Episode Transcript
[00:00:00] Speaker A: There's a lot to be said around having fewer keywords that actually make a bigger impact compared to having meaningless topics on your site like that. It doesn't really matter. But you have this vanity metric traffic. It's like, okay, who cares? Like, actually go after things that make sense for your business and actually have the capacity to generate roi rather than meaningless vanity traffic that doesn't really matter.
[00:00:24] Speaker B: Welcome to the Agency Hour podcast, where we help web design and digital agency owners create abundance for themselves, their teams, and their communities. This week on the Agency Hour, we're bringing you a conversation we couldn't pass up. We didn't plan to invite many guests this year, but when Stephen Schneider, co founder and CEO of Trio SEO, came on our radar, we had to make an exception. Why? Well, I believe the future of SEO is AI driven, and I want to see if he can convince me otherwise. Will AI take over SEO completely, or is there still a place for human expertise and optimization? In this episode, we'll explore who we're really optimising for in today's landscape, the importance of relevant search volume, practical steps to integrate SEO into your agency's offering, and a whole lot more. And if you're considering allowing the robots to control your agency's SEO, you're going to want to hear this. I'm Troy Dean. Stay with us.
Ladies and gentlemen, without further ado, please welcome to the Agency Hour, Stephen Schneider from Trio SEO. Hey, Stephen, how you doing?
[00:01:26] Speaker A: Hey. Hey, Troy. How's it going? Nice to be here.
[00:01:28] Speaker B: Thank you, man. Welcome to the show. Glad to have you here. Now you're. We should give people a bit of context how we are connected. You're co founder with Nathan Hirsch, is that right?
[00:01:39] Speaker A: That's correct. Yeah. Good friend of mine, partner all around. Great guy.
[00:01:43] Speaker B: Yeah. Nathan's been on the show before.
Just. Just give people. Just so that people understand the context. Just pay a little bit of background. How did you meet Nathan? How did your worlds collide?
[00:01:54] Speaker A: I was very serendipitous, just through LinkedIn randomly. I was kind of just coming out of my first company, and then I obviously went on LinkedIn because where else are you going to find a job elsewhere nowadays? And went into a startup, worked there for like six months. Long story short, hated my life, hated every second of it. Quit on the spot with no backup plan. Went back to entrepreneurship and then kind of met Connor Gilliban, who's Nathan's longtime partner. Met Nathan and we just started small talk, texting, nothing really serious. And then I was like, hey, guys. If you want to do something together, like, we should definitely explore that. And one thing led to another and Trio SEO was born.
[00:02:34] Speaker B: Wow.
So why. I have to ask the question, why an SEO? Why? Okay, why an agency?
And why an SEO agency? What was the.
How did you identify the gap in the market? Like, what did you think you could offer that wasn't being done elsewhere? Just talk us through the kind of the genesis of Treo SEO.
[00:02:59] Speaker A: Yeah. So my first company, I co owned a portfolio of blogs and websites and kind of was in the like, buy, build, flip kind of wild west era of SEO and affiliate marketing and all that sort of stuff. So we were publishing like 3 to 400 articles per month across our portfolio of brands. And so that was kind of like my background for a couple of years. Scaled that up, had a big fun run. And then obviously Nathan and Connor are well established entrepreneurs. Connor's a great SEO. And so when we kind of hit things off, you know, I was talking to them, I was like talking to Connor mostly and was like, why don't you guys have an SEO agency? Like, this is such a natural fit within your portfolio of brands, your portfolio, your personal brand, et cetera. And he's like, oh no, we have it all mapped out. Like we have like a 20 page document of what we would do and how we would do it, but we don't want to run it. We're not operators. Like, we kind of each have our own skill sets. And so I pretty much pitched myself and was like, well, I have the blueprint of how to pretty much run content at scale and do it really cleanly and efficiently. So if you guys can find some beta clients, like, let's hit the ground running and test this thing out. And so that's what they did. And they pretty much like we bootstrapped it within 30 days, had some beta clients, and kind of like just instilled the same strategies that we've been doing for our own companies. And it hit the ground running and just kind of brought it to life.
[00:04:18] Speaker B: And how long, when did Trio SEO start? How long you been around?
[00:04:22] Speaker A: It's over a year. So about October, I think we went, we had an August, October period of just like bootstrap, build a website, get it up and running clean and dirty. And then October was kind of like when we publicly launched.
[00:04:34] Speaker B: So I have to ask because with the advent of AI and everything that's going on with AI like we did, at some point, did someone say this is a really bad idea because we're going to be out of business in a year because AI is just going to eat us a lot. Like, was that a concern?
[00:04:50] Speaker A: Of course. I mean, yeah, everyone says that. I mean, but I think that, you know, if you kind of hear that, you must be doing something right to some degree. The way we look at it is like, we're pretty boring SEOs. We've kind of always planted our flag in the sand that we play by the book, we don't try and cut corners. We're not using AI. We human write all our content, Everything is edited by humans. Like we use Grammarly on the side. But you know, it's, it's dull and painful. And that's how SEO should be. It's a game of delayed gratification to make all this stuff come to life. It's a little bit of black magic and luck and you do it right and you know the end story.
