E45: Hannah Thorpe

Richard Hill
Hi and welcome to another episode of eCom@One and today's guest is Hannah Thorpe, the MD of Verkeer, specializing in SEO and a seasoned SEO and digital marketing speaker. How are you doing, Hannah?

Hannah Thorpe
Hi, I'm so excited for this. It's nice to get a chance to talk SEO with someone during lockdown. Looking forward to it.

Richard Hill
Fantastic. Well, let's get straight into it. So I know you're obviously the MD at Verkeer and I think obviously been doing a lot of talks and various sort of big stage talks. And here we are on the eCom@One podcast. Thank you so much for coming on. So what's, maybe straight into the motivation behind the Verkeer and what you do that exactly?

Hannah Thorpe
So Verkeer as an agency was founded, I think about eight years ago actually by our CEO, Nick, and really the motivation stayed the same the whole time, which is part of what attracted me to the role and to the business as a whole. And that motivation is really to kind of deliver best partnership and service to clients. It's a lot more focused on what actually matters to each business. And yes, I adore SEO but sometimes it's not the right thing for a client and sometimes SEO moves the dial and it gets, you know, loads of traffic but that traffic is meaningless and doesn't make you revenue. And the Verkeer's focus is on always having ROI-driven conversations and making sure that we actually impact the bottom line of the business. So we like to think of ourselves as like, there to grow the client rather than that just grow their SEO.

Richard Hill
Yeah, that's music to my ears. I think music to our listeners' ears is obviously driving traffic for traffic sake, you know, doesn't pay the bills, does it? And ultimately everybody's got to pay the bills. And that's the big message with the eCom@One podcast. You know, ultimately even what channel might drive the most traffic might not drive any or minimal revenue. So if you're spending months and weeks and X amount of thousands of budget on a channel or on a strategy that isn't generating short term revenues, potentially, if that's where we're focused in the short term, you know, you've got to make sure that you're looking in the right area. So, yeah, great to hear that. So I think one of the things we get asked a lot in our agencies and on the podcast is eCom stores particularly have maybe five thousand, ten thousand, twenty thousand SKUs, lots of products, lots of hard numbers. And then when it comes to sort of deciding on which set of SKUs and which keywords to go after, it's usually a bit of a minefield on where to get started. So what would your advice to be to be to an eCom store, deciding on keywords to rank, you know, deciding on specific areas to focus on with that keyword research? Where where should they begin?

Hannah Thorpe
So I don't know if this is a terrible answer, but it depends. I know we get criticized a lot for saying that. But if you are an established site and you've had decent traffic for a while and the site's converting at a decent rate and you're happy, I think the first place is actually to start with your internal site search and see what people are looking for. Like check where they're navigating when they're clicking through your fast navigation and browsing categories, but also check what they're typing and what they couldn't find. And you might find they're using totally different words to describe your products, they're returning blank searches. But from a user perspective, you can see you actually did have a suitable product and that can really help with your product specific stuff. But then I would say we start with what your competitors are doing as well, especially if you're new to the market, whether that's just a particular niche or product that you're new to or eCom as a whole. Start by using tools like SISTRIX or SEMrush to download what your competitors are ranking for and start to see how they matter and then look at those keywords in the search results as well. So see what the intent is from Google. Is Google ranking a product page or category page? And then from that you can start to determine if that keywords really right for you. If you look at the content that can match that, I'd say I'm a big believer that also like you can kind of rely on your product pages to almost rent themselves. As long as you've got good tech foundations and unique product descriptions, they should not query when someone knows exactly what they want to buy. So focusing on really optimizing an amazing category page will make you a lot more revenue than focusing on just one or two individual products.

