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I’m the co-founder of Optimising, an SEO agency in Melbourne that works with ecommerce…
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James Richardson posted thisAnyone in my circles know any Brisbane or Gold Coast based Ecommerce Managers looking for a great new role with a client of mine? Location is non negotiable Brand is an iconic household name and a great opp to lead a growing team. Feel free to reach out if you know of someone and I can introduce.
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James Richardson shared thisAgentic AI Melbourne is on this Thursday night and Optimising is getting behind it alongside OpenAI, Union.ai and BlueRock & AI Dojo. I'm looking forward to heading along, even though I'll more than likely be very out of my depth in most of the AI conversations. (It's a room full of engineers actually shipping agents and I'm just a guy who chipped in for the pizza.) Big thanks to Ryan Djurovich for putting together such a great community event. Registrations are reviewed and there's a waitlist, but details here 👇 https://lnkd.in/gANiCyY5
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James Richardson posted thisImportant one for .au domain name owners auDA is about to change who's allowed to own a .com.au. Right now, having an ABN and a "close and substantial connection" to the domain is enough and that's the rule most Australian businesses registered under. auDA's board has accepted a recommendation to delete that rule. Going forward, you'd need a registered business name or trade mark that matches each domain you hold (Back to the old days when I sold domain names at Melbourne IT!) The registrars behind the petition say that's around 2.7 million of the 3.4 million .com.au and .net.au domains out there (roughly 4 in 5) that would need fixing just to stay eligible for renewal. Every one of those is a new ASIC registration or trade mark application, plus a correction at the registrar. The stated goal is to crack down on domain hoarding which is fine but the collateral damage lands on every business with a descriptive domain, a product-specific domain, or a shortened version of their name. I've spent many years helping businesses build value into their web addresses and now making millions of them re-prove they're allowed to keep them is a strange way to protect the namespace. I would encourage everyone to sign the petition if this affects you 👇 https://lnkd.in/gpxmGzBV
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James Richardson posted thisI haven't shared much on how I use AI in my workflows but shared this on a comment on Ben Somerville's post last week and thought it deserved its own post. My day is spent being pulled in a lot of directions meaning I can miss some important slack msgs - here how I solved it. Every weeknight at 7pm, Claude DMs me a list of everyone I've left hanging in Slack that day. Mentions, DMs, threads where the last message isn't mine. It checks whether I've already replied or reacted (a thumbs up counts), drops those, and sorts what's left into three piles: - Needs a reply (someone's blocked on me) - Left hanging (no direct ask, but the thread ends on them) - Pending action (handovers and FYIs) Each item gets a link and one line of context, so I can clear the lot from my phone on the couch. I reckon its the simple ones which help the most. Here's the prompt if you want to pinch it 👇 "Every weekday at 7pm, check my Slack for anything I haven't replied to that day. Search for messages mentioning me, plus DMs, from the current day only. For each one, open the thread and confirm I haven't already replied or reacted - if I have, drop it. Group what's left into "needs a reply" (someone is blocked on me or asked a direct question), "left hanging" (softer, no direct ask but the thread ends on them), and "pending action" (handovers or FYIs where no reply is needed). Then DM me the list in Slack with a permalink and one line of context for each item."
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James Richardson posted thisHas anyone worked out a way to block all phone numbers starting with "02 9123..." so I don't have to pickup any more incessant Google Ads account manager calls? I am blocking them 1 by 1 as they come through but they have unlimited lines it seems so taking a while... Already had 3 this morning
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James Richardson posted thisI talked about a migration gone "bad" last week but I've seen a tonne of similar stories over the years - no names so I don't get into trouble. - A national medical group goes live with a site they'd spent 12 months building then reverts to the old one a week later because conversion rates "didn't look as good." - A big brand launches a new site and six months later they redesign and relaunch again, with a different agency. - A big international brand launches a genuinely great new site into 7 markets. Nobody notices the noindex tag on it. They come to us 12 months later wondering where the traffic went. - A developer launches a new site, has a billing disagreement with the client, and submits a temporary URL removal in Search Console on the way out. None of these were small businesses. All of them had budgets, agencies and sign-off processes. The launch is never the risky part, it's the 12 months either side of it.