[00:05:26] Speaker B: So do you feel like there's a play? I mean, it is a science and an art. I remember starting out, you know, 150 years ago when SEO was kind of quite easy, really.
And it is a science and an art. Do you feel like AI has a role in SEO? And just for those listening, Because I know there's a lot of agencies that will be listening to this that will be tempted to add SEO as a service, particularly after what we talk about and what you guys offer. But they'll also be saying, well, you know, this is a short term play because all my clients are just going to have AI do the thing. And I mean, frankly, some of the AI tools that we're using are incredible. And so how long do you think you can put that flag in the sand and say, well, you know, we're humans, we write it. Human editing, it's really dull, it's really boring. We're playing the delay gratification game. There's no place for AI here. What's the shelf life of that value proposition, do you think?
[00:06:18] Speaker A: Yeah, I mean, obviously I'm biased, I'm pretty bullish on SEO, but I think it's actually going to become the opposite of what people are kind of expecting.
I think that kind of the counter narrative to that is people are going to be looking at, okay, when Google and the dot com boom came, like, SEO first exploded because they were like, how do we get our company website on Google? And that was like the first kind of gold rush. Well, now we have people coming to us and say, how do we get our company in ChatGPT? How do we rank for AI? How do we do all this sort of stuff. And so the game will change inherently, as it should, but the people who are playing the game longer than those who quit because of the fear or the kind of insert other object here is what will kind of determine the rest of the kind of how the current doll.
[00:07:08] Speaker B: So do you think that. Do you think that SEO will pivot to.
You know, there's a couple of schools of thought here, is that SEO stays the same, but the search engine is no longer Google. The search engine will be perplexity or, you know, whatever, whatever interface you're using to search the LLM. Or do you think. Because I have some thoughts on this myself, which I'd be curious to talk about, and I think we're probably in agreement, but do you think the SEO becomes LLM? Oh, like we're just optimizing to get it into the search bots rather than this, you know, and like Google itself, you just won't be. I mean, I have this whole kind of. I'm waiting for spatial computing to really be kind of viable so that I can divorce myself from a computer screen. Because I hate looking at computer screens.
Nothing personal. It's just not good for my brain. And so I'm really looking forward to putting on my smart glasses and my little nanopods in my ears and just talking to AI and interacting with the Internet that way. And then at that point, like, I'm not searching on a search engine on a screen, I'm just asking my agent questions and it's going and getting me the best results. So does the data that we're then publishing for companies and optimizing metadata, then the metadata we're optimizing for AI search rather than a traditional search engine. Is that kind of where you see things going?
[00:08:27] Speaker A: I think so. I think that the, the kind of crazy, futuristic scenario that you just described is definitely the one side of the conversation that would be amazing. We're looking at what a dream state is.
But I think when you break it down and you think about the basics for the fundamentals, I always talk to clients, I'm like Google or LLMs, however you want to phrase that conversation, is never going to. Not want to showcase an authoritative brand or one with credibility. So if your website currently doesn't have that and doesn't feel like you guys are kind of, you have the content that you can speak to. If you're not showcasing to Google that you actually have the credibility and the authority and expertise that you say you do, well, how else do you think you're going to be able to win the ranks. And so the other kind of visual aid is the iceberg. You see the, the little bit of the iceberg above the water. But what really sank the Titanic, you know, it was all the other stuff below that adds the depth and the content and the keywords and the backlinks and the credibility. And you look back at the end of the day and the site that is a homepage and a contact page is left in the dust compared to the site that's service pages, about page, a full blog, a podcast, a marketing strategy like the Giant is going to succeed at the end of the day because of that authority that they can kind of, you know, press forward with.
[00:09:55] Speaker B: Yeah, I mean, and I think, you know, I agree. I just think the, my observation is, I think the futuristic scenario that I painted, I don't think it's that far away.
[00:10:09] Speaker A: Yeah, I think it's a lot, I.
[00:10:11] Speaker B: Think it's a lot closer than we think. My, this is a philosophical conversation, but my theory is that people are going to resist letting go of their keyboard and their monitor for a long time because they don't know what else to do. And they're comfortable in front of their keyboard and their monitor. A lot of people hide behind the keyboard and the monitor. And I frankly can't wait to get rid of the fucking thing because I just want to be free. I want to move, I want to be able to walk, I want to be able to play guitar. I want to be able to do whatever I want to do and still communicate with people and not have to go and look at a computer. So whenever my team are like, oh, we need to jump on a zoom call, I'm like, you can jump on a zoom call. I'm on the phone. Do I really need to look at a screen? Can you, like, here's this report. Great. Tell me the numbers. I don't need to look at a spreadsheet. Tell me the numbers. Right, so my point is, you know, I agree that we're still going to need to optimize data for the machine. That is the interface between the customer and the database. Right. So here's a customer who wants a local. Give you a real example. I was looking for a GP recently, a new gp, and I wanted a GP that is happy to talk to me about nutrition. Because 99 and a half percent of GPs don't talk about nutrition. Because they do six years of med school and they have one two hour lecture on nutrition. Right. They don't like, they don't Just, I don't even talk about what you put in your mouth, which is nuts, right? So I wanted to find a GP who was happy to talk to me about nutrition and diet, and I ended up finding one who was a referral from another health professional that I was seeing. And, but my, my future state, and I'm 52 this year and I think this will happen.
