A Bold Take on SEO
Shannon Penney (SP): Hello everyone. Thank you for joining us on the Fully Managed Podcast. Thank you, Harry Brooks, for joining me today. I really appreciate you coming on.
Harry Brooks (HB): Yeah. Looking forward to it.
SP: Thank you. So today we’re gonna start with something fun, something funky, fresh, to not have your marketing brain overload it immediately. Getting into this, I’ll do the hard hitting stuff for later. So what we’re gonna do today is this segment is called Hot Takes and Unpopular Opinions. So, I want you to share a bold opinion that you have that maybe you think a lot of people would disagree with or you brought up before and have had some arguments against. And then just defend it in less than a minute. Does that sound good?
HB: Sounds awesome. Love it.
SP: Awesome. Alright, ready? Time starts now.
HB: There is no such thing as advanced SEO. Alright, I’m ready. So, in like 2008, I wrote a blog on like a free like WordPress thing way back then called, “There’s no such thing as advanced SEO,” and I actually got called into HR for it. Yeah. So they sat me down, they were like, “We sell HSEO, what are you doing?” And I was like, “Look, at the time I was going around the I was like in two cities a week teaching businesses how to do SEO.” And that was my gig. And I was like, “Look, if you write good content and it’s high quality and you know what you’re talking about, and you, it’s about a thing, a specific thing. It’s not this ephemeral, you know, notion. It’s going to rank.” And remember this is going back almost 20 years. So, that that’s still true. It’s still true. If you have good high quality content that’s authoritative, you know what you’re talking about, it’s thorough and it’s genuine, it’s going to do fine over time. And yeah, you can get into structured data and you can get into page speed improvements and compression and ification, all the stuff that business owners don’t know how to do. And really, when it comes down to it, if your site is a good site and it’s authoritative and you know what you’re talking about and it helps people, it’s going to do fine.
SP: I think you did great and I think that was a great argument. To be honest, I don’t know if you are updated on the whole HubSpot drama, so to speak. But, a lot of people think that their domain authority went down, and their like their links and everything, they’re not ranking as high as they always were, which was like they were the textbook everyone was looking at them for. And a lot of people think it’s because they were link building, but they weren’t putting quality content. So they were just kind of doing it as much as possible because that was kind of the format that seemed to work for so long. But I think, yeah, what you’re saying, even though you said it was 20 years ago when this notion was came about, I think that this is even more true now because of how Google changes constantly. I think that specifically now with AI and everything integrated into Google search, I think that this is even more true now of that there are certain things that we don’t focus on anymore.
HB: Yeah. And that’s you know, in a perfect world, there are like, three legs to the stool. And if you kick one out, the stool’s gonna fall over. You can get away with it for a bit, focusing on just great content. You can focus on it for a bit. Okay? All we’re gonna do is try to build links for the next year, and you can focus on it. My site load’s fast, that’s all we focus on, but when push comes to shove, you kind of need the technical, the content, and the off page all to work together to kind of to keep things moving forward for a real amount of time, to have something that’s that’s strong and has some longevity behind it. You know, that said, you can write two blog posts a week and see your organic traffic kind of trend up over time, until the next you know, update. And then it’s like, “Oh, what happened?” It’s ’cause you neglected other stuff.
SP: Yeah, I completely agree. I think that you need to account for everything and not just focus on one strategy. That’s very um, I guess not accounting for, you’re putting all your eggs in one basket.
HB: Yeah, I think yeah. You know what’s funny is I actually heard on on one of the previous episodes and now I can’t remember who who said it. I wish I could, I can go back and find it, but
SP: I might be able to remember. Yeah.
HB: I’m horrible with names. Oh, you know who it was? It was the agency guy.
SP: They’re lovely.
HB: Yeah. He made this really good point and it was, if you have if if you don’t know what marketing channel to pursue and you go to an SEO guy, they’re gonna tell you, “Well, you need SEO.” And if you, if you don’t know what you to do for marketing, go to a branding guy. They’re gonna say, “Well, your branding is a mess.” And I think that that was really poignant because it it just hammers home the point that you you need objective, good advice from marketing people who can guide you down the right channels. And the same thing holds true at a micro level. If you’re looking at SEO, you don’t want somebody to just say, “Content, content, content.” And you don’t want somebody to say, “Content is dead. You have to do this.” And so you need somebody that’s gonna look at things, you know, kind of holistically, even within the realm of one channel, like SEO.
