Back with another episode of The Search Session. I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and today my guest is Will Kennard, a London-based technical SEO consultant.
In this episode, we talk about technical SEO, Next.js and modern JavaScript frameworks, working with developers, SEO for startups and large companies, and why technical SEO should drive new ideas, not just fix issues.
Key takeaways from this episode
Balancing AI hype with real data: why SEOs should rely on data while adapting existing technical SEO practices to support AI-driven discovery.
Next.js, Nuxt and modern JavaScript frameworks in SEO: why tools like Next.js can be powerful and SEO-friendly when implemented correctly, but require careful trade-offs between server rendering, static generation, and flexible architecture.
The convergence of technical SEO and development: how understanding code, AI tools, and modern frameworks helps SEOs collaborate better with developers and achieve stronger technical outcomes.
AI-assisted coding and developer tools for technical SEOs: why experimenting locally with tools like Cursor helps SEOs learn code, validate technical assumptions, and better understand modern web frameworks.
JavaScript rendering and AI discoverability: why separating server-rendered content from client-side interactivity helps ensure websites remain accessible to both search engines and LLMs.
Technical SEO as a creative strategy: why technical and creative SEO are inseparable, and how understanding web architecture helps design interactive content experiences that are both engaging for users and easily indexed by search engines.
SEO for startups: how strategies must adapt to funding stage, from foundational content for bootstrapped companies to brand authority building for funded ones.
Getting SEO changes implemented in large organizations: why SEOs must translate technical issues into business impact and communicate differently with developers and executives.
Catch the full conversation in this week's episode.
Topics covered: technical SEO · Next.js SEO · JavaScript frameworks · AI search · LLM discoverability · startup SEO · enterprise SEO implementation.
About the Guest
Will Kennard
Founder and SEO Consultant at Very Good Digital, Co-founder and Marketing Lead at Strongly
Will Kennard is an SEO and web consultant with over a decade of experience in digital growth and technical SEO. Over the years, he has worked with hundreds of brands to improve their digital products, search visibility, and technical architecture.
He founded his own digital growth consultancy, Very Good Digital, in 2024, and co-founded the strength clothing brand, Strongly, in 2023. He is also a technical lead at Kip, a sleep wellness brand, where he oversees the technology aspect, including the iOS app.
A regular conference speaker, his work sits at the intersection of search, product, and web development, with a particular focus on JavaScript frameworks and their impact on crawlability and performance.
Video Chapters
Transcript
Full conversation between Gianluca Fiorelli and Will Kennard.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Hi, I’m Gianluca Fiorelli, and welcome back to The Search Session. Today, our guest is a technical SEO who defines himself on LinkedIn as an SEO and web consultant, conference speaker, and co-founder.
He’s the founder and consultant of his own company, which is Very Good Digital, and also the co-founder of Strongly. In the past, he worked with the friends of Torque. This person is Will Kennard. How are you doing?
Will Kennard: I’m good, thanks. Thanks for having me.
AI Hype, AEO, and Calming Client Expectations
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, how are things going in the UK today?
Will Kennard: Yes, not too bad. Not as miserable as it usually is, so yes, it’s all right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay.
Will Kennard: I’ve been at a couple of SEO events this week, so it’s been busy.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, yes. It’s a lively SEO community there in the UK. And how is SEO treating you lately?
Will Kennard: It’s interesting. It is tough at the moment, I think. I mean, I’m sure you’ve covered this topic a million times, but people are obviously very excited about AI, particularly senior leaders. So I find myself spending a lot of time trying to convince people not to do things that, previously, weren’t really an issue.
Purely because of the whole kind of hype around AEO. And I think we might be at a point where that's starting to calm down. I'm not sure if it's something that you've seen, but for me personally the hype was definitely higher in 2025, but I'm still sort of dealing with a lot of that.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, surely it was. Somehow, the hype was justified, because it's not just something new, it's something radically new. The problem is that, obviously, with new things popping up, there are new ways for new shady people who try to monetize on the shoulders of the ignorance of clients, substantially.
Will Kennard: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But anyway, I'm curious because yes, I too in the past, especially, needed to somehow calm down the enthusiasm of clients or calm down the enthusiasm of potential new clients. Sometimes, even losing someone because of this. How do you deal with this situation? As we say in Spanish, we have a very nice definition that translates as not throwing the baby with the dirty water.