I can see it like we are moments away from me being able to say, hey, whatever your name is, find me a local GP within a five kilometer radius of my office that is happy to talk about nutrition right now. You're right in the fact that the blog, the podcast, the data, all that kind of stuff is going to be important. But what are we opt. Who are we optimizing for? Are we still optimizing for Google or are we optimizing for perplexity? Or are we optimizing for like.
Because the race is to own that data, right? And, and Google, Google own the data. But I just feel like, I don't know. You tell me. I just feel like they're not doing, they're not allowing us to.
We're still kind of being forced to go and search on Google and I think there's a big push away from that. So, like, yeah, talk to me, like, how's the new technology and wearables going to interplay with that?
[00:12:43] Speaker A: I mean, I think the SEO is definitely going to change. Like, there's no question about that.
I have started using ChatGPT more than Google when it makes sense to do so. And you know, I obviously felt with Trio, like, it's, it's definitely a depends situation, which is the classic SEO answer. But there are the scenarios where some industries and some types of websites will burn and they deserve to burn. Like, I look at the recipe sites, you know, I always go back to those. It's like, there's no reason for a 3,000 word article on 10 steps of how to bake a cake. I don't care about how you collected flour with your grandma and you rolled out the dough and made the cookies. It's like, just give me the damn recipe. And that is a perfect function of AI. Like, that is the immediate gratification answer that we all need. However, on the flip side of that, if somebody is looking to sell their company and exit for potentially a $50 million sale, there's likely going to be a little more due diligence and sale involved in terms of like scouting the lawyers or the accountants or even going through the process of like, what's the valuation hold. So the nuts and bolts of that industry are probably a little bit more dense than say, the recipe sites. So I think that as you kind of look at content as an umbrella, it's a pretty big umbrella and sections of that will fall off and die. But I don't know if it's as black and white as like AI is going to crush every single website. I think it's going to be a natural transition or a fade out, very similar to how credit cards were adopted or checks. Like everyone thought it was going to be cash forever and I never even carry cash. So it's, it's just the natural evolution of how humans engage with things to get things faster, you know.
[00:14:36] Speaker B: I agree. Content is, is a thing. And content I think will always be a thing. It's just the modality that we choose to distribute that content and the modality in which clients and users choose to consume that content. I'm a video guy. I spend most of my time on YouTube these days. And you know, I spend hardly any time on Google and social media apart from YouTube. So talk to me about, you know, if, if, if we believe that content is a thing. And you remember, you know, most people listening to this podcast are agency owners. So content is a thing and we need to be producing content for clients. Talk to me about the type of client that you would just say, look, it's just not worth you going down a content strategy. You're better off just like, you know, doing local SEO and you Google my business listing or running ads or like, like who, who is a client that you would just say don't waste your money, don't waste your time. It's just not going to work.
[00:15:29] Speaker A: Yeah, yeah, we, we don't, I mean we deny a lot of audits that come through for that same reason. We had someone come through recently and they were an event planning service in New York City specifically only for fireworks shows. And it's like, that's so niche to where, like that's a local SEO over a seasonal event for a one day sale. And it's like, that's not a content SEO play. Like go Facebook ads, go groups, whatever you need to do.
Local SEO is a whole different can of worms too. Like if you are a flower shop down the road, it doesn't make sense to have a blog about types of flowers when somebody from a completely different state can find you. So that's why we obviously deal with a lot of like B2B and SaaS companies that anybody you find that content online has the, you know, opportunity to engage. But there are plenty of, plenty of ways and reasons that we would be like, hey, not a good fit, Go do this thing instead. This is what we would suggest. And we're not going to take your money for the sake of taking your money. No one wins.
[00:16:32] Speaker B: And. Okay, so good. I'm glad to hear you. We have quite a few SEO agencies in our programs and they, the good ones with integrity and who operate authentically, will turn clients down when they're just like, there's just no way we can get you a keyword ranking that makes sense and is going to deliver any value to your business. So what I want to talk about now is, all right, let's say that we agree that content is a thing and we've got a bunch of clients that we can go talk to. They're B2B or, you know, they're SaaS companies or they're, you know, they have the capacity to get a return on an, on a long term SEO strategy. And I'm an agency owner. What, you know, and I'm talking to this, I'm talking to agency owners about this right now. Right. We have agency owners who are thinking of killing off their SEO services because their SEO is driving increased rankings and increased traffic, but they can't.