Yeah, fantastic. So site search, site search. See what's going through and see. Well, you know, I think that some owners of eCom stores and quite often when they start a venture with eCom, entrepreneurs, they know the products pretty well. So they they assume quite a lot of things. I'm looking at the data like you say and actually. Rather, assuming that particular SKU or product is searched by this term that you're going to see where people land on your site. One idea is that they can look at sites, that you could look at the site search and see the variations in the models and the different searches that they're searching for and optimise for them. And then really focusing hard on these on these category pages, using SEM, big fan of SEMrush then, you like SEMrush? Yeah, yeah, yeah. We're a massive fan of those guys so you can use the tools that are available to see, you know, as you said, quite often people are trying to rank a product page, but when you look at the index and look at what's ranking, it might not be a product page. You're taking the wrong sort of weapons to the fight when you know that a guide is needed or a Category page, and that SEMrush has great functionality there doesn't it, it tells you what is ranking. So you then try to then look at that competition and see who's doing what and see what you can create if you've got something similar that already exists on page three, potentially that you can work on. Okay, so that gives us some ideas on where to look and what sort of things to look at. But ultimately, when we get to those product pages, you're saying about having unique content and unique copy on those product pages, but what else can a business do to optimize those product pages?

Hannah Thorpe
I think the key is to like, make your plan for each product page, for the whole product lifecycle. So think about how you're launching it, which is actually something we see a lot of eCom sites miss, is running things like a separate site map just for those new products when they're added to make sure they get crawled and indexed quickly, having a process for linking to that new product from the home page, from the top of the category, like put it in Google's face as much as you can. And you want that like day to day maintenance on that front page, which for me, it's about having really great copy on it, but also having really high quality structured data. So if I'm doing that, I actually start by planning my product page content out, using so much they've got. I think this is terrible because I never learn the names. I think it's called the content marketing writing assistant or something. It's in their content toolkit. And you can put in the keywords you care about and it will dissect the top 10 results or the top 20 and tell me the word counts and things and how to use that to get a learning as to rule based what you'd want to be writing. And then I manually and I'm sure are tools to do this, go and check each page that's already ranking. That's a page from the types of schema they're using and applying that structured data really early on will help Google understand and process that page, product schema at a minimum, but if you can add as much as possible I would, in terms of showing Google everything about your business and the organisation as well. And then plan for how you're going to retire that product when it goes out of stock. Are you bringing it back or not? Because that's going to help, you know, how you're going to redirect afterwards or if you're going to leave it live in order to keep generating demand and then push notify people as and when it comes back, you have that kind of end goal in sight, because if not, you'll end up with a ton of great ranking pages because you follow steps one and two, and then you'll just lose all that value in the long run.

Richard Hill
Yeah, a lot of great takeaways that I think that one that is that, it's like what that what to do in question when you've got so many products coming and going on the website. And if you know, what would you say if you know that you've got a really good ranking product and it's doing really well for you on your eCom store, but then, you know, you're ranking number one, number two on top of the, top of the page somewhere that really well had some good run rate on that product. You know that product is no longer available and that product SKU is not going to be, you can't sell it anymore. What sort of recommendation would you give to the listeners as to what to do with that SKU?

Hannah Thorpe
I think it depends like it's a trade-off, again with the it depends. It's definitely a trade-off between what I want you to do and what's best for the use. So for a user, if it's a popular product and it maybe had a lot of press coverage and you've got people coming in direct to that page a lot, you might actually want to leave that page up for a bit with a message saying this isn't available, try and have a look at our other products here. But the SEO in me is like 301 it to the nearest alternative and make that one rank instead, which I think you can do in most cases, people aren't that product loyal that they'd mind too much. But it depends what you have available or ping it back up to the category level if you have to.