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James Richardson posted thisKnow someone looking for a part time role - super flexible? I've got a bit of a tricky one to advertise atm so post here to share with my network... We're hiring an Office Coordinator. Two to three days a week onsite, hours that can work around the rest of your life (school hours are completely fine). It's the person who keeps the place here running. Supplies, maintenance, the offsite that needs booking, new starters getting a laptop, our B Corp and 1% for the Planet commitments staying on track, and making sure nobody's birthday quietly slips past. Not reception. Not a big office management remit. Local to Richmond would be ideal and a genuine interest in sustainability helps. Link to the job ad in the comments :)
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James Richardson posted thisSEO pricing has become a bit of a race to the bottom and it's making clients respect the SEO/GEO work less - I said it. Every year the "SEO" line item gets cheaper somewhere. $500 a month, $300 a month, claude can do it all for you for free. So the number a client has in their head for what it should cost keeps dropping, and the value of the work itself hasn't gotten less. Migrations are a great example. New site build, half a million on the dev agency's invoice, great value. Then the SEO quote comes in at about 10-15% of that to make sure the traffic they've spent years building survives the move, and that number can't fit in the budget... We've got this a bit backwards. Some of it is our industry to blame to be honest. Everything seems the same, so the client isn't wrong to compare because that's just what the market looks like from where they're sitting. I was chatting with prospect yesterday who told me last week our quote was triple the other agency's and I think it was. But she also said she didn't need another monthly report telling her what was wrong, she needed someone to actually fix it. She did understand that we were selling a solution and not a product but thats not all the time. Most clients will get there too but we’ve got to price it fairly and educate.
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James Richardson shared thisWhile it sucks to see it happen, I have to say it was a novelty to see an SEO migration fail getting talked about in the Media this week! Maggie Beer Holdings was all over the news this week for a $9.5m loss caused by a "Google blunder". While the number makes the story sound better (it wasn't all that) it shows th impact of not handling your migration with the white glove treatment can have. They moved two of their ecommerce sites to Shopify in June last year (which for a business that makes its money at Christmas is WILD thinking) Big bit is the old URLs weren't properly redirected and by January they'd lost up to 38% of their Google traffic, and were spending $800k on emergency ads trying to buy it back. We do a lot of migrations and tbh they are generally not the "fun" work we do. They're hard, unglamorous work, and the most valuable thing we produce is never the new design. It's a spreadsheet mapping every old URL to a new one, signed off before anything goes live. The bit most people miss is that migrations don't fail on launch day - that always looks great. Google takes a couple of months to catch up, so everything looks fine until it isn't. By then you're in your peak trading period with nothing you can do about it. Wrote up what actually happened, including a few bits they didn't report on 👇
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James Richardson reacted on thisJames Richardson reacted on thisone thing about me is that i get weird and cagey about the most ordinary of things. i'd more likely tell you about my greatest insecurities, my miscellaneous trysts, or every psychiatric diagnosis way before i share what i did over the weekend / my favourite TV show. and maybe there's something to unpack there, albeit not on LinkedIn. this also means i'm weird about projects i should be proud of. like the fact that this time last year, i was in the studio recording an album – partly composed alongside my sister (Meg-Gayle) and my solo debut outside of my band. then as a gift to myself, i released her on my birthday in July. since then, she sort of just exists? with the occasional appearance on socials and my favourite canvas that is instagram stories. which is just ridiculous! because so much heart, time, effort and money went into making this that it feels like a waste not breathing more life into its potential. but the thing about making music is that it's often as much about marketing as it is the music. and the thing about marketing is that when you already do it 9 to 5, you don't exactly want to do it some more from 5 to 9. that's the next hurdle i'll be grappling with anyway... for now, my daily baby step is talking about it more. especially after someone recently said "maybe you're just embarrassed by it" – to which i responded with the most award-winning incredulous, indignant expression of all time. no, i am NOT embarrassed. i think i've made a great body of work, and you can listen to me here: https://lnkd.in/dQCGAri2
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James Richardson reacted on thisJames Richardson reacted on thisLast week I wrapped up my time at Half Dome after 8 years and it’s hard to sum up what that time has meant to me. It’s been a place that’s pushed me, challenged me, backed me and given me a huge amount of freedom to learn and grow. I’ve worked with some seriously talented people, made friends for life, had experiences I never expected and built client relationships that I’ll genuinely miss. The farewell tour was pretty special too. A few days full of incredibly generous words, good people and plenty of memories. A massive thank you to everyone who made the effort. And a special one for Will Harms and Joe Frazer. You’ve both been there every step of the way and given me a ridiculous amount of support, opportunity and mateship over the years. I’m very grateful for it. As for what’s next, I’m effectively jumping without a parachute. After 13 years on the agency side, I’m ready to see the industry from a different seat. My goal is to move client side, ideally into a performance marketing, acquisition or growth role where I can combine the hands-on experience I’ve built with the leadership, commercial and strategic side of what I’ve been doing in recent years. I’ve already had some great people open doors, make introductions and offer advice, which has been pretty humbling. A big thank you to everyone who’s reached out or put my name forward so far. If you know of a role coming up, are looking for someone with my background, or think there’s someone I should meet, please get in touch. Even if it’s just for a coffee and a conversation, I’m all ears.
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