The bottleneck is that the client doesn't have the conversion strategy in place to actually monetize and get an ROI on that increased rank, traffic and rankings. Right. So how do you, how do you, and I'm asking this as if I'm an agency and I'm about to start an SEO service and I'm going to build out an SEO team and maybe I'm even going to kind of hire you guys to help me do that, if that's what you do, which we can talk about. How do I prove to a client that it's worth spending the four or five grand a month or whatever it is on, on this content when one, it can take time and two, as a content agency or an SEO agency, I've only got control over getting the, increasing the rankings and getting the traffic to the site. Once the traffic's to the site, I, I can't really like, if, if they're not gonna pick up the phone and call their leads, what am I supposed to do? So how do you keep clients from churning and how do you continue to prove and communicate the value of what you're doing so that you retain clients over the long term?
[00:18:29] Speaker A: Yeah, so a couple things unpack there. I mean, the first thing Is like, we're not a CRO agency, we're not a user experience agency, and we state that from step one. So we do encounter a lot of situations. Like you're saying where we can get a client who they say, I want to rank number one for this keyword. And you look back, after six months, they're ranking number one. They're saying, where are the leads? And that's not what you sign up for. Obviously, that's not what you want to hear or nor do you want to tell the client. So the CRO aspect and the user experience of all that sort of stuff is a huge component of what we do in order to either educate the client and help them internally to make decisions. Every client that works with us gets a free CRO UX audit. And like I said, we're not claiming to be experts, but we've owned enough websites over our lifetime that we know good from bad, do from don't. So we go through every single page, we redline it, we take screenshots, and we say, look, this is what's bad, here's how we would change it, et cetera, et cetera. If they can't implement that or they don't have capacity internally to make that, you know, do a 180, we can help bring in somebody and like, you know, maybe assist to bring that and shape it.
Lead magnets are another great thing. So, like, if we're working with a client and potentially they, you know, they come to us and say, hey, you know, like another client of ours. X and Y was a huge win, great case study of ours, because they came to us and they said, we have this calculator on the site. It's one of the best calculators in the industry. Drive as much traffic to this thing as possible, we'll take care of the rest. Perfect, great relationship. So we kind of try to look for tools or any kind of medium that would facilitate that, because nobody's going to go to the blog or go to the webpage and immediately book a discovery call. It's not how people work. So you have to be able to find that medium in order to facilitate the conversation and bring people into the ecosystem that allows them to nurture them and keep it going from there.
Education, I guess, is the big thing. It's just making sure that there's transparency and expectations set throughout that entire lifeline. But I mean, others had a conversation. If we have a client potentially that we're looking to work with and they have no dev, no internal team, one man show really successful business and they have no capacity to improve their website. Like, that's not a good fit for us because then we do our job and they're mad at us thinking that didn't work. When we have the data, like you said, where we have the clicks and the traffic and all that, but there's no conversion. So it's just about making sure that you look back and it's like, is this going to be a win for them? It's like, we can do our job correctly and if they don't see the results, then probably not.
[00:21:08] Speaker B: Yeah. And how do you deal with, I mean, this happens a lot with B2B and SaaS is like the sales team are just not picking up the phone and calling leads and they're not doing the sales development work that they should be doing. Right. They're just not. Because they're not hungry. Because no one likes cold calling. Right. Even if it's a warm lead that's coming from a lead magnet. Right.
What happens at that? Like, do you go, well, that's not our problem. Sorry, we've driven that. Like, this is what you hired us for. But then, you know, then there's a conversation about, well, your sales team's inefficient or incompetent, and that's not our problem. We're doing our job. I had a conversation yesterday with an agency, with a client is. This is a slightly different case as well. It's like they're canceling the service because they're too busy. They're like, we're at capacity, we're too busy. Like, we don't need any more leads. So we're canceling the SEO and the agency's just like, that's a first.
Right? So, so I'm curious, like, do you, do you literally just report on like, rankings and traffic? Like, here are the rankings, here's the traffic. We've done our job.
[00:22:06] Speaker A: So we look at like the SEO fundamentals, which are kind of like what everyone would say, like the clicks, the impressions, the organic traffic, the blah, blah, blah, like what you kind of justify as SEO. And then we actually work with them to know whether There are specific KPIs for them and then tailor that to each of their reports. So, like, if there are like lead magnet downloads, or maybe it's booked calls or calendly links, like whatever that KPI metric is to them that says, yes, this is a win win, that's what we then report on and that's how we then justify that. Like, yes, this is working, but kind of going back to the other side, it's like the traffic could be there and maybe there's just too much friction in how their site's designed. So then we have to work with them on that. So even though we have a specific KPI in mind, like now we have to almost shape the page itself to funnel toward that KPI because people are not, you know, conversion experts, nor are they graphic design experts. So it's like kind of takes an army of people to be like, okay, if I'm looking at this through an unbiased lens, like, what am I seeing that's wrong with this? And I've never even wanted to reach out to you for services. So just kind of goes back to that at the end of the day.