And how do you deal with this situation where a client is asking you, or maybe a new client is contacting you, for something extremely AI, maybe very much influenced by everything that is still popping out in social media, especially on LinkedIn, X, or even by some big consultancy companies like McKinsey, saying search is going to diminish 75%, before “X” year. And so they come to you and say, "We must go full AI," et cetera, et cetera, et cetera. How do you balance this, sometimes genuine, need or desire with not forgetting the past and what the real situation now is?
Will Kennard: Yes. I think there are two sides to it. There's the data, and then there's actually doing it. And I think the first place to start is actually looking at the data. Are they getting referrals from these, whether it's ChatGPT? Usually, at least in my experience and from events that I've been to recently, it sounds like pretty much everyone's in the same boat, but clients are still getting the vast majority of their traffic from traditional search channels.
And then when you plot that against sales or leads or whatever the metric is, that’s, you know, the kind of lagging metrics. I think that frames the conversation instantly, especially for senior leaders who really only care about those kinds of lagging metrics.
But the other side to it is actually doing some of it. I think I'm definitely not in the camp of ignoring some of this stuff. I think there has obviously been a shift in the way that people interact with their computers. I don't think it's as big as we thought it was going to be right now, at least. There’s certainly a list of things that I do for GEO, AEO. A lot of that is stuff that we've been doing all along. But I do genuinely acknowledge that.
I do have a couple of clients for whom I only do GEO, which might not be to everyone's cup of tea. I know a lot of SEOs think it's total snake oil, but I think there's some merit in looking at the kind of factual content that you have and making sure that it's hitting the mark in terms of helping the LLM understand your brand and what you do, your products, and your services. So I think there is the data, and then there is actually the doing it.
But a lot of that doing it is technical stuff, which again is stuff I was already doing. But it's a good opportunity to get people excited about it, especially technically, which is hard to get people excited about in general.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. In fact, sometimes I also use the GEO frenzy for resurfacing things that maybe got lost in the springs.
Will Kennard: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Because I say, "Okay, but if you want to be visible or more visible in ChatGPT or be cited and mentioned and then linked by Perplexity, you have to solve these things. Because these motors don't work like Google. They have some kind of technical difficulties.” We will discuss JavaScript and LLMs later.
But we all know that classic stuff like a good indexability of a website, good navigation, not having bottlenecks, and simply not blocking the AI bots via robots.txt or dealing with Cloudflare, which is the blocking-by-default type of thing, et cetera, et cetera, is making them understand that technical SEO is not just that nerd thing that SEOs always insist about.
And talking about a part that I agree with you on, in the sense that it's not a problem. I'm an SEO; I like to talk about SEO for AI search, but it's more for terminology, not because of some philosophical reason. I think that GEO, AIO, or whatever you want to call it, is nothing else but a new surface. As we work on many surfaces for search, why not this one? Why should you be so critical about it?
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The JavaScript Debate: Next.js and React for SEO
Gianluca Fiorelli: Talking about technical SEO, you are, let's say, I don't know how to define you. You are a strong advocate of Next.js, React, this JavaScript, which obviously still now has a very bad fame in the SEO world. Just to cite a couple of common friends of ours, like Jono Alderson, or Barry Adams, or even Ian Lurie, all previous guests here at The Search Session, they really say it clearly: if you can do something without using JS, please don't use it.
Give a listen to Gianluca Fiorelli's conversations with:
Jono Alderson, who asks what if most of your SEO work is just noise and makes a provocative case for why differentiation, brand, and relevance engineering are now the only levers that actually move the needle.
Barry Adams, on why AI is quietly breaking the traffic model publishers have relied on for a decade, what survival looks like, and why building a loyal audience beats chasing Google every time.
Ian Lurie, who isn't panicking about AI because the fundamentals of great marketing have never changed, and AI is just the latest thing that rewards people who get them right.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Let's say that I'm not so radical, but I'm not such a strong fan of JavaScript myself. But let's play this game. How do you convince me that I don't have to worry or be so critical with Next.js or React nowadays?
Will Kennard: Well, firstly, I still use WordPress, and I still use PHP-based stuff. I'm not necessarily saying that Next, or Nuxt, or any similar solutions are better. I've just had a good experience with them over the past couple of years, building tools and sites, where previously I was a little bit skeptical, probably because of my background in SEO. We always think of the whole single-page application thing, and obviously, it is not being great for SEO, and certainly not for LLMs to be crawling.