SP: Yeah, exactly. They need to be more realistic rather than just looking for a problem, maybe right, based off of their industry. Because I think that’s that’s when you actually have true transparency, I think when you’re going to an agency.
HB: Agreed.
SP: The good ones are telling you realistically that maybe you just don’t need help. Right.
HB: Yeah.
SP: Or or maybe you really need help in this, but it’s not what we do, or whatever it may be.
HB: Yep.
Introducing Harry Brooks and the Journey to White Label Agency
SP: Exactly. Well, I think that this was a great start to the podcast. I just wanted to introduce you officially and let everyone get to know who you are. So for everyone that doesn’t know that’s watching. This is the Fully Managed podcast. This is a podcast where we discuss marketing and business tips to help assist you on your business journey. I’m your host, Shannon Penney’s, partnership coordinator, and I’m joined here today with a very special guest, Harry Brooks. Thank you again for joining me today. I think we’ve had a great start for conversation. I’m very excited to get into it.
HB: Yeah, my pleasure to be here. Thanks.
SP: Could you start by telling us a little bit more about yourself? Anything that you think would be relevant up until this point in your business journey and what you’re doing right now?
HB: Sure. Yeah. Thanks. So I launched my first PPC campaign in 2002. I’m getting long in the tooth. And back then I, I was working in an unrelated interest in like, in like offsite data protection. And I was an armchair affiliate guy. And this is back in the day of nickel clicks. And what’s funny is I was dating someone who ultimately became my wife, but she was an aesthetician. So I learned everything I could learn about skincare and became a really good skin store affiliate.
SP: I mean your skincare, your skin looks great. So you, you yeah.
HB: Yeah, you haven’t seen it up close, but from the eighties. So, you know, back then you could you could have a paid ad and send it directly to an advertiser’s website. And if somebody bought, you got the, the affiliate commission, you didn’t have to send it to your own website. That didn’t start until like 2005 or 06. And so anyway, I was kind of an armchair affiliate guy for a few years and and it was great. So I, I kind of learned Google Ads AdWords at the time, kind of in the trenches, in the dark underbelly of the affiliate world. And I got picked up by Network Solutions and back at the time, in the mid two thousands, early you know, the the mid aughts, they were they were the name ga, main game in town for for domains and they had a huge affiliate business. So I came, I went on there actually to manage their affiliate program and did that for a year and then kind of fell into this. They were selling SEO but with outside sales reps, like high priced SEO services. And so they developed this idea, the sales operation where you, you, you had huge list, 30, 40, 50,000 people in a market. And you email ’em and invite ’em to a seminar and teach them SEO. So my job, they looked around and went, “Who knows how to do SEO? Brooks? He knows how to do it. He’s been doing it at home.” You know, that kind of thing. And so we started this seminar program where we just went from city to city to city, all across the US getting from 40 to 500 small businesses in a room. You spend eight hours teaching ’em SEO, and then at the end of the day, some number of them went, “Yeah, that’s great. No way I’m doing this.” And so income, our biz dev reps to sell ’em on an SEO package. So I did that until 2009 and it was it was awesome traveling and teaching and meeting all those small businesses. And when they disbanded that outside sales organization, my job became defunct. And and I didn’t miss a day of work. I just I had been talking to small businesses and moonlighting, of course. And so I didn’t miss a day of work. I, I, you know, that the day that that job ended, I created my first agency. It was search first, internet marketing, and launched it and immediately had, you know, half a dozen clients on retainers. And it was just, “Okay, now I’m an agency owner.” Three years later, a guy from college tried to hire me to run to work in his agency, which was much bigger than mine. And we quickly realized that it was silly for me to contract for him. I took my dozen clients or so, and used him as an equity buy-in into his agency. And we became business partners in 2012 and we’re still together. So that agency in 2012 is conversion pipeline. So I currently sit as the chief marketing officer for conversion pipeline. It is a full service digital marketing agency, offering everything that you would expect from SEO to paid ads, to design and development and so forth. Well, what’s interesting is that a few years ago, I guess it was four or five years ago, we looked up now our agency had been around for a, you know, a decade more, and we realized like a huge chunk of our revenue was other agencies. And it just kind of happened. It wasn’t on purpose, it just happened. And so even a couple of years ago, if you’d gone to conversion pipeline.com, you would’ve seen White Label Digital Marketing Solutions. Well, that became kind of problematic because our retail client base, which was the majority, didn’t know what White Label was. And our other agency partners were like, “Well, wait a second, if you’re a retail agency, you know, are you are you competing with us? What exactly what is the, what’s the deal here?” So we were looking for a way to split that business from retail digital marketing services