[00:23:17] Speaker B: By the way, if you are an agency and you're managing multiple client websites on WordPress, which I know a lot of agencies still are, you might want to check out our friends at WP Remote. Akshat and the team there do an amazing job of allowing you to manage all of your WordPress websites from one dashboard. They have a series of plugins to help you get your clients WordPress websites under control and performing better. They have Airlift for performance and speed. They have a malware security plugin. They of course have Blog Vault for backups. And they have WP Remote, which is a remote dashboard that allows you to manage all of your clients WordPress websites from one place. So go and check out wpremote.com and if you're coming to any of our live events this year, you'll probably see some of the team because they are a partner of ours at our live events here and we're big fans and we use WP Remote sl. So go check them out.
I'm selfishly asking this, but I think there's some. There's lessons in this, right? I've always, for some reason started out selling a WordPress plugin that nobody looked for, nobody knew they wanted it until they saw it and they were like, oh, holy shit, that's a good idea. It's a white label video tutorial plugin that taught people how to use WordPress and we sold it to agencies so agencies could just install it and then their clients would know how to use WordPress and they didn't have to teach their clients how to use WordPress. Right? It was a really good plugin. Eventually exited that business.
There was no search volume for it, right? 0 search volume for it.
Where I'm at now is we're Essentially, digital agency coaches, digital agency mentoring. Again, no search volume for it, hardly any. Until people realize it and see it and they go, oh, holy shit, yes, I do need a coach. And I didn't know you could get a mentor or a coach that, you know that specialized in digital agencies, but there's no search volume for it. What would you say to a client where their core product has no search volume? What's the strategy that you would design around that?
[00:25:18] Speaker A: That's a tough one. So what I would suggest there is that they're probably not a good fit for like traditional SEO services. Meaning, like, you know, the. What we specialize in is blog content. So it's like we're looking to create seven articles a month over the 21 day period of, you know, X number of delivery, deliverables, blah, blah, blah.
That is kind of the traditional game from our sense. But we've had clients come to us and say like, hey, I'm in a bunch of pods and we know that this FAQ is a great question to target. There's no search volume, I don't care, let's create the content. We're like, awesome, that's going to be a great internal resource for your team. The sales team can leverage it. From that sense. It is still a win. So probably traditional SEO, if there are zero keywords for us to even explore, whether it's very top of funnel, which is usually the easiest to go after, like, I would probably say it's probably not a good fit to work with them if there's absolutely zero. But you can usually always find a few.
[00:26:16] Speaker B: Yeah, we made the mistake. I'm glad to hear you say that. We made the mistake once of producing a blog post. We got a lot of feedback that, you know, we don't know how to spell in our emails and it was because we spell Australian. So we put like a U in the word color. We spell enrollment with 2L's or 1L or whatever it is. And you know, the Americans got to love them, were like, oh, you don't know how to spell? I'm like, well, actually we do. We just spell things differently to you. And so we, I said to the team, off the cuff one day, I said we should publish an article about the difference between Australian, US and English, UK English, British, English. So someone on the team did. And that blog post pulls in, up until recently, about 60% of our traffic and it's completely irrelevant to our business. And those people are never going to become customers. So we killed that blog post recently and Just redirected it to the homepage because we're idiots and we don't know what we're doing. And also because there's no search volume for digital agency coaching, there's, you know, very little randomly. We have actually picked up at least two clients that I can think of off the top of my head who have told me they went searching for a digital agency coach and found us. Right? So, you know, 50 grand a year there in revenue from a search term that has about, you know, 20 searches a month. I've always flirted with this idea and I want to get your take on this and I think it's, you know, interesting for other people to hear this. I've always flirted with the idea that, well, what are agencies looking for? They're looking for.
Usually they're looking for like how to set up an events calendar on WordPress or how to host a WordPress multi site or what's the best host for WordPress. Because a lot of our agencies build websites for clients on WordPress. Right? Or they might. How do I build a brand guide in Canva? Because we have a lot of branding agencies or. And I've always flirted with the idea of, I mean one, the problem with that is it's very competitive now in 2025, that stuff is very competitive. Like you'd be up against WP Beginner who really own that space. You'd also attract a bunch of people who aren't agencies. So you know, we spend most of our money, time and effort on Facebook ads and email. So Facebook ads generate the lead for us through a lead magnet and then email does the heavy lifting and books in the call nurtures and books in the call.
Like, do you think it's just a waste of time a business like ours? And again, I'm just asking this selfishly, but also, I know there's plenty of other businesses out there who are in a similar situation and agencies listening to this will have clients who are in a similar situation. Would you just not even bother with SEO or do you think there are some long tail keywords that are worth going after that will bring in enough traffic to download their agency scorecard, lead magnet or whatever it is.
[00:28:53] Speaker A: I definitely would not go after anything that competes with wp, anything in that community or even Canva. Like canva's a beast. Like there's no chance of competing.