So I'm not necessarily saying that I absolutely love Next.js and I think it's amazing and all that kind of thing. I think it definitely has its faults, but the main thing is that if you’re using it properly, it's really powerful. And one thing it does very well is allowing you to create the application-style single-page stuff as well as the marketing-style server-rendered stuff, and also doing a very good job of statically rendering the site. It has everything that you need in it, but it can be misused quite easily.
I think that's where people go wrong with it. If you are developing a site, particularly if you are maybe a developer who has zero experience with SEO, or maybe you've never worked with an SEO team, and you start from scratch using Next.js, you can make some very quick decisions with the framework that would mean your site is not as readily crawlable as something that was server-side rendered with PHP on Apache.
But that being said, there are some really powerful things within it, such as server components, which I've talked about before and done a couple of talks about. For me, the compartmentalized aspect of building everything in components and then allowing you to effectively have those components run on the server and choose whether you want to generate those statically or not is really powerful.
Particularly when you combine it with a CMS like Payload or Sanity, something like that, basically a headless CMS, you can choose what you want to do and where on the site, and you're not limited to one thing. And I know that WordPress sites have these kinds of solutions as well, but to me it makes more sense to see the whole code base in one place and be able to add app-like features if I need to, or marketing features if I need to, all within one framework.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. Yes. And these are the kind of needs that the bigger the company is - or even if it's a small company but bigger in terms of operations, also in terms of business, but maybe smaller in terms of how many employees it has - it's something that usually comes out.
I see it especially with international companies. The more markets a company operates in, the greater the need to fully customize its website. So WordPress is not enough. Magento is not enough if we talk about e-commerce.
For instance, I have a client in the travel space, very big, operating only in Italy, where JavaScript is an obligation for usability in terms of personalization because it depends on the cookie setting and so on. The website is designed by persona. If it recognizes you as one type of persona, it presents you with a different type of - not content, because it is substantially the same - hotel recommendations, tour recommendations, excursion recommendations that are totally designed depending on who you are.
Which sometimes, this makes things as an SEO more difficult. But that doesn't mean it is worse. I think that sometimes the constraints by design caused by JS, if JS is well implemented, oblige us as SEOs to be more creative, to think out of the box.
Will Kennard: Yes, I think there's a big aspect to it as well with SEOs, especially technical SEOs. Personally, I think we're going to get more technical, more towards the development side of things, because of AI tools. We've got the opportunity to get them to write something and then understand it afterwards. Obviously, I wouldn't recommend doing that on a client site, but you can build your own projects now.
Using hosts like Netlify or Vercel, you can deploy a project pretty easily and relatively stress-free. I remember the days of first creating websites years and years ago, and it always felt like a big hassle spinning up a site and figuring out the hosting and all that kind of thing. Now, with the kind of serverless hosts, it's pretty straightforward, and there are templates involved and things like that.
But, from a technical SEO point of view, the approach where we think about sites built with things like Next or Nuxt has always been about the client-server relationship and whether we can get a client-rendered page rendered on the server. But when we break things down into how the technology really works, particularly with Next, you can put suspense boundaries around components. You can have 80 percent of that page rendered on a server and delivered to the search engine or the client as pure HTML, and then insert bits of interactivity, like you said, something that changes based on cookies or whatever logic you're using.
That is the sort of level that, to be honest, after doing SEO for maybe 15 years, mostly technical SEO, I wasn't always super interested in. Because, as a technical SEO, you tend to find yourself identifying issues and then trying to fix those issues.
But when we start to talk about architecture, the architecture of a section of a site or a page or a component, the conversation is a lot easier with developers, at least I find. Because if you're lucky enough to work with developers who give you the build output, a list of the directories, and how they’re rendered, you might look at them and say, "Actually, these four pages really should be statically generated, and for some reason they are generated on the client side, or maybe even dynamically generated.”
Being able to pick those apart with a developer and say, "Maybe we could wrap this in suspense and make sure it’s delivered after the fact,” is really powerful. I think that's potentially where we're going a bit wrong, thinking about it from the client-server perspective as if there's a complete boundary, whereas the network is actually heavily involved.