versus white label digital marketing services. And we found negotiated and bought white label agency. We just bought the whole dang thing. So it worked really well. It was it was a really fun experience. We, this white label agency had been being run out of out of an office in Toronto, by a a very sharp group of guys who had this agency, and it was very similar to us. It was an offshoot of their main. They, they were a web flow development shop and they didn’t want this agent. They had it and it was running great, but they didn’t want it. They wanted to be a web flow shop. So, so we decided that it was that was the perfect catalyst to be able to split our business units into two different distinct brands that made sense. So I guess last summer, last year, we had finished our integration and white label agency. We are able to by their agency partners match ’em up with our agency partners. I have a dev crew that’s been with me for almost 20 years, so I wanted to get my people doing the dev work and my processes for SEO and for PPC. And so we finished all that integration and now we have two distinct businesses. So, yeah. A lot of what I do is spent on white label agency talking to other agencies, and I, we have two other business partners. So owners look at me like I’m crazy when I tell ’em there are three owners. It works. It just works. We have one who’s a creative and like, you know, kind of, “Hey, let’s do this, let’s do this, let’s do this.” Yeah. We’ve got another one who’s like, you know, keeps everything just in perfect order. And then I sit in the middle, so a managing partner for white label agency and chief marketing officer over a conversion pipeline. And one side is retail, one side is talking to other agencies. So wearing a bunch of different hats, but thoroughly immersed in the digital agency world. That was a very long one.
SP: I’m happy for the whole comprehensive story because I think that that’s very interesting. I, it’s really cool to have the foresight of realizing that your agency is confusing because I do think that that happens sometimes with a lot of people where you, if you’re doing too many things or maybe you have a certain clientele and then they kind of conflict where you are doing the white labeling and people were confused about it, or you’re doing the retail and the people were confused about which one you specialized in and were best at, it makes sense to split it off. But I think a lot of people wanna do so much at once. And they’re capable of it. But I think the confusion of clients comes at a detriment to them because they maybe, it, it kind of takes away from like the trust aspect of like, “You’re really good at this one thing.” Yes.
HB: You can’t be a yes man. I can, I can add a title tag. Sure. But I, what, what do you mean structured data? You know, how, what am I supposed to do? So, so it’s just a different, there are different incentives for the different markets that you serve. So it really does make sense to have to, to, go after them in different ways and, and talk to them in different ways too.
SP: Yeah, of course. I think that that is, it, it, it’s good to recognize that that is something that would work better for you because I think, and for your clients, because I think that, kind of stretching yourself too thin in the confusion can kind of, I think that it it’s necessary to be clear to clients. And I, I think that the more confusion that happens, the the harder it is to work with them and then to be clear about what you’re doing for them.
HB: Oh, yeah, yeah. Clarity, especially around SEO is tough. It’s understand it, they don’t understand it or or or they understand the end result, but they don’t understand the deliverables. And deliverables with SEO is hard because a lot of times it’s, content. Yeah. They can see it, touch it, and feel it. A business owner can, like they, oh, okay, here’s a new page on the site. But when you start talking about technical updates or page speed improvements, it’s just this this kind of, they glaze over and they don’t, “Okay, what did you do exactly?” And so that can be tough. And being able to articulate what you’re doing and why you’re doing it, and and what the goal is of a particular step is super important when you get into those types of services, because you can’t see it. You, you know, you can’t see, like with the paid ads. Program you can see, you know, impressions, clicks, conversions. It’s easy to to grasp and you can put a dollar on, uh, value on it. SEO is a little bit of a different creature, so maybe tough in some circumstances if you’re not clear.
SP: Yeah. It’s a talent, I think, to be able to explain something simply. Especially if you’re so immersed in that world. Yes, especially for a client that doesn’t completely understand SEO or the terminology that goes around it or the steps going on. I think that to be able to explain it simply the to them is really a value, because people can be happy with an end result, but if they don’t understand the process, they might not necessarily trust that. You were working the whole time, which sounds like yeah. It sounds bad because obviously they should trust you to even come to you for a service, but I think that SEO a lot of times takes more time than people expect, especially people who don’t understand it. And so to be as clear as you can about the process and explain it to them in terms that they would understand is so important and vital to them being completely happy at the end, not only with the end result, but knowing that the process was seamless. Yes. Or maybe not seamless.