Richard Hill
So possible redirects or possible message that says 'we haven't got this, but we we've got this'. But don't leave it I think is the message isn't it, don't leave it as is. This is frustrating, isn't it? If they land there, from a user's perspective, if they just land there, they're looking for the... I'm trying to think of a product now what have I got...The Citizen scientific calculator and they land there, I'm sure you've got other calculators, but maybe not a Citizen one, so you can link off. And they also have obviously a very popular black face mask as well. But I'm sure if you haven't got the black face masks, you've got alternatives, haven't you? But I think it's quite often that we see that time and time again, it seems to be quite, quite an ongoing theme with e-commerce stores with products coming and going and even more so I think at the moment, because obviously stock levels can be harder to maintain with what's going on with the pandemic and whatnot. Stocks in and out more frequently or out more frequently potentially, you know, a bit more uncertainty around when products are going to be coming back and returning to, you know, in, you know, a longer lead time, which potentially you you're likely if you're listening to the podcast, you know, if you're, you're likely to have longer periods of products being out of stock. I think, it's having that routine, one of those ideas, you know, to to implement rather than just leaving your products, that they're just not available, just not available. Then you're saying to Google potentially, right, well, we're landing people on here, but then they're bouncing, they might have a high bounce rate if you're not giving them an option. So, yeah, some great. Some great, some ideas there Hannah thank you. So, obviously you've worked on a lot of campaigns over the years. What companies have you worked on that have generated the best results? What sort of things have you done that the listeners might find interesting that they might be able get some insight on and they might be able to do some similar things?

Hannah Thorpe
Cool, this is where it comes out and I'm a bit of a nerd, every time I sat down trying to think of who my best results and best campaigns have been, it's always been the ones that have been really heavily technical focused. So a client that I worked on, they were an e-commerce shop. And then they were doing like pencil cases, notebooks, etc. like every stationary products you'll need in every colour variation and every style variation, like a pink pencil case with 3 zips versus 2. It's pretty much the same product to the average bear.

Richard Hill
Yeah.

Hannah Thorpe
But I think for me, like what was the massive result for them is because of the way the site was built and it was a Magento site. This is an out-the-box Magento problem. There was just this huge crawl loop from the like, way the product filtering colours was working. Any time you clicked between a colour of a product, what you saw was a nice parameter getting added to the URL and then added again, and then as you clicked through the whole site and it meant that a, what was a three thousand page website with about 20 SKUs was actually being crawled as having hundreds of thousands. And pretty much they were ranking nowhere and actually for a fix that genuinely took that developer about half an hour, like I think we nearly doubled the results kind of immediately within the next two months. And they've just seen exponential growth, but they're not a client anymore, it's from a previous agency. And I still just look at the visibility and I'm like, it's still going up. And they barely implemented anything since and stuff like that where a small tech change can really make the difference is the sort of client I love.

Richard Hill
Yeah that sounds fantastic. It's the technical, I think that they usually are the quickest wins aren't they, these little technical bits where they're either like that crawl issues, just not being able to crawl or in that instance, you know, you've got those multiple variations of a SKU that's just given that bloat to the to the website. And I think that's quite often most people that are maybe self taught or are on this eCommerce journey don't know where to start. Well, don't know where to look. That type of problem, maybe let's dive into that a little bit more, that type of problem you know, how how how can somebody maybe check that type of problem? And what is the actual fix? What would you say to that?

Hannah Thorpe
So depending on your level of like how much you like tech stuff, the the average answer would be go and get a copy of Screaming Frog, even the free version, if your site's small and if not, I think it's like one hundred or so pounds and that's like forever. So you might as well get a website which you just put the domain in and it will start to go through and pretend to be Google and then you just look for anything you don't expect. So it'll tell you how many pages it looks at and if that's drastically different to how many products you sell, plus or minus like 10 percent for your like About Us, etc. Like that's a problem and that's something to look into. But I think for me, if you see that and it's scary and you don't know where to start. Take a step back and go to Google and type in 'site:' and then just your domain, like drop the 'www.' bit and then click to view either 100 results per page or just click all the way to the end of the search results. And that's where all of like the rubbish lives.

Richard Hill
It does doesn't it.

Hannah Thorpe
So, like Google basically will order that page for pretty much on how many internal links you have to each page of your site. So all this stuff at the end is the stuff you're not linking to much, it's lower quality, it's where duplicates, dev sites PDFs, things that shouldn't be indexed and shouldn't be being crawled live. If you have loads of stuff that looks like nonsense there like search results, then you've got a tech problem and you should probably grab someone who knows a little bit about SEO to give you the tips on how to fix it.