Why Technical SEOs Need to Get Closer to Development
Gianluca Fiorelli: Indeed. Indeed. And I think that this sort of very strong collaboration with developers has always been crucial and important for SEO, and even more now. I also find that if you are able as an SEO to find a common language with developers and common ground, a way to be diplomatic enough with your knowledge to make them understand that you understand their work, that you appreciate their work, but that things can be done better for the bigger purpose.
I have found from my experience that this is the best way to collaborate with a developer. Because the developers are usually painted as the big enemies of SEO, always criticizing what SEO wants to do or recommend, and maybe sometimes even working against SEO recommendations. But if you are able to do this, they are the ones supporting the SEO with the stakeholders.
Will Kennard: I think I've been quite lucky over the past couple of years. Maybe it has been generated by the fact that I've been very proactive in my learning something like Next.js. I try to get into the weeds of the documentation. A lot of it at first looks completely like something I can't understand at all, but getting into it, you start to think about it from the point of technical SEO and also development.
Generally, when I work with developers now, I get a much more positive response when I'm talking their language, especially if their language is JavaScript. If you get into those weeds with developers, they instantly give you a bit more respect. I do think the lines between technical SEO and developer are definitely blurring even further, purely because we can take a file of code and put it into AI and say, explain all of this to me.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yeah, so this is exactly what I do, because I'm an SEO but not an SEO coming from a computer science background. I come from a totally different background. Usually, I feel more and more comfortable when I have to talk about information architecture or content or things like this, rather than going into the depth of Next.js, for instance.
But thank God, in a sense, AI is really helping me. I apply my usual mental framework when I want to know something. Sometimes I act like a five-year-old boy who is always asking why, why, why. I sincerely annoy the model, I don't know, Claude, asking continuously, but why is this so, and explain it. And I think, but why? And so on.
This is great because it's also a way for me to learn.
AI Tools, Prototyping, and Learning Through Code
Gianluca Fiorelli: For instance, you were saying before about the facility that AI is giving us to prototype things, for instance, components, or even a landing page, or whatever we want to prototype.
I think this is a great tool that AI is offering to us with vibe coding, which is substantially what we were doing in the past, but with more difficulties. Buying a fake domain or creating a subdomain for testing, recreating on the server the same conditions of a client-server, and so on.
Will Kennard: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: That was quite painful, sincerely. Now, even someone who is totally, I must admit it, I do technical SEO, but I cannot define myself as a pure technical. I'm not like you, so strong in knowledge. I'm not like Jono Alderson at conferences, typing code while listening to the speaker at the same time.
But this is something that is helping me. I started to do these vibe coding experiments, especially if I want to demonstrate to myself not only that I can do that, but also that maybe my theory is correct.
Will Kennard: Yes. I think it's also just a case of not even needing to deploy something to learn a lot. If you get used to the basics of installing a Next.js build on your local machine, playing around with it, building it on your local machine, and seeing what the build output is. And then if you are using something like Cursor, I would consider Cursor not really vibe coding because you still need to understand things and do them yourself. You can obviously use it to vibe code, but you would probably use Lovable or something else for that.
But if you're using it to navigate through your project and ask questions, particularly with the later models, I found that Opus 4.6 and Sonnet 4.5 onwards have been much better at giving correct answers to things that I already sort of know. I'm not a coder in the sense that I sit down and code and enjoy it that much. I enjoy reading and figuring it out, but I have little patience to sit there and try to write a whole page.
Gianluca Fiorelli: The same, the same.
Will Kennard: The tools are perfect because usually I'm looking at the code and thinking, "Okay, this is wrong, or this is right," and I'm trying to verify my thinking. Then I'm highlighting a section and verifying my thinking, and I'm getting a correct answer back now.
It's really powerful, and I would probably encourage any technical SEO to, if you're not already building your own stuff, go ahead and build your own stuff, but don't use Lovable and Base44 and those tools that are browser-based. I would go and use an IDE like Cursor, really try and get into the weeds of it.
And obviously, then, if you're building something locally just to play around with, you can't really do too much harm. You'd have to do something in the terminal to really break things. You can break the site, but to do anything to your computer, so there's not much risk with that as well. And it's good fun.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, totally.
