conversations with people who are sat in a room with me. So thanks for giving me the platform to share.
Mark Graban:
Well, thank you for sharing. Thank you for being here. So again, Andrew Laws has been our guest. Look for links in the show notes or go to Yeseo.io. This has been great.
Andrew Laws:
Thank you.