Richard Hill
That's fantastic, I think you should pause this episode right now, 'site:your website' dot whatever it is, and then you'll see all the search results page after page of your own website, then go to the end of that, then go to page 10, 15, 20 page whatever it ends up taking you to and look in what's there. That's a great tip Hannah that. Yeah. I really like that. Yeah. You're going to see, if you see some spurious dev URLs, which is quite common isn't it. That old dev server still getting indexed. All those variations then that's, get in contact with the technical side or your developer. And then resolve, yeah, and then, yeah, hopefully Google can crawl your site quicker and prioritize those pages. Fantastic. So, SEO, sort of measuring results, what metrics should a business specifically trying to decide whether SEO is working for them or not, what should they be measuring? Would you say?

Hannah Thorpe
I think you want to measure what matters to you. So ultimately, the dream is you're going to be measuring revenue. And if you're an e-commerce site, obviously that's a bit easier. If you're B2B enquiry stuff, it's going to take a bit longer and be a bit harder. So when you're measuring revenue, I always think keeping it simple is really important. So Google Analytics by default is going to show you your last click contribution. So someone that's come on via organic and then converted on that organic search, basically. I like to kind of broaden that up and just make sure you have a view as to how much organic is involved, like in other journeys. So are people finding your brand via organic and then sending the link to their partner and coming back direct to convert. Those sorts of things where you start to see organic playing this role as part of the bigger picture is really important because in SEO like there's a lot of SERP space available in awareness queries and question based stuff. And this SERP space, the closer you get to the bit where people make money, the more richer results, PPC result start appearing and make it harder. And another tip I would say is I always like to have indicators of performance that aren't just revenue. So what are the steps? So for me with a client account, when we first make changes like month one, I'm going to be having indicators related to your crawl budget and crawl efficiencies and putting some numbers against what you're going to hit. And then month two, you want to start thinking about what you want to be seeing in terms of your ranking changes, what metrics do you care about there? And then move in to looking at traffic and engagement and on site, because by that point, you should be getting lots of people in to make sure that the right people, it's time well spent on your website and then that will result in the conversions. If you set up tracking in that way you'll see where something falls down so you won't just be left at the end going, well, where's my money? You know, it dropped off because I didn't hit my engagement but I hit my volume and so on.

Richard Hill
Yeah, great. So many takeaways there I think obviously the end goal is to make money. That is the end goal. But before we get there and there are various other areas, various of the stats that we need to be tracking, and they all contribute ultimately to the end goal of creating people that have an intent that I think that that last click attribution is quite often one that most people they just don't look at the bigger picture. Look at what's passed, like passed the ball like we say in a few of the podcasts, you know, especially when you're doing PPC and SEO together, they quite often work pretty well together. But if you just look basing it on that one click, then that one click did that one thing, but the reality is when you start digging into the data, you know, it's going to be various, just the various clicks on that journey to maybe buy or maybe to look at the product or category or subcategory or SKU or put something in the checkout, and they're all various different intents. So PPC, SEO, that's something we talk about a lot on the podcast. Obviously, we have two agencies here at eCom@One. So what's your opinion on sort of one or the other or should you just do one, should you just do the other? What's your take on that sort of argument?

Hannah Thorpe
On the whole, you should be doing them together, even if that means you shouldn't be doing one of them. You should be considering it as to why not. So I think that they can really help each other. I think that PPCers are really lucky because they get way more data than SEO gets. And sharing that information across is really important. But also, SEOs tend to know a lot about what looks great on a landing page and content on the landing page, and that's going to really help your PPC. So working together is super important, we actually use a tool that's called SERP Scetch, which is a new tool to the market. It's amazing. It's slightly vested interests, but SERP Sketch pretty much takes a picture of the search results for any keyword and then it works out roughly the pixel size of all of the results. And then it basically tells you how much of that SERP is available. So it will tell you actually on that SERP, it's 70 percent paid. So for the and for the organic keyword difficulty, it's actually probably not worth your time. So give that to the paid people, whereas this SERP is more fifty fifty or this one's got 'people also ask' boxes and it can just help piece together the right mix of the right channels and that's great.