HB: Yes. And you know what, literally two and a half hours ago, 10 o’clock, I was in a meeting with an agency owner and he was talking to a prospect that has four local businesses in an area. And so we’re gonna launch into, you know, he’s gonna position and place local SEO services. And this is an agency owner. And his question to me was, “How long is it gonna take?” Don’t always know that. And then he said, “You know, he’s gonna ask me that. What should I tell him?” And I said, “Look at him right in the eye and say, ‘You have no idea how long it’s gonna take and for what.'” And then I backtracked and said, “Okay, don’t be so flippant, but.” You have to be able to explain that. We really don’t have any idea, and I think the best way to frame that for an end client for an agency is to say, “Look. One, we’ve been doing this for a long time. We have a lot of expertise. We’re going to follow best practices. So we’re gonna do the things we know we’re supposed to be doing. We’re gonna do them in a timeline. We know we should be doing them. And what we expect is to see over time positive trends.” And that might be positive trends in organic search traffic or positive trends in number of conversions or inbound leads. But there are gonna be times where it ebbs and flows. And sometimes it’s kind of counterintuitive. We see you do a great job on on-page optimizations and you see traffic go down and conversions go up. And being able to look at that and explain to the client, “Well, you were showing up in search queries that were really not tied to what you do exactly. And now you’re search showing up for search queries that are very closely tied to what you do. So you’re getting less traffic, but the people who are coming to your site are are are much more valuable.” And having, you know, looking at the data and being able to interpret that and sharing it with a client in a way that they’re gonna understand and not gloss over is huge.
SP: Yeah, 100%. It is, it is a difficulty because you do have to educate a client to a certain extent, which a lot of people, I think, don’t realize that is is so important to the process. And I think that it, it sucks ’cause sometimes you’re not necessarily paid for the educational aspect of it. Yeah. But it’s also really important for you to have a more, a better relationship with your client for them to realize that like. There might, it might not look good sometimes, but it’s not necessarily at the fault of you. It’s just that sometimes things go up and down or they look bad, but they’re not actually bad. Whereas, and, and I think that it’s hard to understand when you don’t completely understand SEO as a whole.
HB: Yeah, to totally agree. And, you know, getting into being able to, to clearly explain what they’re seeing in analytics, I think is where that really comes to shine, a lot is, you know, marrying up what you see in search console with what you see in analytics and being able to filter out junk and noise and analytics and show them the meaningful things. That, that’s, I think, a a very big deal. And being able to distill reporting and all those numbers for maybe somebody who, maybe they’re in home services and they spend their time talking about, you know, roof installs, you know. They, they’re not gonna care about a lot of these little tiny, granular data points. They want to know what are you taking away from it. But more importantly, they’re gonna want to trust that what your, what your takeaway is, is accurate. So, the job for us is to be able to get our agency partners comfortable with those conversations if they’re not already. And on the retail side, being able to talk directly to the clients. So, yeah, know your audience for sure.
SP: 100%. You definitely need to consider that. So segueing, because out curiosity, wondering how do you, what does the process look like for, like picking your agency partners for the white label agency? Like what
HB: Yeah. Yeah. At at some point, probably in the, in the near future, we’ll be able to accommodate some of those people too. But for the most part, we’re able to find out within a half an hour, we try to pre-qualify ’em on the website. That doesn’t always work. So yeah, it’s, it’s really, you have to talk to ’em and you have to get a sense of, of where they are in their business journey and whether or not they’re a good fit for outsource services yet.
SP: Yeah. So what is, then, what does the ideal person look like? Like the the peak partner that you would really love to have?
HB: Yeah. Yeah. That, that, that’s a good, a good question. So, let’s see. If I were gonna develop a buyer persona for this, there would probably be like two or three primary personas. The first one is is like the middle of the bell curve. If I look at all of our agency partners and just plotted ’em out, the ones that are right in the middle of the bell curve would be, these are agencies with, you know, eight to maybe 15 people. That have a sizable number of retainers that know they need to hire another good PPC analyst, but also know that it’s gonna cost them, you know, fully loaded 70 or $80,000 a year to get a, a junior one. And don’t want to do it. So they need help in production. That’s that’s an ideal, ideal client, because they know it, they’re already doing it. They get it. Another buyer persona is maybe even smaller than that, where you have, you know, one to three people and they’ve got five or 10 retainers under their belt and they can’t do anymore. They they just can’t do it. Severe time limitation. There’s only so many hours in the day. You can’t develop content, develop creatives, you know, build a website if it comes up. Run PPC, keep tabs on SEO and client comms. And newly, you can’t do it all. So people like that, that are, that are smaller, but like, but get it and are doing it, they’re perfect.