JavaScript SEO for LLMs: Rendering, Visibility, and Compromise
Gianluca Fiorelli: Still on the topic of JavaScript, last year at BrightonSEO UK edition, you gave a talk, and it was about JavaScript. Obviously, you made people notice, because at that time it still wasn't so clear that, okay, Google obviously has years of experience in rendering JavaScript, so it understands JavaScript-based websites and content and components and so on. But LLMs don't.
So when you are working with clients, and you are only working in terms of LLMs, what kind of work of reframing do you do with a website that maybe has been developed in Next.js, and then you have to not downgrade it just for the sake of visibility in LLMs? How do you find a good compromise between offering the content to the LLMs to be retrieved, chunked, used, and cited, and the daily classic SEO, let's say the Google experience, but also the usability of the website itself?
Will Kennard: Yes. That's one of the points in my talk - well, a couple of the talks I've done recently. I think at the moment I use Next and Nuxt frameworks interchangeably because they are very similar in the way that they work and the sort of server rendering available.
Personally, I don't think there's any excuse for a website to have pages that can't be discovered by an LLM and definitely not by Google. If something's rendered in pure JavaScript, there's got to be a good reason for that. You wouldn't want to spin up a blog using Next necessarily. Because if all you're going to do is blog, you're going to want a hassle-free experience, which you can get with Next, but you have to make sure you're doing it properly before you get to that point.
I think if you are in the situation where you're thinking about whether this should be for machines, you've almost already answered your question. You ask yourself, has this got some interactive element? Maybe it's a chat or a map or something like that that is fundamentally just a human thing. That's fine, and it doesn't always need to be indexed. But what you can do with something like Next is say that the component that holds that interactivity can be rendered on the client, but the rest of the page doesn't have to be.
That means you can add descriptions and things that the LLM can understand and Google can understand and use, whilst also keeping that client-side element to it. The reason I say there's no excuse is because all of this technology exists within Next.js now. It's almost like that’s why it’s so powerful, but that's also why people get it wrong very easily.
I've spoken to a few companies recently, where the report that I mainly use is rendered with JavaScript in Screaming Frog. You click rendering and then run the crawl. In the report, there is a kind of percentage difference of JavaScript vs not. It's based on things like word count or bytes. So how big was the page once we'd rendered it with JavaScript, and how big was it when it was just text-only rendered.
That gives you a really good idea because you can pick out pages straight away and say this page is ten times bigger once JavaScript has been activated. Then you can look at that page and say what the reason for that is.
Sometimes it will be that the site is built with Next or Nuxt, and there is just a section that is a little bit old, or a different developer worked on it and used the wrong directive, and made it a client portion of the site. But other times it will be something that has to be a client component, and that's fine as well.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I understand. And what really usually annoys me, to be honest, is when JavaScript is used in a way that changes the content that is actually in the response HTML. I'm not talking only about the classic SEO things, like changing the canonical or the title tag, all these strong SEO signals, but also sometimes changing part of the content, adding something that is meaningful. If it was meaningful, why not have it immediately in the response HTML?
Using Technical SEO as a Creative Catalyst
Gianluca Fiorelli: But okay, let's talk about something else I wanted to get into. When I was preparing for this conversation, because yes, I know you, but I wanted to be sure to move the conversation to something meaningful. One of the things that really attracted me is something you usually discuss: using technical SEO not just as a checklist, like "This is an issue, check; this is an issue, check," but as a way not only to resolve problems but also to create opportunities. So, as a creative catalyst. Can you explain that better and give some examples of things that you have done with this framework?
Will Kennard: Yes. I think the biggest one is that if you are a technical SEO, or a technical person, you tend to look at things first from a technical SEO issues point of view. You kind of have to do that. If you do an audit on a site which leads into a retainer, or you're working in-house and you find a bunch of things that are wrong, that's the main aspect of technical SEO. It's like, okay, there's stuff that isn't right, let's fix it and get it to the point where it's as good as it possibly can be.
But there's also an element, like I say, with something like Next.js, where you start to think, “Okay, what if we created a piece of content that combines elements that are interactive and need to be on the client vs stuff that just has to be statically rendered?" and being technical enough to understand that “Yes, we can do that.”
I'll give you an example. I have a client who had this kind of interactive map, which is aimed at a certain ideal customer profile. I'll say map, it's more like a mind map type thing. Again, it's quite a simple piece of content, but it's super effective for their target audience because that person will be looking for their solution. That map shows them all the related areas for that solution and helps them understand all the features of their product and things like that.