Richard Hill
So that's SERP Sketch, so that's one of your own tools is it?

Hannah Thorpe
Yeah, it's a friend's business actually.

Richard Hill
OK, well we'll give them a shout out. No problem. That sounds great, I think again, it's going back to picking the right battle, isn't it, picking the right. You've got a certain amount of budget, you've got a certain amount of time, you know, for doing it yourself. And you could try to go after these big glory keywords that okay they might well be big intent and a lot search volume. But are you actually going to you know, is it going to take three years to get there or six months to get there? By the time you've figured that out, it's too late sort of thing. Or you could have worked on various other terms, so knowing where, you know, the volume is, where the intent is. You know, what's the what's the landscape like both on PPC, and SEO? Yeah. Okay. So obviously a bit of a I would say a bit of a SEO geek is what we're, this has turned into a bit of a geek. That's in the ni-, that's a good term, I think. Yeah. We've got a lot of geeks in our business, you know, and I like to think I know my SEO. I think I do. But some of the, some of the guys in the team. Yeah, it's a whole another level. So, you know, you're talking about crawl budgets and that technical aspect. You know, I think that's an area that quite often gets missed on sort of, you know, more of a self-taught sort of expert, if you like. But, you know, I think that's an area that, you know, isn't it doesn't get talked about that much. But what other areas do you think are up and coming or areas that people should be looking out for, like the future of the sort of things that you believe or you're seeing that are starting to have more impact or make more impact on a sort of SEO side of things?

Hannah Thorpe
So I always try and explain this and just end up flailing my hands around, but basically I believe that SEO like fundamentally is made up of multiple algorithms. So there isn't just one single algorithm. We know there's lots and lots of baby algorithms that are interacting together, which is kind of why we're in this whole, like, cool update world where we don't really know what's changing. Google changes something here and it ends up affecting something miles away that they didn't realize. So I think that you can roughly group those steps, the baby algorithms, into two kind of areas and almost two types of information retrieval. And there's traditional SEO, which is like the stuff that has always worked and having the right page title and making sure you've got the entire links and external links. What I consider kind of the boring bit of SEO to me, but the stuff that like does the heavy lifting. And then you've got the other side, which I think is the sort of information retrieval where Google, instead of looking down into it, scrolling and pulling the information from websites, it's looking up into its knowledge graph. So Google's knowledge graph basically stores everything that Google believes is fact and then Google can quicker retrieve information from its own knowledge graph. So it's like having your own kind of like bookmarks in a library. And so Google is doing that all the time now and those knowledge graph results are what fuel the 'people also ask' boxes, the rich snippets, the like bits where it tells you which bit of the video to watch all of that information. Yeah. And that discipline of getting your site acknowledged by Google and acknowledged as part of the knowledge graph I think is going to become a new bit of SEO, which I roughly call like entity building or like answer engine optimization I think Jason Barnard calls it, whatever you want to call it. That is a separate discipline to this whole like links and on page. Based on that, we find tactics that work, things like really focusing on unstructured data more than ever before, focusing on the relevancy of your content and the related content within that same domain, the relevancy of the link profile, rather than just like the number of links but actually really focusing deep down on quality doesn't even have to be like a follow, like money anchored text link. A mention is good enough if you're appearing in a high authority place. And just those kind of like harder to measure, harder to grasp bits of SEO, I think you're going to pull out more to be that seperate discipline.