Those are just the wrong keywords. Like you said, you're spending money on things that are cast in a wide NET and maybe 0.01% is your ICP. That's not a very good bet.
What I would probably look at is one looking at a strategy, you could probably find, like you said, that keyword that's worth 20 searches a month. But those are honestly the keywords that I've nerd out on from an SEO perspective because that 20 searches per month generated 50k in revenue. It's like that is the most high intent keyword you could possibly have on your site. And without an SEO strategy, you would have never even known. And so even though it doesn't require a hundred blogs and twenty service pages or whatever the strategy might be, relative to your XYZ industry, having that one page on your website that's dedicated to that SEO keyword was a meaningful impact. So there's a lot to be said around having fewer keywords that actually make a bigger impact compared to having meaningless topics on your site like that. You know, the language thing you said, that doesn't really matter, but you have this vanity metric traffic. It's like, okay, who cares? Like, go after the one that has 10 searches per month or maybe zero searches per month, knowing that that actually is going to drive some revenue, like optimize for that, build some internal links, build some backlinks, like, actually go after things that make sense for your business and actually have the capacity to generate ROI rather than meaningless vanity traffic that doesn't really matter.
[00:30:33] Speaker B: Yeah, good. Thank you for that. That's super helpful. I just want to pivot the conversation a little bit. If we're an agency and we're going to add SEO to our offering, what are the first things that we should be looking at? And maybe like, what's the first team member that we really need to make sure that we've got either that we can outsource to or that we can h. Do you guys do white labeling for other agencies, by the way? And if so, like what? Like, if I'm selling SEO to clients, how, like, where am I going to slip up? Like, just give me like the, hey, don't do this. You got to do this first. You got to make sure you got this in place.
[00:31:11] Speaker A: Great question. So, yes, we do white label. It's worked great for many people. Typically what we do is we still go through our entire process. So some people don't like the fact that we'll see a discovery audit still. And if we deny your client, like, sorry, but it's probably for the best. Like, we don't want you to take on someone. So we go through that process, do our own Normal thing. But like, if you're looking to do that internally, the main things I would say is making sure that you have a good strategist. Because wherever you are, devoting resources into, whether it's keywords, content, et cetera, if you spend six months going in the wrong direction, it's a really tough conversation to tell a client six months later.
The next one is communication. So if you are reporting or sending updates, the biggest thing that we hear from clients who have just recently fired their old SEO agency and are now coming to ours is they say, we didn't hear from them for three months, we didn't hear from them forever. Like what the hell were they doing? And we send weekly emails with two or three bullet points over sections of content, sections of analytics. They don't even have to scroll or email, but they know they get an update once per week. They ought to reply. That's what we're doing. Everyone's good. The next thing is analytics and reporting. If you can't report what you're actually doing, or if that's even meaningful to the client, like you're not going to last. So I mean, just kind of look at it from their perspective. You want results, you want good communication, you want to know that you're paying good money to have it be worth something. It's not rocket science.
[00:32:39] Speaker B: What do you use for your reporting? Do you just use Google Analytics or do you have your own tool? Do you use or.
[00:32:44] Speaker A: Yeah, so we use a combination of Google Analytics, Google Search Console, Ahrefs, and then we import those into a custom dashboard that the client can all kind of see, a centralized view. And then in terms of like our weekly emails, we use airtable, which is kind of like Asana or Monday. And then we just do a roundup of what was written, what was edited, what was published, what's currently being worked on, and then pretty much just like summarize all that into one email and automate it.
[00:33:08] Speaker B: Huh. So you use airtable to manage all of your clients projects internally? Yep. Super interesting.
[00:33:14] Speaker A: Everything.
[00:33:15] Speaker B: Wow, that's interesting. Have you built any stuff on top of airtable with like their low code like interface builder or stuff or you just like working table view?
[00:33:24] Speaker A: Yep, just everything in there. We're just pretty much using Zapier to the max.
[00:33:28] Speaker B: Yeah, right, got it.
And do you find most of your client, most of the clients that you're working for, are they publishing on WordPress? Is that still kind of the platform of choice?
[00:33:40] Speaker A: Some. I think that it's kind of a dying breed I actually just saw a post about this on LinkedIn, about how like, you used to WordPress used to be like the great free website builder and now it's like a hundred bucks to do this and 50 bucks to do that. I have a plugin that's worth this and it's like, just go to webflow or Squarespace, like, it's all fine. So we have a variety. I would say probably 60 to 80% still WordPress, but it kind of varies depending on how technical people are.
[00:34:08] Speaker B: So Squarespace is a legitimate option from an SEO point of view, as is webflow.
[00:34:13] Speaker A: Yeah, it's all the same. I would say it just depends on how well the design looks. That's kind of the big thing. But SEO is not going to make or break depending on the cms.
[00:34:23] Speaker B: Right. I've never used webflow. I've played a little bit around with Squarespace. Is webflow a big learning curve to be able to publish stuff?