But we still wanted stuff on that page that wasn't just client-side interactive. So what we did was basically combine that map with a list on the right-hand side that can be statically rendered. That means we get both the benefit of having the content on the page and the interactive map as well.
And when you click the elements, it pulls through and shows you the right element from the sidebar, so you kind of get the best of both. Previously, the approach would have been that it's either client-side or server-side.
If you’ve got good knowledge in technical, you start to think about… At least what I do is put content briefs together with the technical side in mind. I think about things like schema, and obviously structure, and things like that. But mainly schema, and then I might even think about, “Okay, if we're creating a new section on the site and the site is built with Nuxt, I know what the folder structure is going to look like, and I know what the config files are going to need to look like.” So I can go as far as briefing the developer on that as well.
So yes, you're briefing creative work, but the developer can see the vision from their point of view as well. I think the idea that technical SEOs only do technical SEO is probably not really that true, because I'm sure you do the same. You get a technical project, and you get a content project, but they always mingle. They always interchange.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, they always tend to collide. It is natural because, first of all, I think there is a classic misunderstanding that content is only what is written on a page, or at most a video or an image. But content can be many things.
For instance, I work a lot with comparison websites. A good application on a website that is able to do useful things, like comparing different insurances or policies very fast, but picking all the data from the database correctly, and so on - that is content. And it increases all the positive on-page signals that many people usually consider only for a well-written guide or a good-performing video.
And obviously, when it comes to this kind of content, especially, but also with all the other types, you have to frame it very well for the developer team that is going to develop that kind of content.
Will Kennard: Yes.
Gianluca Fiorelli: But even if it was, as you were making the example of a map, let's say a travel website with a travel guide and an interactive map, like you were saying, that is something that must be done - using the terms of cinema and television, where I was working many years ago, when you are doing the pre-production - by different teams who need to work at the same time and talk together. In that sense, the SEO is taking the place of the executive producer, the one directing them.
Will Kennard: Yes, yes.
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Gianluca Fiorelli: Talking about a type of client, and also because, as I was looking at your LinkedIn, you are the co-founder and marketer of Strongly. First of all, what is Strongly?
Will Kennard: Strongly is a clothing brand.
Startup SEO: Building Demand, Authority, and Early Momentum
Gianluca Fiorelli: Okay. So let's talk about the startup world. Let's define it this way. Or it may even be your personal project in this world. So, in the world of startups, companies are trying to build something, usually a tool, usually a new experience for something.
How do you deal with this kind of client? They are quite peculiar because, depending on the funding, maybe they have money, but they usually ask for very quick solutions to gain visibility quickly and have the possibility to grow faster. So, how do you deal with this kind of client, which is very different from a classic big brand client?
Will Kennard: Yes, startups are something that I have worked with a lot, and I also have my own. It's a tough one because SEO takes time, or we should say organic takes time. You could probably include organic social and things like that.
It's difficult because of that time factor, and saying that, if you don't have funding, it might take 12 months before you start to see any real sales or leads through organic channels. So, that’s quite a hard pill to swallow.
I think if a brand hasn't got any funding and they're starting from scratch, they should do some foundational stuff, but definitely don't make SEO the only thing that you do.
And usually, what I say, because I do get a fair amount of startups inquiring with me, and if they're at that stage where they have no funding and they are just organically building their business, I will effectively do a content strategy for them and say, “These are the things that I recommend you produce on this basis.”
You start to think about the kind of expertise they're going to show, because whether a startup has funding or not, there's usually a reason it exists. Yes, there are startups that do something somebody is already doing, maybe a little bit differently or better. But most of the time, it's because they found a kind of problem that hasn't been solved yet. So they'll go after that.
If you are dealing with a problem that hasn't been solved yet, that actually works pretty well with organic. There isn't much search volume for that problem because it's potentially a new problem or something that realistically has no search demand. That's quite tough to get people to write about.
But there's almost always a problem in the consumer's mind that is very closely related to the thing the startup is doing. You can start from there and build out the knowledge for that brand around the problem they are solving. You almost end up building the search volume yourself, because people start to understand that this is an issue. Generally, that’s how it works.