Richard Hill
Wow, there's a nice, quite a lot of things there, I think I think yeah, a lot of good takeaways. They're fantastic, especially I, I agree on so many levels. I think when you go to the index now and search for whatever it may be, those different sort of structured data, those snippets, those answer boxes, figuring that out as an eCom store owner or working with your SEO agency. Quite often it's about answering that question. The answer engine, as you said, that's a term we use in our agency, you know, the different tools that are out there, that tell you the questions that are getting asked, you know, and then trying to answer those questions with an equivalent search page on the site that's got the answers to that. And trying to get those knowledge boxes. It's quite a moment as well I think, it's like, yeah, when you're trying to get a knowledge box or an answer box for a client or your own site. What is X, Y, Z or how to do that? And then like the video ones as well. I think they're, they look fantastic. They take up so much real estate on the on the first page of Google when a video pops up and it shows you that timeline and the video of when or what has been said when, you know, it's like a, I like that idea. That's sort of is like a separate part of Google, almost that, quite often, you know, so many people are just so focused on that page that that listing of one to 10, the normal, if you like, search query listings when there's so many different types of structured data etc. that you can rank with or for. Yeah, a lot to think about there. You know, I would say, guys, listening to the podcast. I would say pause for a minute, maybe just rewind three minutes and just run through that again, because there's some great takeaways there. Fantastic. So obviously, I know you've done a lot of big talks, different events, Brighton SEO. It's not an event I've actually been to, not sure if I'm meant to say that out loud or not. A lot of our guys have been over the years, but I've never been. So I know you spoke there. What was that like?

Hannah Thorpe
It's blasphemy to admit you've never been.

Richard Hill
I know, I'm gonna hide.

Hannah Thorpe
Um, yeah, I mean, nerve racking. Yeah, I think I'm always really shocked by anyone that speaks at SEO events or any event and is like 'I love it, I enjoy every second of it'. Like, I think I hate every minute of any form of public speaking. Even this, I'm like, could be the worst experience of my life right now. Like you're great, but horrifying to me. And I think more I think you should be honest about it. The amount of speakers you see backstage either doing a shot of tequila before they on or having an absolute nervous meltdown, like it's so varied for everyone. And I think that should encourage new people that if you're petrified, like so is everyone else, we're all in it together. And it's important to push yourself outside of your comfort zone. I would say about Brighton SEO specifically that Kelvin is one of the best event organizers. So he gives you loads of support in terms of like running through your talk with you. You can get a mentor who, like, works with you. If you're moderating, your moderator will sit down with you and go through the session and the questions they're going to ask you and get you really prepped. So events like that are just so much nicer for the speaker when you know in advance what you're going to be asked about rather than thrown in at the deep end.

Richard Hill
So it's an amazing experience. I have to admit, just the caveat to when I said I've not been, I actually went to the meetups in the pubs in London before it became Brighton SEO. Yeah. And I can remember going and meeting Kelvin and probably about 15 of us, maybe a bit more actually, 20 of us. And that's probably about ten years ago. And then it became what it is today, you know a huge, almost like a mecca for SEO, I can't remember how many it is now, about 6000 people, I've probably got that completely wrong but the number is right up there. Yeah, I think that's great. I think that's, I appreciate the honesty, because I think, you know, that that sort of going up and speaking at big events, small events, any event today is quite a challenging, in the mind process and that the run up to it five minutes before it definitely, you know, jumping up there and doing your thing. But I think, you know, the guys that are listening in, stuff like that, you know, and speaking and just being able to speak to, you know, your your team to be able to speak to your you know, that's different. But it's similar. You know, that the good things come from things like that. And stepping outside your comfort zone, I'm a massive believer in that. You know, we encourage the majority of our team to sort of step up and step into speaking roles if they can, and where they can go and speak at different events. So good on you for being super honest there. I think it's I think they say it's right up there, it's like fear of dying and fear of public speaking. It's like there's not much in it really I don't think. I could I could definitely attest to that. You know, it was something that was super, super, super scared of. You know, it was a real challenge for me. But I just keep trying and doing it, doing it, doing it. And, you know, I think you still get nervous and you still get a little bit like, oh, my God. But then you sort of build ways to deal with that and, you know, get used to it. And then you realize what's the worst that's going to happen. I'm going to fall over. Maybe, maybe not. But, so we mentioned a couple of tools as we as we step through this episode, a couple of tools. One particular I've not heard of so that'll be interesting, SERP Sketch. But what are the tools that you recommend on the sort of the maybe on the SEO side of things, you know, we get a lot of the usual names mentioned, but any sort of, any anything there that guys might not have heard of or not maybe, you know, the tools that you would recommend?