[00:34:30] Speaker A: It's pretty intuitive if you can follow the basics of it. But in terms of the structure and design, I think that's a little bit more advanced. But like, just from a blog, just like publishing standpoint, it's pretty straightforward.
[00:34:43] Speaker B: Got it. And so I'm interested in just coming back to the agency conversation, the white label thing. I'm interested, like, what percentage of your clients are actually trio SEO clients and what percentage are agencies that you offer white label services to?
[00:34:56] Speaker A: Very few. So we have one white label right now. We had one previously. So, like, that's not like a big thing that we're trying to promote. If a good relationship comes along, we'll see if we can make it work. But most of the time people are like, very gung ho about it and then it very rarely happens. So we try and be pretty picky about the partnerships that we set up just because it's both of our reputations on the line. We want to deliver great results.
[00:35:22] Speaker B: Yeah. And so with that relationship with a lot of agencies who use other white label partners, like from a development point of view or running their WordPress care plans or doing SEO or running ads or whatever. And usually what happens is the agency that's interfacing with the client, the mistake that they make is that they the horse bolts too early before they have enough knowledge to actually design a strategy. Right. And so how do you keep up with what's going on in the SEO world? Like, where do you. Who do you learn from? Who do you follow where? What are the resources you use to keep up to date with what's happening so that you can stay in front of developments and so that you can be offering your clients the most, you know, the most relevant strategy based on what's happening in the marketplace.
[00:36:08] Speaker A: I live on LinkedIn. That's kind of like the only place that I really consume knowledge nowadays. I think that they're just so. Oh yeah. I mean I publish content daily. Nathan and Connor, we also all publish content like just kind of building personal brands, building trio use it for leads. Like great use of finding network and partners. Like we need to tap into XYZ specialist and just people are always like pushing content out there. It's kind of one of the hidden gems, I would say of content creation or is kind of starting to get there. So yeah, there's so many smart people that are just like releasing guides on like technical SEO audits and I'm like, I'm not a technical guy but like I'm going to save this and dive into it later or AI advancements and how they're using this or you know, anything. It's just like people are eating it up and I love it too.
[00:36:55] Speaker B: What's the strategy on LinkedIn when if you're posting content on LinkedIn, is there a call to action? Are you then saying, hey, if you want help with this, like what do you do? Like DM me or go here and book a title like how does it work?
[00:37:09] Speaker A: Yeah, so you can convert your profile, like your individual profile into creator mode and that allows you to then post a link right below your picture and you can pretty much create a call to action in your profile and you can kind of like some somewhat optimize your profile, almost like a website landing page. And then when you create content, you can create what's called a carousel, which is pretty much like a multi page PDF, like a swipe real and then you would just create content based on the type, whatever it is. So like if I published one today, it was like how I create ROI focused strategies for our SEO clients and then I walk through like the fundamentals of our process and the results and all that sort of stuff. And then the last slide of that carousel would be a CTA with some sort of direct action. I can even post a comment in my own post around like, you know, want to learn more, Work with us, get a free audit here, link, et cetera. So over time you can engage with content that way. But usually it's a lot of great just like word of mouth referrals because people now know us, know the space, know trio et Cetera.
[00:38:11] Speaker B: And the call to action is driving straight off to like a land landing page on your website where people can, you know, book in for an audit.
[00:38:19] Speaker A: Exactly.
[00:38:21] Speaker B: Is LinkedIn content evergreen? Like, is it more discoverable? Cause I find off if you post stuff on Facebook, like within, you know, 12 hours, it's gone. Like, if you put stuff on YouTube, you continue to get views for years. Right? It's really evergreen content. Is LinkedIn evergreen or is it kind of a bit more consumable or a bit more kind of transient?
[00:38:39] Speaker A: It's about a one week, one week Runway. So usually like I can post something and it will like kind of get a spike over the first two or three days and then it kind of has this like trickle down effect and then kind of usually drops of that at the end of the week.
[00:38:53] Speaker B: How much time? I'm curious about this because I don't really do much on LinkedIn, but I kind of think I should, but I'm managing my fomo. How much time do you spend a week posting content on LinkedIn? And is that the only social platform that you're posting content onto?
[00:39:06] Speaker A: Yeah, it's only what I'm posting on right now. I probably spend four, four to five hours a week and that'll buy me about a month of time just because I have so much content. Like, I started posting about two years ago and I've posted almost every day since then. And I also have a spreadsheet of every single post I've ever posted since then with like the LinkedIn URL, the Google Doc. I wrote it in the analytics for that. Like, it's a very like OCD spreadsheet for this setup. And then if I ever need to, I have it categorized by like the type of content, whether it's on page, SEO off page, whether it's an agency focused, whatever it may be. And then I can like go back and be like, okay, I posted this post two months ago and it performed really well and I want to like redo the design, like, let's drop it back in the to play and reshape some stuff. And like, I just have so much content now that I have to do less work to get the results. But I also try and make some new content so it's just less, you know, vague.