If the company has funding, a startup with funding is a little bit different. Then you're going to say that we're going to build a marketing function, and part of that marketing function is going to be content and SEO. You're building that from scratch, and it's almost a non-negotiable.
That's the way I explain it to startups. A lot of it might feel like a big leap and too much of a risk, but it is almost non-negotiable for a brand. You kind of think of it like this: you probably wouldn't want to buy from a website that doesn't have much content on it, especially if it's something you care about. If you go into the about pages, guides, and things like that, it really helps the whole experience. But yes, it's a tough one.
It's definitely difficult to make a full-time living just from startup clients alone.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes.
Will Kennard: They simply don't have the right cash flow. It's just a part of any business, right? You need to have clients who can pay you, and it is tough.
But startups are almost always the most fun to work with because you're working on something new and fresh. Everyone is very keen. People sometimes say they don't work with startups because they might not be around in two or three years, but who cares? That's not really what it's about.
It's about building something. If you build that thing and it's not successful, fine. But a lot of startups that I've worked with in the past have gone on to hire big agencies and are doing really well now. And I can say that I was there when we did the first reviews and when we did all the basics.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes. I'm not used to working with startups, but somehow I work with something similar. It's not exactly correct to call it a startup, but it's close to what you were just saying. Sometimes you look at these old clients you had, and you see how they’ve grown, maybe also thanks to the support you gave them.
In my case, I think about a website that is now very well known and used by millions of people, which is Chess.com. I remember that many years ago, Chess.com was a usable, cranky chess application to play on a website.
I supported them when they wanted to start going multi-country and international. It was not a very long collaboration, but it was very fruitful and useful for both sides. I was still relatively young as an SEO at the time, so for me it was a good exercise for learning and growing as an international SEO.
For them, it was also a moment when they started learning SEO with me, thanks to my collaboration. The biggest satisfaction was when I started to see Chess.com cited in SEO conferences as a good example.
But even more than that, the greatest satisfaction was seeing my sons download the Chess.com application and start playing with it and asking them, "How did you find it?" “Oh, I found it because a friend was searching for playing chess, and they found it on Google or doing a blah, blah, blah.”
Sometimes working with startups can almost be defined as vocational because of all the stress, the cash flow they don't have, and all those kinds of things. But it's also a good exercise in thinking out of the box, finding different solutions, and working on cheap but effective solutions, and so on.
Navigating Corporate Bureaucracy and Stakeholder Buy-in
Gianluca Fiorelli: On the contrary, I'm sure you also work with big brands. And when working with big companies, the problem is bureaucracy. How did you evolve in making your tickets, let's call them that, be approved and implemented, not in geological eras?
Will Kennard: Yes. This is something I personally really struggle with because I'm very much the type of person who, if I want to get something done, I just get it done straight away. My skill set allows me to do most of the things that I would recommend to a client myself, if not all of them, and maybe even a bit more.
And it's definitely something that, when I'm working with larger companies, I personally struggle with. I think the way I usually get around it, and this is something I learned the hard way, is that when I was back in media agencies, I focused a lot on the details of things and the solutions because I cared about those.
If something was wrong and I knew it needed to be fixed, I really cared about that. So I would talk to people about that. But you learn that this kind of stuff is often boring to other people who don't care about it as much as you do.
The only real way to deal with it is to zoom out and look at the bigger picture. You start by looking at trends, market size, and things like that. Then you say, “We could be getting this share of the market if we fix these five errors.” That's a simple example. After that, you can drill down and say, “If we fix this serious technical issue, which means these pages aren't being indexed properly, then you’ll get an X amount of revenue based on the performance of similar pages.”
For me, personally, those kinds of things are the evidence I need to give. But it’s less interesting than the actual implementation itself, and it's something that I've always known since I started in SEO. Like I said, learning the hard way and then taking a step back and producing more basic stuff. A lot of the time, it's about getting people interested in the extra traffic or the extra revenue.
But I still sometimes find myself, even now. I'll finish an audit and a strategy and start talking to the client about something like schema or caching, or something like that. And I can see their eyes glaze over, but I can see the developers are interested.
So I have to catch myself and make sure I have a separate conversation with the developers about the technical details, and then keep the discussion strategic for the company owners or people in higher positions.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, this is something that I learned too, by mistake. Obviously, we learn from experience. What I usually do is create the big audit, with the technical part but also content, and sometimes I also touch amplification, even if I don't do any kind of digital PR or link building. But it's something I like to oversee sometimes.