SP: Okay. So then Harry, what was what would your in ideal partner look like when you’re like, doing this vetting process?
HB: Yeah. Great question. So, best partners are people who already are providing the services and have done it for a while. So they know, they know how to set people up, they know how to sell it. They know what the expectations are and how to set expectations with the client. So if you can picture, this is not an average, just a typical agency partner, would come to us and say, “Okay, we have, you know, call it 20 retainers and 12 of them have ads running and we decided not to hire up for a new ads analyst ’cause it’s gonna cost too much money to bring in the new head. So we wanna outsource this.” Super common. So they already have the clients, they’ve already been sold. They’re ready to go. That is we can step in, take over production of those ad accounts and not really miss a beat most of the time. What makes us really love it is when we can go in and find quick wins. So an ad account that’s been running for a year and go in and say, “Oh, you know what? We find a lot of success when we do this, this, and this. Let’s make those changes and see material. Improvements to a campaign.” Would love that. ‘Cause it makes it a little good. It’s nice.
SP: It’s also nice to look at your results like really quickly and enough that you’re doing good.
HB: Yeah. Totally. So, so the short version, the short answer to your question is, somebody who under understands how to position, sell, and close and advertising client and and has somebody ready to go. The flip side to that is what, what’s not great is when. The agency is really, really fresh, brand new, and they don’t quite know how to set expectations with running ads accounts, and don’t know the ins and outs of setting up the administration. My client center accounts, GA four, integration, tag manager integration, all of those little nuts and bolts really makes a big difference when the agency partner gets it and they’ve done it and they understand what we’re gonna have to do in order to execute on the white label, partnership. So. That, that’s really the short version is experience and setting expectations right with a client, I think makes all the difference in the world.
SP: That makes complete sense ’cause we definitely talked about earlier that you have to educate to a certain extent. And I think educating for, educating to a more extent where you don’t even understand the field of advertising at all might be a lot more difficult to use the service or involve Yes. Involved without, no.
HB: What’s funny is that just, I literally an hour ago. I got a message from a longstanding client, somebody, a partner we’ve been working with for five years. And the question from the account manager was, “The client is doing searches and don’t see their ad. What do I tell them?” And so what we we ended up doing is making a, you know, an eight minute video saying, “Look, you have a $30 a day budget, you’re at less than 10% impression share. You know, we have 30 defined keywords that are phrased in exact match. Unless they are spot on, they’re not gonna see their ad in the wild, just through a combination of throttling and, targeting and everything else.” So, I, you, you know, that’s a situation where if, if they had understood the ins and outs a little bit better. Yeah. And that’s on us with a longstanding partner to train, make sure that they understand what’s going on. But, the point is that those are, those are little objections that are really easy to, to discuss with a client. If you just have the, the little bit of, of background to be able to do that. So what makes the best partners are those that, that really understand those ins and outs.
SP: Yeah. That’s really lovely. It’s, especially, it’s, it’s nice that maybe before it even got to you, maybe they understood it enough to be able to explain it to your client, which is probably the idea, but I know that sometimes it gets back to you.
HB: It does. And, and really that, you know, we we’re not mad to get that, that’s why we’re here, so we can hook you up and help you out with that. It’s just one of those little examples of like, “Yep, we should all know this. It’s been a long time.”
SP: Yeah. Well, it’s lovely that you’re willing to go through that effort of educating them because I think it’s also people in that exact scenario may misunderstand that, “Oh, this isn’t working, or you’re not doing your job, or you’re not like this,” because they don’t understand the levels of how this works. Whereas like a lot of people are expecting immediate results as well, which they take time and, and all of that. So having that education aspect, I think helps you out. On, not just them out.
HB: Yeah. So of course Google keeps us on our toes because you know, some campaigns you turn ’em on and the next day it’s like, “Boom, leads.” I wish it were like that every time, but it’s not.
SP: I know can predict it sometimes and it changes constantly. Indeed. Well, this is all the time we have for today, but I really appreciate you coming on with me. This was very fun, very formative and I usually don’t get to talk to a lot of people in the ads, uh, field as much as I do like the generic marketing agency. So it was really cool to get to learn about this niche as well. So thank you so much for not only probably teaching the audience, but for teaching me.
HB: Oh, you’re very welcome. It was my pleasure.
SP: Thank you and thank you everyone for watching and or listening. We’d be nothing without you, so please, check out some other episodes to learn like I get to do every time. Thank you so much and have a lovely day.