[00:40:03] Speaker B: Got it, yeah. And you manage all that in Airtable, right?
[00:40:07] Speaker A: I did for some time and then we hired a designer and he preferred sheets, so I switched over.
[00:40:12] Speaker B: But yeah, love it, love it. What are you most. What do you, what's the, what's the biggest frustration you've got right now in your role. You're the co founder and CEO of Trio SEO. So you know, only like working with clients and doing the thing, but you're running the business, growing the team. How big is the team at the moment now?
[00:40:31] Speaker A: So it's me, Connor and Nate, kind of three founders and then we have about 10 full time people overseas and we have about 10 or so contractors that we tap into as needed.
[00:40:42] Speaker B: Got it. What's your biggest frustration right now? If you could wave a magic wand and fix something in the next seven days, what would it be?
[00:40:48] Speaker A: Oh, it's always sales. There's always something with sales. I mean, it's just like, it's such a beast of a process. And any. Anytime you're dealing with human psychology, there's always so many unknowns and nuances that I wish I could just, you know, have all the answers. But I feel like that's everybody who's ever in this position or in a sales position where you're like, you think you just have it all figured out and then curveball. So.
[00:41:11] Speaker B: And is it who. Who are you doing sales or do you have a sales team?
[00:41:14] Speaker A: Nate, lead sales. And then we just hired a biz dev, kind of like scheduler and kind of appointment setter, blah, blah, blah. And then I'm pretty interlooped in with like the client meetings onboarding and like anything that would be more of the closing side of things.
[00:41:29] Speaker B: Got it. And is it, is it frustrating just because it's. There's such an education piece that needs to go on before people are happy to commit because they just don't know what they don't know.
[00:41:39] Speaker A: Not so much about that. We have that pretty dialed in. We have a really strong process. I think it's like more personally that I never had to be in sales. And so there's like, it's such a fresh arena for me that my personality, like I get so addictive into like any subject that I'm studying where it's like there's almost information overload of what I could be studying or could be doing and testing and experimenting. And you kind of have to put the blinders on and know that shiny object syndrome can kill some strategies and you have to just like stay focused and keep doing the thing.
[00:42:09] Speaker B: Totally. I'll give you a. I'll give you a resource in it. If you haven't already read Gap Selling by Keenan. It's a fantastic book. For anyone listening, read Gap Selling by Keenan. It's an. It's amazing. It's awesome. It's like the playbook on B2B sales as far as I'm concerned. Flip side of that question is what are you most excited about? What's coming up over the next 30 days or the next quarter that's really got you jazzed?
[00:42:30] Speaker A: Good question.
I'm just trying to do as many podcasts as possible. I think that they're a great way. I love marketing. I love meeting people like, you know, connections like this. Going to meet you, Troy. Going to, you know, just meet people all around. So to anybody listening, if you have a podcast, I hope you starting with it. Like, I just like meeting people and talking to people and to see where it can go. I mean, I just eat it up.
[00:42:53] Speaker B: Yeah. Awesome. And I would, I mean, I will say podcasting and video content is my favorite form of content too, because, you know, we've just made a 40 minute video today out of that. We can cut it into a bunch of shorts. We can extract the audio. We can. The audio is a podcast. The video goes on YouTube. We've got a transcript which we can turn into a bunch of show notes for our blog post. We've then also got a bunch of. We'll extract probably 10 or 15 social posts out of this episode will turn into an email newsletter. It's like a whole ecosystem of content there from one 40 minute conversation without a script. We had no script when we started this. Right. I just knew a little bit about you. I knew that we had a mutual connection in Nathan. I knew we were talking about SEO. I was going to try and trip you up on the AI conversation and you've done really well there. So yeah, it's like a really easy way to create lots of content. The one thing that trips people up is they get self conscious about, you know, watching themselves or hearing themselves on camera and the speakers. And my advice is don't just record it and then don't watch it back. Just publish it and let other people hate on you because they will. And that's fine. That's just all part of the game. So awesome. Hey, Stephen Schneider, thank you so much for joining us on the agency. I really appreciate your time and yeah, all the best with Treyo SEO. Keep in touch. Would love to hear how things unfold and I look forward to seeing what happens with AI and spatial computing over the coming years.
[00:44:13] Speaker A: Thank you so much. Thanks for having me on. I really appreciate it.
[00:44:16] Speaker B: Awesome.
Thanks for listening to the Agency Hour podcast and a huge thanks to Stephen for joining us next week on the Agency Hour, we are shaking things up with a special co host. He's a beloved figure, a true legend in the Agency Mavericks community, and someone we're always excited, excited. A chat with. Who is it? Well, you'll have to tune in to find out, but trust us, you won't want to miss this one. Okay, folks, remember to subscribe, and please share this with anyone you think may need to hear it. I'm Troy Dean, and remember, Oreo has made enough cookies to span five back and forth trips to the moon.