What I learned is that the details and modules of the audit are for the people who are going to do the work. But then you need something else for the stakeholders. And again, this is something that a well-prompted AI model can help with, to make your work faster.
I always create a more operative view, more business-focused. So, if I say to the developers why this is not working, to the stakeholders, I say this is not working, and this is causing this and this in terms of business operations, usability, user satisfaction, and so on. So this is something that I also learned: to separate the two types of communication.
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Beyond the Screen: Warhammer, Gym Life, and Personal Passions
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, almost one hour has passed talking about SEO. Let's talk about Will Kennard. For people who don't know you, what does Will Kennard like to do when he is not using Cursor or doing technical SEO?
Will Kennard: I spend a fair amount of time in the gym. Not obsessively, but I do like weight training, so a lot of people in the SEO industry already know me for that.
And then I'm just a massive nerd, really. I like to play Warhammer with my mates. Ideally with a beer.
Recently, I've also started getting a bit more into food. It's not something that I cared about that much earlier in my life, but maybe as I'm getting a bit older, I enjoy trying new restaurants or cooking with my girlfriend and experimenting with cooking. I find it really interesting.
But largely, when I'm not coding or at the gym, I'm probably playing Warhammer or reading a Warhammer novel.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, I remember that when we met in Barcelona for the International Search Summit. We briefly talked about Warhammer, because you are more on the gaming side, while I am more on the painting side. I'm not really interested in the gaming part because honestly, I sometimes find the rules overly complicated.
Will Kennard: Yes, they are.
Gianluca Fiorelli: So, talking about Warhammer, remind me, what is your preferred type of army?
Will Kennard: I'm building a Dark Angels army, but I've also got a couple of Kill Teams. I've got a Tau Kill Team and a Space Marines Kill Team. So I'm relatively new to it. Well, I say I'm new to it compared to some people. I haven't finished my main army yet, but it's getting there. It takes a long time, especially the painting.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Yes, army painting takes quite a long time. In fact, I had a very silly, crazy idea during the peak of COVID, when I was losing clients. We were working a lot with travel websites, and obviously they stopped everything because nobody was traveling.
So I said, "Okay, what can I do apart from maintaining the few clients that I still have? I'm quite good at painting, so let’s try to reinvent something, a temporary gig, as an army painter for people who don’t want to paint.”
But it’s very boring because after the tenth type of soldier painted at scale, you really can’t do it anymore. And it takes a lot of time and I'm a stupid perfectionist, and battle-ready painting is different from display painting; yet I tend to aim for display painting.
So yes, it’s difficult. Maybe sometimes we should share tips: you for me as a gamer, and I for you on how to paint armies faster.
Will Kennard: I know there are a few people who play Magic: The Gathering as well, which is something I've had a love-hate relationship with.
Gianluca Fiorelli: And there are a lot of people, especially in the US in our industry, who are very passionate about Dungeons & Dragons. I think all these kinds of games are somehow characteristic of the SEO industry.
Will Kennard: Yes, definitely.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Thank you, Will. It was a big pleasure to have you as my guest here at The Search Session. I hope to see you soon in real life, maybe at one of the many SEO conferences around the world, here in Europe, or even in the UK. And yes, I would really like to have another opportunity for a new conversation with you in the future.
Will Kennard: Nice. Thanks for having me.
Gianluca Fiorelli: Thank you, and thanks to all of you for being our guests and listening to Will and me. Remember to ring the bell and subscribe to help this channel grow. Thank you.
Podcast Host
Gianluca Fiorelli
With almost 20 years of experience in web marketing, Gianluca Fiorelli is a Strategic and International SEO Consultant who helps businesses improve their visibility and performance on organic search. Gianluca collaborated with clients from various industries and regions, such as Glassdoor, Idealista, Rastreator.com, Outsystems, Chess.com, SIXT Ride, Vegetables by Bayer, Visit California, Gamepix, James Edition and many others.
A very active member of the SEO community, Gianluca daily shares his insights and best practices on SEO, content, Search marketing strategy and the evolution of Search on social media channels such as X, Bluesky and LinkedIn and through the blog on his website: IloveSEO.net.
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