Hannah Thorpe
Ones people haven't heard of...I mean, I love obviously SEMrush, SISTRIX is great because it's a different data set than SEMrush. So they'll do similar things but I like double checking, being able to look at a broader picture of the tools. I love Content King if you haven't used that one. So Content King does continuous crawling so you can start up monitoring. So if you're like an e-commerce business and you've got different product managers who are continually uploading things or editing stuff, you can actually get alerts when they're changing things and changing page types, changing a meta description. And it's just good for like overall monitoring your site house and everything you've done to that. You can set up alerts, so I can get alerts if my clients' stuff goes out of stock because of stock messages automated on the site and it triggers Content King. You can also monitor competitors with it.

Richard Hill
That's what I was going to ask you actually, because that's where it gets interesting, isn't it, when you know you're trying to do some work on a specific product or products that if you're monitoring the competitors on those SKUs, yeah tell us about that, yeah.

Hannah Thorpe
So things like if you are alerting when a competitor is, say they have that like three left in stock message, you can actually get alerts when that changes on their site and therefore you could change your PPC strategy before they drop out of the auction you can already start thinking about what you want to be doing, that it ties it all together, which is why I absolutely love Content King to be honest. And also just in terms of that monitoring support, it integrates into things like Slack so you really don't have to log in to get anything and I'm quite lazy with tools. I want them to tell me things and me not have to go and dig it out.

Richard Hill
That sounds great. It's not one I've heard of and I know straight away that's going to get dropped into our Slack SEO team group in about 20 minutes' time. Because we live on Slack, our whole business runs on Slack pretty much, one of the many tools, but definitely if it integrates with Slack then I'm all ears. Oh, that's great. Fantastic. OK, well thank you for that. Now this has actually gone super quick. We're right at the end, we're right at the end, it has been an absolute pleasure to have you on and I really appreciate it. Now, we always like to finish every episode with a book recommendation. What book would you like to recommend to our listeners?

Hannah Thorpe
Cool, you would think that knowing this question was coming, I would have bothered to look up the author and I helpfully have not, but my favourite book related to everything marketing is actually called Blue Ocean Strategy. And it's all about when you are entering into a market, how you kind of understand that market and then plan your approach. So not to spoiler it, but there are two oceans that you might be operating in. Red ocean where you're price competitive. That tends to be like your fast moving ecommerce stuff and you're always pretty much fighting over some very core USPs of your business versus theirs like delivery and then you have a blue ocean where you don't have competitors and you've developed your own market. But the challenges in that market is that you have to generate your own demand. And for me, like red ocean, blue ocean, and then that bit in-between of purple ocean is kind of how we like to frame all of our strategies and clients seem to really get it. So it's a good way to get SEO signed off and get businesses understanding what you're doing and why.

Richard Hill
That sounds great. That sounds great. That's one for the, one for the reading list. Thank you very much. So thank you Hannah. So for the guys that are listening, want to find out more about yourself, more about the business, what's the best place to reach out to you?

Hannah Thorpe
You can find me on Twitter, which seems to me the thing that I am fastest at responding to and I am just Hannah J Thorpe, Thorpe spelt like the park. Easy to remember. If you want to reach out directly, you can email me on hannah@verkeer.co as well.

Richard Hill
Fantastic. Well, thank you for being a guest on eCom@One, I'll speak to you again soon.

Hannah Thorpe
Cool thank you so much.

Richard Hill
Thank you, bye.